The Dark Pictures Anthology: House of Ashes

This is basically a crappy movie with some QTE's attached to it! The Story's premise is interesting with it revolving around [spoiler] vampires coming from outer space [/spoiler] which is really cool, but the way it was told was both really drawn out and kinda poor with some side plots not really adding anything to the experience and being there for filler sake. The Characters have got to be some of the most stupid and annoying people that I've seen in gaming with them commenting on really dumb stuff or having some pretty bad voice acting except for the old dude who opens the game. I wish this was a case of 'this game is so bad its good' but it was more of a bore rather than anything funny unintentionally. Also I don't know who was in charge of the camera cuts for the scenes, but it was abysmal. The Setting is quite interesting taking place in tomb structure with the ending having some scenery that I definitely wasn't expecting, but was quite impressed that it went down that route. It can get pretty samey though with some areas basically moulding into one another and being hard to differentiate. Visually, its weirdly bad. While I didn't run into any bugs or glitches, the performance was sometimes pretty poor with there being flickering textures that wouldn't load and weird lighting here and there. There really isn't a distinct art direction for this game as its going for realism, but the characters look really uncanny with their animations feeling wrong and not only that, there are some pretty poor textures layed about that can break immersion. Sound and Audio aren't all that special with the soundtrack feeling like something ripped out of a typical thriller film and the audio was nothing interesting to note. In terms of Gameplay, well there really isn't any except for the few times that you move characters, inspect objects or perform QTE's which for a game like this is expected. The problem that I have with this is that in order for the gameplay to take a back seat, the narrative and/or presentation must really stand out, but unfortunately this is not the case and make for a mediocre experience. Overall, The Dark Pictures Anthology: House of Ashes is one of those games that you would find a youtuber playing and reacting to as that would be more enjoyable than what is on offer here. If this is a representation for what this series has to offer, then its left a really bad impression and would be something that I would steer clear from!