The Dark Pictures Anthology is Supermassive’s horror series, and House of Ashes is the third game released so far. Some fans are wondering whether House of Ashes is a sequel to the previous Dark Pictures games and if they need to play them first to understand what’s happening. We’ve got all the answers players need below.
Do I need to play the other Dark Pictures games before House of Ashes?
Each of The Dark Pictures Anthology games is self-contained. So, they can be played in any order and don’t require knowledge of previous titles in the series to enjoy. The only thing that ties them together is the mysterious Curator that acts as the player’s confidant.
House of Ashes takes place during the initial actions of the Iraq War. While attempting to find a cache of WMDs, a team of US soldiers becomes trapped in an underground temple when the ground beneath them gives way during a firefight with Iraqi troops. Their intrusion awakens monsters which begin hunting them throughout the ruins.
One thing that sets House of Ashes apart from previous entries in the series is that the monsters are real. In the first game, Man of Medan, the horrors were caused by the leaking of a hallucinogenic gas from World War 2. In Little Hope, the events are the hallucinations of a man with survivor’s guilt.
It’s possible that the Curator could come to play a larger role in the series, and some sort of connected theme might emerge, but for now, it seems like he mostly serves as a narrative vehicle. Each of the games is presented as an unfinished story that the player must complete, but other than them all being a book present on the Curator’s bookshelf, there doesn’t seem to be any correlation between them.
