This article originally ran under a different banner/website in November of 2020 and is now being here re-uploaded for purposes of convenience and consolidation. Please enjoy.
HEAR YE!!! HEAR YE!!! GATHER ROUND!!! GATHER ROUND!!! It is that time of year where Supermassive Game delivers unto us an interactive horror film in the vein of Until Dawn. With their recent Dark Picture Anthology, Supermassive Games has almost become a Halloween version of Santa Claus. Placing a new horror game in my stocking if I am a good little video game Doomsayer. However, the Dark Pictures Anthology initial entry, Man of Medan, felt like a lump of coal in my horror game stocking. Fortunately, it is a new year, and it is time to see if I was on Supermassive Games’ naughty or nice list as I review Little Hope, the latest entry to the Dark Pictures Anthology.
If you are familiar with Supermassive’s work, then you can probably assume how Little Hope works. For my new followers, I can only describe the gameplay as an interactive movie. You gain control over one of the characters, you can search for clues, choose dialog options, and perform quick timed events to keep the characters alive. The formula hasn’t really changed, but I do have some small gameplay complaints.
One, the mouse and keyboard controls on PC are horrendous. Rather than use WASD keys to move around, Little Hope wants you to click around like a point and click adventure, but with the three-dimensional spacing, you can occasionally get stuck in a corner. Secondly, Little Hope has two co-op modes: one a movie night where you pass the controller back and forth, and a shared story mode where you and your co-op partner play different parts of the story as the group splits up. Unfortunately, you can only play the shared story with an online partner, as the movie mode requires you to play couch co-op. As the pandemic marches onward, it would have been nice to play the movie night mode with an online partner, as having my partner describe events of the story to fill me in was quite annoying at times.
Gameplay nitpicks aside, Little Hope, like Supermassive Games’ other titles, lives or dies on its story. Naturally, to say whether Little Hope is worthy of your time, I must dig in with my surgical knife to see what makes this story tick. Naturally, there are no spoilers ahead. Upon taking a detour into the titular town, a college professor and his four students have their bus crash just on the outskirts of Little Hope. As they venture deeper into town, they uncover a fog that won’t let them leave, a mysterious girl, and the ability to transport to a colonial time where doppelgängers of our characters are engaged in some witch trials. You think Little Hope is juggling too many themes, but the ending wraps them all together nicely.
The setting of Little Hope has the groundwork to be an effective horror town. Little Hope is a rustic abandoned New England town that would have Stephen King drooling. There are plenty of dark corners and abandoned buildings perfect for stalking monsters. Unfortunately, Little Hope is a bit too eager to show off these monsters stalking our protagonist. During the time these monsters were hogging the spotlight, I frequently thought back to Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. I recalled how Kubrick would use the tight hallways of the Overlook Hotel to obscure the viewer’s vision. You expect a monster to pop around a corner, but when they don’t, the sense of uneasy begins to grow. Little Hope easily could have captured this sense of dread if its monsters weren’t hungry for the spotlight.
The other component of the story is the characters. One of the reasons I enjoyed Until Dawn was the characters. I was rooting for Sam, Chris, and Ashley to make it out while hoping the more unlikeable characters got what was coming to them. Unfortunately, I don’t have any characters I am rooting for or against in Little Hope. I don’t want them all to die like all the characters in Man of Medan, but their fate doesn’t really bother me either. This is especially a problem when Little Hope wants you to work at overcoming the character’s negative traits by either performing heroic deeds or choosing the proper dialogue choices. I often chose to make the characters say nothing because I find it humorous to watch one character confess their fears and to have another character say nothing. The unfortunate truth is, despite being mere high schoolers, I could tell you the hopes and dreams of the cast of Until Dawn. I can only say the cast of Little Hope just wants to get out of the titular town. I will also continue to say the crypt-keeper-style Curator is still nowhere interesting as Peter Stormare’s performance as Dr. Hill.
So the characters are lackluster and the game doesn’t understand the power of subtly, I am sure many of you, MY LOYAL FOLLOWERS, are expecting me to damn Little Hope. Well, honestly my loyal followers, I was prepared to say the game is a slight improvement on Man of Medan, but then I got to the ending and saw how the game tied everything together. I was left with my jaw on the floor. Most video game stories are nothing to write home about, but Little Hope felt like a story I wanted to replay to piece everything together. I have heard people compare it to Jordan Peele’s Us. Now I won’t say this game is on par with Jordan Peele’s masterpiece, but Little Hope’s ending has certainly arrested my thoughts as much as the ending of Us. I honestly got some major Silent Hill vibes at the ending wrestling with grief and guilt. Many journalists said the ending of The Last of Us Part 2 was on their mind for weeks after finishing the game; well I feel the same way about the ending of Little Hope.
After Man of Medan, I was worried Until Dawn was a fluke. However, after Little Hope, I am convinced Supermassive Games has some creative ideas brewing. I believe if they can focus on fleshing out their characters and work on making their game more subtle with their scares, they could have something that rivals Until Dawn. In order for this to happen, Supermassive must release themselves from the shackles of their release schedule. Supermassive vowed to release a new iteration of The Dark Pictures Anthology every year. Considering how much work has to go into writing these stories and creating assets for their new settings, I truly believe their newest story, House of Ashes should come out in 2022 rather than 2021. Supermassive Games clearly have the potential to give a genuinely great interactive experience, but they clearly just need time. I, for one, will gladly wait to give them the time they need.
