Dark Pictures Anthology: Little Hope is the latest installment in a new series of games from Supermassive Games. Akin to the Playstation 4 game, Until Dawn, Little Hope and its predecessor, Man of Medan, use a unique storytelling style for their game, in which the players can choose from one of two options for dialogue. Some choices of dialogue affect the relationship between characters in the game and can be instrumental in whether the character lives or dies.
Little Hope tells the story of a group of college students and two professors who are stranded in the strange town of Little Hope after a bus crash. With no cell reception, and the town seemingly empty, the group has no choice but to push into town and try and find help, or find their way out. Immediately, things are not what they seem, as a mysterious fog appears and prevents them from leaving the direction they came in. The fog forces them into town despite their fears. Once in town, they meet a man in a bar who won’t really give them any answers and wishes them luck. Alone with no help, they wander the town, trying to find their way out.
Things immediately get weirder when different members of the group start seeing visions of the past, during the Salem Witch Trials. The people they see are themselves, just past versions. The group must help the little girl if they want to escape – but that’s not the only thing coming for them. In their world, the past versions of themselves died in horrible ways, and now they’re coming for their modern-day counterparts.
In the end, we learn that things are a lot stranger than first thought and that everything loops back to the beginning of the game. Fans of the game have complained that the premise ‘it’s all in your head’ is too similar to the first game and that both Man of Medan and Little Hope are nearly identical in their endings. A third installment, House of Ashes, has been announced and fans hold out hope that this game will be different from the other two.
In Little Hope, your character can die in a variety of ways. If you fail a quick time event, you’ll die. However, you can also lose characters you aren’t playing by not having a good relationship with them or making the wrong choice as another character. Controls can be a little difficult, as you’re in a third-person perspective, and when you turn a corner or walk into another room, it can rotate the camera and make it hard to figure out where you’re going. Often, when I was playing, this would lead me to loop back into the same room I had just come from when the perspective changed. Without directly saying so, the game appears to be broken into chapters. These chapters are broken up by a recap of what you’ve done and chosen so far by the curator. The curator is a character who has been in both games and serves as a stopping point for the game. He will offer hints occasionally, but they aren’t very descriptive. Players can also find totems in-game that warn of certain events, and can even warn of a character’s death in-game.
Little Hope is available for Xbox, PlayStation and PC.
Jeri Hensley
Creative Director and Reporter