in the House of AshesIn the upcoming third game in the Dark Pictures Anthology, players can work their way through another short but intense multi-perspective horror narrative. The protagonist of the game is Rachel King, a Marine played by Ashley Tisdale from the High School Musical. House of Ashes is about King on a mission to Iraq in 2003.
Polygon recently spoke to executive producer on the anthology, Dan McDonald, and saw some narrative and gameplay footage from the upcoming episode. Rachel’s situation quickly becomes complex; Her ex-husband shows up while she is in a new relationship. Your team is looking for weapons of mass destruction that never existed and they are being ambushed. The fight awakens something supernatural that is pulling both American and Iraqi fighters into an underground ruin from Sumerian myth.
“From a thematic and location-related perspective, we knew that we wanted it to be military. We knew we wanted to associate this particular type of threat with a desert location, ”said McDonald. Game Director Will Doyle’s research prompted the Supermassive Games team to play the game in Iraq in 2003, as there are a number of story potentials in the legend and myth of the real world. “We spoke to a lot of people from an Arab perspective to make sure the script we wrote is good,” said McDonald. “We had script doctors check it out from a military perspective to make sure it was good.”
However, McDonald went on to say the main focus of the game was on supernatural horror. “The Iraq war as a backdrop for us is not what the story is about. Here they start, but pretty quickly [the main cast] is in a different place; You are trapped underground and there is something alien going on. “
According to McDonald, the team has tried to implement fan feedback on the first two titles to improve House of Ashes. “We go through a process to assemble every time we finish each game [all feedback and criticism] and check it out. The difficulty for us is that in this franchise, every game is almost over before the next comes out. So we need to listen to this feedback and figure out how to force it into the next game. “
Lots of players from A little hopecriticized, for example, its linear narrative, which had very few interesting branches. It was a step back from the first Dark Pictures game Man of Medan, but one that the team learned from. “We had some challenges in the A little hope History. At a time during development [the characters] were always together, ”says McDonald. House of AshesAs a result, the signs are split up and kept in the dark more often. There are some nice technical changes to the formula too. The camera is less tied to specific angles, the characters move faster, and there are difficulty levels for each player to keep things as tense as possible.
When examining fan feedback, the designers at Supermassive also found that they were a little too smart to hide the clues and breadcrumbs that hinted at the larger world of dark images. McDonald admitted that there are still clues that fans on board the Ourang Medan have not found. “I think we made them too dark – you know, numbers and stuff,” he said. “It’s not something you could really train without someone telling you what … we’re not going to do it.”
House of Ashes is expected to be released later in 2021 on PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Windows PC, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X.
