The Dark Pictures Anthology: Little Hope – Game review

The Dark Pictures Anthology: Little Hope is the second game in the Anthology. Just as Man of Medan, it is a story-driven horror game, where you decide how it ends.

After a car accident, four students and their professor end up in a town named Little Hope. That is enough to know since more than that would contain spoilers.

You can play alone, with a friend online (both have to own the game), or with up to five friends in couch-coop. Playing alone lets you play all five characters in different scenes. Playing online gives you the possibility to play a few scenes you don’t experience when playing alone, but you also miss a few you would’ve experienced otherwise.

Like in Man of Medan, playing with a friend online will end up in a few awkward situations where you stare into faces for five seconds without them doing or saying anything.

All five characters build up a relationship with one another. Characters you don’t control act based on their relationship to the character you control. Relationships will also give or take options in conversations or actions. You can change relationships through your actions, as well as the story changes based on that.

Gameplay-wise it’s no different from Man of Medan. You walk around, do quick-time events, and that one little mini-game where you control your heartbeat. At least all of that improved a bit. It feels smoother now. Walking still feels like driving a truck, but it’s a bit less clunky than before.

You still get stuck in small areas sometimes and the camera still changes when going into a room, which changes the directions of the left stick but it’s a lot less annoying now. I never thought they could and would improve that, but they sure did. The only thing still as bad as before is turning directions with your character – it’s just sluggish.

As everyone who loves these games knows, the most important part is the story and Little Hope can shine here. It’s way better than MoM’s even if the character’s actions still are illogical sometimes. For example, in the prologue, one character is standing on the balcony and the house is burning. Instead of climbing off the balcony, they go into the house.

The story still has its longueurs after the first high but after some time one intense scene followers the other. All in all, it’s less predictable and has way fewer logic errors.

What makes the story really good, is everything surrounding and supporting it. The characters again are stereotypes, but not in a bad way this time, and the (voice) acting is good. The sound effects and music are very atmospheric. Some scenes live off that.

The graphic also improved by a lot in total. Do you remember the teeth of Man of Medan‘s characters? That was probably the most common negative aspect of reviews. They now look more natural. The facial expressions also got better. Characters feel more lively.

Again, you can find a lot of letters and pictures to gain background information about the world. Most of the time, they are interesting and add a lot of value to the game.

Little Hope strictly follows the same structure Man of Medan did but does everything better. Many negative aspects of the previous game got improved which is huge for an AA game. It’s around five hours long with different endings and creates the perfect B-Movie experience you would want for Halloween!

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