The Dark Pictures Anthology: House of Ashes part 1

First off, I feel as though I was kind of duped into buying this game by an impressive trailer, a low price, and the fact that I was drunk and therefore did exactly zero research about the game before hitting that "buy now" button.

I do this frequently when I am drunk so whatever, I have it now.

I have played it for about an hour and I wouldn't say I love it because of a lot of reasons but it also isn't terrible. It kind of depends on how involved you want to be in a game and in this game, I'll go ahead and say now that you are not going to be very involved.

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So in the trailer I was given the impression that this was going to be a survival horror type game like Resident Evil but it definitely isn't that. In fact, for the most part you aren't given control of the action very often and if you are they are wandering around and looking at stuff over and over. This gets tiresome pretty quick but I suppose has some interesting aspects to it.

After a brief flashback to the "start of it all" we find ourselves in war-torn Iraq as a group of marines mixed with scientists who are investigating a hidden underground weapons facility. Given the scene from thousands of years ago that we literally just took part in, it doesn't come as a tremendous surprise that this weapons facility actually ends up being the tomb or temple or whatever it is that was featured in the first act.

The graphics are pretty good outside of a couple of seriously lazy sections involving combat cinematics so I am not going to complain about that.

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So after a skirmish we find ourselves back in the temple that was featured at the start of the game and there are a few questions I have about how this happens. For reasons that are not indicated at all nor could they have been caused by small arms fire, the cavernous area below all of a sudden becomes exposed to the marines and scientists after not being discovered by anyone for a very long period of time. Talk about an amazing coincidence huh?

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So our team falls down to this temple, all in conveniently different locations despite having been in very close proximity to one another on the surface and now we have to explore various areas that are not the same rooms. It's not as terrible as I am making it sound and if you bother to read a lot of the stuff that you find in the rooms it actually is at least mildly interesting.

The biggest problem that I have with this game thus far and I presume is going to stay this way is that other than wandering around VERY SLOWLY and looking for easily discovered items that make a blinking visual in the distance, you don't have any control over where your characters actually go.

Whenever there is any action they are basically quicktime (or whatever they are called these days) scenes where you have to hit a button at a certain time and all of this is exceptionally easy.

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Other things that you can do is how it is that you choose to talk to other people around you and I guess this has some sort of impact on how things play out later. I'm not sure yet because I haven't noticed anything meaningful come of it just yet and a number of the choices that I have made resulted in the same decision being made in the end anyway.

One scene in particular is where you are faced with your team-mate who is dangling off the side of a cliff and is attached to you and because of this she is risking dragging you into the chasm as well. Twice they offer you the opportunity to cut the rope to save your own skin but in both instances I opted to not cut the rope.

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At the last minute one of your other team-mates comes to help you at just the right moment, but the rope breaks anyway resulting in the other team-mate falling to the chasm. So your choice to cut the rope wouldn't have changed the outcome at all and I suspect that many of the other decisions are going to end up being the same.

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I've made it to a certain turning point in the game as far as I can tell because you find yourself back in some manor where a narrator of sorts is talking to you about your progress so even though it isn't expressly stated, I'll go ahead and consider this to be the end of part one.

I wouldn't really say that this game is exciting because you control very little of it, there is almost no exploration and finding the necessary items to progress forward can be a bit unnecessarily tedious at times. Had I bothered to do a little bit of research into this game before buying it I probably would have opted to not spend the money even though it wasn't every much.

However, the acting is good and the scenes are pretty entertaining even though it kind of feels like a movie that you sometimes have control over to a very limited degree. In a way it is kind of like a less entertaining Detroit: Become Human in my mind.

I may or may not play this one to completion but since it is so absurdly easy, I may as well carry on with it for now.