Hello everybody!
I am very pleased to be able to speak to you about this today House of Ashes, the next game in The anthology of dark images. We’re excited to see the game released on Xbox One and for Xbox Series X | S is optimized. This is our first opportunity to give you a little more detail about the game ahead.
For those of you who don’t know The anthology of dark images is a series of intense, standalone, ramified cinematic horror games. Each game can be played in single-player or multiplayer mode: online shared story for two players and Couch Coop Movie Night for up to 5 players. Anyone can live in any of the games and anyone can die during the story. It all depends on the choices you make in the game!
The anthology has grown in strength and the response we’ve received from the community to both Man of Medan and A little hope was fantastic. It’s been especially exciting to hear from the Xbox community and we’ve had a great response Man of Medan will be available with Xbox Game Pass earlier this year!
Every game in The anthology of dark images is a separate story and all games are very different. We went from a ghost ship lost in the South Pacific to an abandoned New England town and now to the Zagros Mountains.
Our game is set in Iraq 2003. Towards the end of the conflict, an elite military unit, accompanied by CIA field officer Rachel King, is instructed to investigate a suspected underground chemical weapons facility in the shadow of the Zagros Mountains.
Upon arriving at the coordinates, the search party is ambushed by a local patrol. During the battle, an earthquake opens two sinkholes in the ground, throwing both sides into the ruins of a buried Sumerian temple. Something evil is awakened in the darkness under the Arabian desert. Wild and unstoppable, a nest of ancient and unearthly creatures has new prey to hunt …
Every game in The anthology of dark images has some basis in a real fact, fiction or legend and House of Ashes is certainly no different. Let me tell you more about this ancient temple our heroes just fell into!
The temple is in the heart of what was once called Mesopotamia, a historic land that includes what is now Iraq. This area was the cradle of civilization, with written records going back nearly six thousand years. The temple at the heart of our game was built by a real historical figure, the self-proclaimed God-King of the Akkadian Empire, Naram-Sin, who lived around 2250 BC. BC ruled.
Naram-Sin is said to have angered the gods and cursed his people by searching a temple of Enlil, god of earth, wind and storms. The gods brought war, famine and plague to his kingdom. In our story, Naram-Sin builds this huge temple as an offering of peace to the gods to lift the curse, but his requests fall on deaf ears. Akkad falls and Naram-Sin’s temple is buried under the desert sand … only to be rediscovered thousands of years later!
The temple is reminiscent of a distant and violent past, and as a player, you have to navigate a maze of ancient tunnels and huge opulent halls. When looking for an escape route you quickly realize that you are not the only one down there. Lurking in the shadows is something very real and very, very dangerous.
That’s all I can tell you now, but I hope you enjoyed this brief introduction House of Ashes and some of the historical elements that make up the game. We can’t wait for you to play it!
