House of Ashes, the next game in The Dark Pictures Anthology, takes a step away from its usual formula of terrorising a group of defenseless teens with spectral hallucinations, and instead throws a US Special Forces unit into Iraq in 2003 - at the start of the Iraq War - to investigate the potential existence of an underground chemical weapons depot.
As soon as the team arrives at the site they're attacked by holdout Iraqi forces, but before a full-on battle can take place the ground gives way - a nod to the likes of Alien, The Descent, and Predator - plunging the five playable characters into an underground temple dating back to the ancient Mesopotamian empire of Akkad.
The Iraq war is still very fresh in people's memories, so tackling this setting in a horror game is a difficult tone to strike. When asked about the possibility of trivialising the war by using it as a location for a horror game, executive producer on House of Ashes, Dan McDonald says, "that's a theme that we can investigate without getting into the actual wrongs of the Iraq War, because that's something we've avoided, that's not really a part of our story." You do play as characters on both sides of the conflict, though, and McDonald says that the location "gives us a good place to start from, allowing us to build the characters in a really nuanced way, both the military from the US side, and also the military from the Iraqi side.
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