House of Ashes, next episode of The Dark Pictures Anthology, gets a teaser

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Anyone who grew up renting horror tapes at the video store knows the value of a good collection of scary stories, and that is the proposal of The Dark Pictures Anthology, from Supermassive Games, the studio behind Until Dawn. The idea was to release a series of standalone horror games, eight in all according to the studio’s plans, in the same universe. On October 30, 2020, the second one, Little Hope, came out after Man of Medan, and those who reached its end found a surprise: a post-credits teaser for the third chapter, House of Ashes.

The anthology works like those TV series where each season tells a new story, and each game can be played on its own. Even so, Supermassive scatters references among them, and even reuses character models from one episode to another. Some of the series’ trademarks repeat, such as the quick-time prompts on screen, the single and multiplayer modes and the collectibles that show visions of possible future events.

What we learned later

House of Ashes is set in 2003, during the invasion of Iraq. Five protagonists, American and Iraqi soldiers, get trapped in an underground Akkadian temple infested with vampiric creatures. Actress Ashley Tisdale, of High School Musical, plays CIA agent Rachel King. A story trailer was shown at gamescom 2021, on August 25, along with the Pazuzu Edition collector’s edition. The game also brought features fans had asked for, such as a freely controllable 360-degree camera and three difficulty levels for the quick-time prompts.

The game came out on October 22, 2021 for PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S and PC, with “mixed or average” reviews on Metacritic. Several critics, however, considered it the best of the anthology so far and the closest to the quality of Until Dawn.