The Dark Pictures Anthology Little Hope by BANDAI NAMCO

The Dark Pictures Anthology Little Hope: Horror is one of my favorite video game genres because unlike movies and tv shows in the same category. The player is in control of what’s happening instead of being a passive observer most horror games have you stick with a set story while being chased by monsters in homicidal maniacs.

The Dark Pictures Anthology: Little Hope

But the developers at supermassive games want you to create the story with the dark pictures anthology after they released until dawn in 2015. They began working on these smaller choose your own adventure stories that are meant to be replayed over and over to witness all possible outcomes. This started with the man of madonne in 2019 and continues this year with little hope.

The game places you with a group of four college students and their professor whose bus crashed in a town called little hope judging by the name we can expect a lot of hope here not all is right with this place as strange events occur will put the group in danger events involving hideous monsters and little girls that may or may not be possessed by witches throughout.

The journey you will play as every one of these characters in certain sections occasionally you will take direct control of them to look around the environments finding clues as to what happened in this town and finding objects that will allow you to progress.

Little Hope Game story

These sections are fairly restrictive limiting you to only walking and investigating objects if you’ve played a telltale game you know what I’m talking about the real interactivity comes from the dialogue choices that affect relationships between characters.

Depending on how nice or not nice the player decides to make them when the characters are introduced. They have their own key traits that contribute to their dialogue choices and you can unlock more of them as the story continues when presented with an important dilemma the choice.

The character makes will lock in a certain trait like having the professor get his drink on when he should be watching over his students I haven’t noticed any major differences within the story from these choices except at the very end where the fate of a character is decided based on their actions. It felt more cheap than impactful since the death of said character didn’t feel related to their actions but I understood that this was to help encourage another playthrough.

One playthrough of the game will take around four to five hours to complete yes that is very short but again this game wants you to play it multiple times to unlock secrets story paths and endings and if you don’t want to play alone there’s a local multiplayer mode where up to 5 people can pass the controller around and make their own decisions for each character.

You can also play with a friend online as they not only play as different characters but they also play different sections of the game for example at the beginning when the bus crashed I controlled the characters at the top of the hill.

While my friend was controlling the ones at the bottom simultaneously we were essentially experiencing two different scenes at the same time it’s an interesting concept with some annoying caveats to boot like wandering around aimlessly or staring at a drawn-out cutscene while the other player finishes their section and as online games go.

Little hope online

You can get disconnected from the play session but fortunately, you’re able to continue where you left off once you get reconnected while the multiplayer works well enough you’d think the experience of essentially playing through a horror movie with friends would be fun. Unfortunately, this is where the game falls flat the story and little hope just isn’t exciting enough to warrant additional replays.

Even though I’ve played it three times choosing different actions and dialogue options the events don’t change much and I found myself listening to the same tired lines over and over again. I also hoped that the writers would take advantage of the shorter run time and get us into the action more quickly instead the majority of the game is centered around solving a mystery and listening to the characters yell at each other.

Over something that happened the fog appears to be in charge anyone but you right do is all a big favor and get lost in the fall I wish I could please stop fighting isn’t going to help, for the most part, each actor does a fine job in their respective roles given the material.

They had to work with the writers and actors in this game to know that they’re in a cheesy slasher horror story. So, it’s not like they’re trying to give oscar oscar-winning performances the main star of the show here is will Poulter who’s done fine work in movies like midsummer and Detroit but the story here doesn’t give him the opportunity to use his range making it clear that he was mainly cast for star power.

More than the talent thing is I think going into town is probably our best shot at finding help though the graphics engine and mocap technology really capture the intensity of his eyebrows that brings up what might be the best thing about little hope. The eyebrows just kidding the game looks amazing on Ps4 pro the textures are incredibly detailed on faces vegetation the asphalt on the streets everywhere.

Sometimes textures take a little too long to load but I haven’t had that happen to me often now as for the atmosphere it’s pretty dull after revisiting other horror games with great atmospheres like amnesia and dead space. Little hopes generic darkness and fog come off as forgettable and didn’t make me feel any sense of unease on top of that the game isn’t scary at all and is mostly filled with cheap jump scares that never once made me jump. This applied to both the single-player and multiplayer modes.

Anthology game characters

I’m a firm believer that interactive horror games don’t necessarily need to be scary as long as they put you through tense situations where the characters could die if you mess up that isn’t the case with little hope as these supposedly tense moments don’t appear until you’re close to the end. They are incredibly easy challenges to overcome if you want something to change you might as well screw up on purpose to see what happens.

Like I mentioned earlier some of the characters only die depending on the choices you make about their personality throughout the game you won’t get a chance to save them when they’re on the brink of death this only happened to me with one particular character and by the time they died the game ended to my surprise. I then played this game two more times once with a friend online and another through the curator’s cut which is a free download allowing you to explore what would normally be player 2’s section of the story in single-player mode.

During my curator’s cut play through the game crashed on me three times and by the third time my save file got corrupted and I was unable to play the rest of that story. It was truly the scariest part of the game I really hope day 1 patch of this game fixes. This serious issue even if these technical problems weren’t present I still didn’t enjoy the dark pictures anthology little hope and I have to give it a rating of meh while the game looks visually stunning and the actors do a somewhat good job in their roles.

The uneventful story prevents me from wanting to play this game again for only a 4-hour experience. It mostly fills the time with exposition and petty feuds between characters instead of exhilarating moments that keep the player’s adrenaline pumping if I were to play this game with up to 4 other friends I would imagine we’d be very bored anyway that’s our review for the dark pictures anthology little hope.