Lets Review Dark Pictures Little Hope: Entertaining, fun and not very scary
0Supermassive Games' website: https://www.supermassivegames.com/
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The Dark Pictures Anthology by Supermassive Games gets another entry with the witchy Little Hope and we get a fun game with an overdone story and very few spooks.
A bus crashes on a lonely street in the middle of the woods on its way to Little Hope, an abandonned town that hosts a history of deadly tragedies, economic despair and a whole lotta witch trials back in ye olden days. The passengers of the bus - a rag-tag study group - have to find out Little Hope's mysteries to find their way out of the town - hopefully alive.
With the third entry in the Dark Pictures Anthology, Supermassive Games creates yet another fun interactive ride full of annoying characters, fateful decision trees and mean quicktime scenarios to screw up a character's fate and see them die a horrible death. Since ghouls and slasher's were the main scares of the first game and Man of Medan was all about spooky ships, it was only a matter of time, until witches - or rather witch trials - would enter the scene combined with the creepy kid-trope of - honestly - too many movies.
Gameplay-wise there is hardly anything to complain about. If you don't like the Gameplay of Supermassive Games, you won't be convinced otherwise, since the game follows the usual rules of timed dialog decisions, hidden secrets and information to explore and many quicktime events to either survive the night or die trying. Personally, I really enjoyed all of it, even if I continuously failed that one thing where you have to be quiet. It also might be of note that in contrast to other interactive movie-type of games, like the FMV game Erica, for example, most actions actually feel relevant and are not just there to fill a longer scene with a weird prompt.
The characters are not as unlikeable as in Until Dawn but still have some sides that are hard to ignore. But then again, a bunch of people you really don't want to spend any time with is kind of a given with any Dark Anthology entry and works especially well in a horror setting. Plus, to see our 50-something Angela get all up in some teenager's business and playing the Mean Girl is a sight to be seen.
The story is basically all the tropes for creepy kid/witch trial horror movies thrown at the wall to see what sticks. As such, it is interesting to find out more behind whatever the hell is going on but it's not necessarily riveting, unique or especially scary. In fact, with the exception of the jump scares that got me too often, there isn't much of an atmosphere to create an underlying uneasiness. For all its many issues I had with "The Suicide of Rachel Foster", that game managed to thoroughly creep me out at times just by sound design and implied story-elements alone. Little Hope, however, tries too much and also sticks to too many ideas that everyone who loves horror movies has seen at least a few times before. And without spoiling anything, I personally hated the ending. You can fight with me on that but for me, it was uninspired and drained the entire story even more of any spooky feelings it might have accidentally conjured up.
But oh boy, what fun I had. With around 4-5 hours playthrough time, Little Hope fills a horror evening perfectly and just begs to be played again because if Supermassive Games is good at one thing, it's decision trees that actually do change the outcome and therefore create a real "oh, what if I hadn't done that"-feeling. And there's so many opportunities to change it, that it easily surpasses most other games that offer some sort of alternative story lines. There is also a perverse pleasure in failing at quicktimes events or ruining a conversation since it's not like you're game over but you just get to see a different story or have your favourite characters hate each other's guts for the rest of the game. Whereas the recently released "Amnesia Rebirth" tells the player that it is a game that shouldn't be played to win, the Dark Anthology entries actually symbolize this sentiment by creating a full gaming experience no matter how much you mess up.
So, would I recommend it? Of course I would. It's not scary, the story is kinda uninspired and damn if I didn't hate Angela and John but I felt fully immersed (although - again - not really scared), I had a lot of fun and I want to play it again.
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