![]() Characters continue to be the weakest part of The Dark Pictures Anthology. ![]() Plus, the whole idea of a game set in the middle of the Iraq War with Marines going into a secret compound to search for Saddam’s biological weapons can be off putting knowing what we now know about how that particular conflict turned out. There are still instances of weirdly stilted dialogue and certain aspects of the plot don’t really pay off in meaningful ways. I don’t want to oversell the story, though. That’s not because I’m continually chasing the excellence that is Until Dawn, but because the direction the franchise might take next is as interesting as The Dark Pictures Anthology has ever been. Following the reveals in Little Hope, I was left fascinated to see what the team would do next. House of Ashes swings the story pendulum back and ends with the prospects for an entirely new direction for the series. Both Man of Medan and Little Hope tried to subvert expectations in ways that never felt in the spirit of Until Dawn. Without going into spoilers, House of Ashes is very much a step up in storytelling compared to the previous two games in the Dark Pictures series. Supermassive hasn't made any massive changes to how its games play or look. ![]() It’s a formula that Supermassive has used to varying success over its last three Dark Pictures games, but in the right circumstances it still pays off. The bulk of the gameplay in House of Ashes’ six-or-so-hour runtime comes down to making choices and performing different types of QTEs. Movement is clunky even though we now have full control over the camera during exploration. ![]() Environments look stunning at times while others will remind you that Supermassive is no longer working with a big budget from Sony. The facial capture is still mostly great, though sometimes the characters’ necks look like they’re made out of liquid. Supermassive hasn’t made any, well, massive changes to how its games play or look outside of new difficulty options. In some ways, that’s the rub of this entire review. ![]()
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