Dark Pictures - Little Hope varies-with-device

Abandon all hope

The Dark Pictures Anthology: Little Hope is an interactive horror video game developed by Supermassive Games and published by Bandai Namco Entertainment. The second installment of the Dark Pictures Anthology franchise, this game is a mashup of horror tropes and subgenres. It is a series of cinematics, linked together by choices, and, occasionally, interrupted by a quick-time prompt. It is a four-hour narrative game, which can be played solo or cooperatively.

A mix of various horror elements

Like its immediate predecessor, The Dark Pictures Anthology: Man of Medan, Little Hope is a mix of various elements seen in other horror stories. It has the same Puritan-era paranoia from The Witch, coupled with the iconography from The Blair Witch Project. The premise, meanwhile, is very familiar to Stephen King’s The Mist or John Carpenter’s The Fog. It introduces four college students and their professor, all of whom are trapped in a Silent Hill-esque Salem Witch scenario after their bus crashes. The goal of the game is to escape the predicament they are in.

The game begins with a flashback to the 1970s and a short introduction to a troubled family of six. The said family—save one—met their grisly demise when the youngest daughter left her doll on the stovetop causing the house to burn. Oddly enough, the protagonists have the same faces and similar names to the family in the 70s. More, they seem to have been born multiple times, as depicted in the way it thrust the characters into scenarios from three different eras.

Despite the crawling cast and scenes, however, the players can only control the present-day versions of the characters. They can make the dialogue decisions by pointing the needle of a compass at one of two spoken options. As noted, the choices affect the dynamics of the character relationships, how they escape, and whether or not they survive. Be warned, though. There is a lot to chew on in the game that players will only have vague ideas of who the characters are. The time-hopping gameplay impedes its ability to do successful work that the central cast does not feel like three-dimensional characters.

Great game if not for the ending

The Dark Pictures Anthology: Little Hope gave a modern twist to narrative adventure games. The game’s masterful mix of various horror tropes, coupled with its technical proficiency, has made it a solid game. However, with its timeline-hopping premise, the story and characters became uncharacteristically lackluster. More, players are bound to have a very frustrating, anti-climactic ending.