YMMV / House of Ashes

• Base-Breaking Character:
  • Jason. Many fans find him to be a likable character, due to his rough, hardass personality, prowess in combat, and eventual Character Development that allows him to form a friendship with Salim. Others see him as an obnoxious racist who Can't Take Criticism, is too Hot-Blooded to focus on survival, and believe his character arc wasn’t earned and came too little, too late.
  • Nick. He's either a likable character because of his Cowardly Lion and Only Sane Man traits, as well as being visibly brave during the heat of combat, or a whiny Manchild who has insanely Skewed Priorities and believes he's entitled to Rachel despite having only known her for 3 weeks.
• Best Level Ever:
  • The showdown in the sacrificial chamber, where the main cast faces several vampires at once. Even Dar gets in on the action, and has some pretty awesome moments with Salim. Several major events, such as Salim and Nick possibly being injured, Dar's death, the reveal of The Ancient One, Rachel's potential infection, and Eric's determinant death, all take place here.
  • The level immediately prior to that sees Rachel going One-Man Army on a swarm of vampires with an M1917, a crew operated machine gun, to buy everyone else time to retreat to the sacrificial chamber.
  • Rescuing Salim from the vampires: Serving as the culmination of Jason's Character Development, and plenty of action against the creatures and The Ancient One.
  • The last level, where everyone alive gets a pitched frantic battle wielding knives and flares as they wait out the eclipse once they make it to the surface, including a possible battle with the Ancient One.
• Fan Nickname: Salim the Vampire Slayer, due to Salim's well-noticeable kills with a large steel-beam and his sheer badassery overall.
• Ho Yay: This exchange between Salim and Jason:
  Salim: You're going to need me a hell of a lot more than I'll need you.
  Jason: Is that so?
  Salim: I'll hold your hand, but I'm not cuddling you.
  Salim: I have to draw a line somewhere.
• Les Yay: Downplayed as it's not necessarily taken to be romantic in nature, but some players have commented that they at the very least thought there was more natural chemistry between Rachel and Clarice than between Rachel and either of her canonical male love interests.^note Notably though, the inversion of this doesn't usually extend to Clarice, whose light Ship Tease with Jason was generally well received other than by Jason/Salim shippers.
• Memetic Badass: Salim became one to the fans because of how he's willing to go through these vampires with nothing but a steel beam to the heart, to the point that fans like to call him "Vampire Slayer".
• Player Punch: Two for the price of one! Saving Merwin just delays the inevitable, as immediately after he fixes the radio, he is domed by Dar. Him fixing the radio also gets the rescue team to arrive right after fending off the vampires in the climax, so if Salim is still alive, he becomes a POW.
• Portmanteau Couple Name: Jalim for Jason and Salim.
• Romantic Plot Tumor: The Nick/Rachel/Eric Love Triangle. It has an annoying habit of cropping up frequently, in piss poor times and tends to drag a tense game about escaping monsters to a grinding halt so the three can have arguments you'd expect in a bad Lifetime Movie of the Week.
• Sacred Cow: Salim, to an extreme extent. Due to his status as a Memetic Badass and being the most sympathetic of the protagonists in general, and essentially the best protagonist in all of the anthology so far, you’d be hard-pressed to find any fans who outright dislike him and get away with it. You'd have an even harder time trying to find anyone who dislikes him at all, except for those who take issue with him being written as a Static Character and near-Flawless Token.
• Salvaged Story: After the divisive twist to Man of Medan where the supernatural threats were hallucinations, and the reviled twist to Little Hope where the entire game was in the bus driver's head, this game prominently features dangerous monsters that objectively exist; instead, the twist boils down to what kind of monsters they are, namely that the "vampires" are actually infected with alien parasites. The fans were very pleased with this, especially after the notoriously panned ending of Little Hope.
• Stock Footage Failure: If Jason and Eric are the only ones to make it to the surface for the fight scene in the hut, and The Ancient One is still alive, the fight scene itself is very glitchy. The most glaring glitch, however, is Salim coming Back from the Dead with Jason changing to Salim if the player fails the QTE’s. Even more baffling, the animations in general seem to be pretty awkward if there are only two survivors and The Ancient One kills one off.
• Surprisingly Improved Sequel: The game got a noticeably better reception from both critics and general audiences compared to the last two games in the series.
• The Woobie:
  • Salim is unambiguously the most sympathetic of the characters, being a divorced father who is dragged back into the military conflict against his will and simply wants to get home and see his son again. Salim is prone to responding to compassion with compassion (one case being that, mid-battle, if Jason, an enemy soldier, spares a fleeing civilian shepherd, Salim won't even attempt to kill him) and repeatedly proves willing to cross enemy lines to survive together as a group from early on, urging others to do the same.
  • Clarice Stokes appears to have a lot of personal problems as she heard from many people she wasn't cut out for physics. She's also thrust into an active conflict for which she has no training, and is painfully being infected from her encounter with the vampires early in the game. And unfortunately, she gets no happy ending.

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