House Of Ashes
The final stand takes place inside one of the farmhouses. Each character will have their own QTE survival sequence. Players will need to do well here to ensure that their characters don't die just minutes away from surviving the horrors of the night.
house of ashes
It's frustrating, because at its most fun House Of Ashes shows these games can do silly stuff really well. There's an achievement called Chekhov's Gun for using a massive old mounted machine gun. The background music has little bleeps in it, like the motion censors in Aliens, during times of imminent vampire attack. There's a big cavern of gore that goes mostly unexplained because it's just there so you can be chased through waist high blood. This is all great! But it goes wrong when Supermassive try to be serious. At the start of the game, the marines raid a farmhouse and it turns out the farmers also have, just, a comical amount of heroin under their floorboards (this is never mentioned again), and then you get to choose whether to shoot a fleeing, limping farmer in the back or not. And if you don't, Salim thinks you're an okay-ish guy. I suppose we can infer that doing an "intolerance" is bad, because in the end the optimal way to play the game is by not doing an "intolerance". But I don't know if that's a recommendation, is it?
The game starts with a prologue setting up the historical events that lead to the shenanigans in the present day, and your input is so minimal you're basically free to make a sandwich. Then there are at least 30 minutes before you even get any horror, and instead have to trudge through a painful made-for-TV war movie that sets up the basic personality types - he's an arsehole, he's the smart mouth, she's the bitch etc - with soap opera style conversations as our gang of Marines raid a house, shoot some locals, and end up underground. Horror can make you feel a lot of things, dread, fear, discomfort, weird sexual stuff if you're a Clive Barker reader, but you should never feel bored. It seems to go on for so long that you're basically rooting for the monsters to start killing people horribly. The only thing that will make you uncomfortable during these opening hours is the way the game doesn't seem sure what comment it wants to make on the issue of American Marines in Iraq, fumbling story beats about heroin dealing, shooting unarmed civilians, and some pondering about "maybe war is bad?" like it's a high school essay.
After a short establishing scene taking place in ancient Mesopotamia, it flashes forward and introduces the player to the modern-day protagonists in 2003, who are almost all members of the American military forces who are occupying and invading Iraq, accurate to what happened in the real Iraq war around this time. There is one main character who is an Iraqi soldier who happens to meet up with the American military outfit later in the story, but he is the only one from the opposite side of the conflict featured in the main cast.
Greg Mucci is a baker and freelance writer living in Providence, RI with columns at Daily Grindhouse and Talk Film Society. He's written for We Are Horror, Boom Howdy and Nightmarish Conjuring, and can be found championing Jennifer's Body at your local Hot Topic. 041b061a72