Dark Pictures Anthology House of Ashes
Not really digging it. ...
Finished that one and also the season finale:
Devil in Me
Kinda different kinda similar games, but both have similar problems to prevent them from being really good.
Subjective, but I rather would have played something that actually played in the Sumerian era in House of Ashes and also in the original Holmes era in Devil in Me, not in modern day. Modern writers portray a terrible modern day but probably could have sold me anything of their ideas on the past.
The choices are way too vague and it is just guesswork. I think it wants to incentivise replaying everything, with all outcomes, but what are they thinking? Playing the intro 4 times just to get 4 unique items is already a slog. No skipping of already played scenes even when everything Is completely the same... *bytes gamepad* Japanese visual novels solved this with fast forward decently ages ago, just skipping should be possible too, but ff might be actually good since you can follow along again.
I disliked almost all characters in both games. All the soap opera romances and arguing, and very on the nose diversity in Devil in me. Only the overly sweet honeymooners were actually enjoyable to watch and their end was a real bummer.
The pacing felt a little bit better in Devil, starting with that quite shocking cold first kills and then doing a more default horror approach where next murders happen rather late. Some death scenes were pretty dumb, animation team probably struggling with doing whatever was in the script and a script that kinda tried to make it realistic but ultimately failing with absurd ideas and too much utter nonsense in too many close calls and the entire moving walls concept.
The visuals are bizzare. Sometimes actually great, some just weird (the cringe portraits of the cahracters in the relationship menus wtf) HDR sucked ... adjusting according to the instruction pic, I would have to play with 3/100 brightness, which is just dreadful to play most of the time, so I changed that to 50 which made it greyish but not so absurd pitch black. Do developers test their games on OLED, QLED, PVA whatever or has the entire studio one type of display and says fuck them, it looks fine here??? Controls felt again a bit stiff and just unresponsive when walking, especially scene changing with newly oriented coordinate systems confused the game. Load times are very fine, on PS5, but the game feels like a PS4 game when looking on an item and backing out of it again. Why does that need so long to process? Trophies did not work correctly several times. Finishing the game triggered only after the third time seeing the credits. Fixing ALL fuse boxes triggered at 2 of 3 though. The collectible photo oppurtunity is an idea from a madman. No tracking at all, for two dozens almost random objects where even guides don't actually know what is supposed to be in it. At least 1 was glitchy when following the guide I chose, one could be obtained too early, snapping all of my colleagues triggered after 3 of 4 and one I did not really need to do, or at least the correct markers where not shown and if it counted the audio cue did never play. Even with walkthroughs it is guesswork and Supermassive response in some reddit post was "redo all again", not even providing a link to a guide that has it correctly laid out to at least confirm a correct list. Dumbasses know that there are problems since launch and ever since, but have no intent on fixing it. Doing 2 dozen photos again and again without knowing which one did not register is absurd. Lucky that I found my last one after an hour trying this and that, following different guides and user comments.
