House of Ashes: All Difficulty Differences Explained

House of Ashes is the latest interactive spooky story of sorts from the folks over at Supermassive Games, following the successful Man of Medan and Little Hope. This time around, we follow a group of soldiers during the 2003 Iraq War as they try and fend off an ancient threat in a deep underground ruin. If you’re here, though, you’re probably gearing up for a playthrough (or just finished one) and you’re wondering what the deal is with the difficulty differences offered to you at the start of a House of Ashes playthrough. Here’s everything you need to know about House of Ashes’ difficulty differences.

All Difficulty Differences (Forgiving, Challenging, Lethal) in House of Ashes

So for the first time in The Dark Pictures: Anthology, players can select a difficulty level at the start of their game. On the surface, this might appear a bit odd, considering House of Ashes is a narrative-driven adventure game where you kind of just walk around, pick stuff up, and occasionally point at something and hit a button. But what if I told you that you could make that experience harder or easier?

Well, you have that option with the three House of Ashes difficulty levels: Forgiving, Challenging, and Lethal. Think of them as Easy, Normal, and Hard. What they do is reduce the amount of time you have to hit the QTEs when they appear.

So if you feel like QTEs are too punishing and you don’t want to accidentally fail them and potentially get people killed, put it on Forgiving. If you kind of just want the default experience where you’ll probably hit most of them but maybe miss a couple, put it on Challenging. If you want to have an experience where you’re likely to miss a lot, if not all of them, set the difficulty to Lethal.

Of course, if you just want to see the world burn, you’re always free to put it on whatever difficulty you want and just intentionally fail all of them.

That’s everything you need to know on all difficulty differences for House of Ashes. For more tips, tricks, and guides, you can search for Twinfinite, or check out more of our coverage on House of Ashes specifically, below, including our fully-scored review.