There are things in the darkness, and the darkness takes many forms.
Until Dawn is one of my favorite games of all time, and almost my favorite horror game of all time, narrowly beaten out by Silent Hill.
After playing the mildly disappointing Man of Medan, which had a lot of cool stuff to offer and plenty of potential, but generally felt unpolished and predictable, my hopes for The Dark Pictures Anthology were pinned on the aptly named Little Hope.
And I can say that Little Hope cements The Dark Pictures Anthology as a worthwhile investment and renews hope for the future of the series. However, it has its fair share of caveats.
Little Hope puts you in a very Silent Hill setting – a ghost town that seems to be haunted with demons. While the story concept seems fairly derivative, and it is no Silent Hill, it is the way that Supermassive Games manages to construct the story that is perhaps the most impressive quality.
It could have been a shlock-fest, and while it does evoke b-movies in a variety of ways, including sometimes unfortunately in its script, it uses all of its elements very well, including cinematography and haunting glimpses at monsters in the dark.
Like its predecessors, the game likes to pursue “fake” jump scares from time to time (the howling of the wind, something running by you in the night) but it later follows them up with real scares. For the horror-initiated, the game’s scares, while technically pulled off well, do not have as much heart behind them as they could have.
They lack a certain shock value. This may be because I managed to get everyone to survive, but the game’s few shocking horror moments I experienced came only at the very beginning and a few of the “flashback” sequences. The others were either standard jump-scares, but interspersed between less than successful scares is a story worth experiencing.
I came to love all the characters, with the flirtatious and headstrong Taylor winning her way into my heart, though each of them had their likeable qualities. I adore the way that Supermassive write their characters. They might be fairly simple to start with, but that allows you to see the basic horror cliches they embody.
Other than Taylor, we have Daniel, who is the guy trying to impress the girl; John who wants to be the leader through virtue of his title as Professor; Andrew is the quiet nerd who knits the group together, and Angela is the mature student who struggles to accept other people’s viewpoints.
Each of these characters has a valuable arc and reactions to the situation, and I loved seeing how each of them interacted with each other in genuine ways. Supermassive knows that mixing and matching character pairings can only result in deeper and more interesting characters. I may write a further piece later detailing what I think of the characters and the story in a more spoiler-filled article.
If the story is much better than Man of Medan, what are the antagonists like? They are marvellously designed, even better than Until Dawn‘s monsters in terms of pure design. What brings them down is that we don’t see enough of them. Little Hope has a nice slow buildup to the action, which allows for the stakes to be set and for us to get attached to and develop the characters. I definitely wouldn’t change that. I suppose what really holds Little Hope back is its scope and scale.
I would’ve loved to have seen more character development, more locations in the town, and more branching paths. But of course the game doesn’t have the budget or the scope for that – it tells a simple but intriguing and effective, even tearjerker of a story.
One day I would love to see Supermassive Games tackle another game with the budget and scope of Until Dawn, and put some more interactivity and gameplay into their games. They create worlds that are just dying to be explored further, and characters whose depths only just get a chance to be plunged before we are drifted to the credits. Each character’s arc is technically complete, but the characters Supermassive writes in Little Hope deserve longer stories to go with them. I’m perfectly happy – very impressed, even – with the ending, but I just wish we got more!
The formatting of the game allows for powerful narrative and dramatic tension, as characters react to the personality traits you have given them while you were controlling them. However, your interactivity is very limited. There are zero in-game puzzles to solve while playing, and the only mystery is the narrative mystery – just what is going on in this strange town?
There’s no opportunity to go off the beaten path – it is a linear exploration of a ghost town, which does make for good pacing, but perhaps some extra exploration options would have been nice, especially in earlier segments of the game, where the town could have had some additional fleshing out.
Perhaps in response to the fact that Man of Medan‘s twist was easily guessed, Pip Torrens’ Curator has more elusive hints and suggestions to give you than last time. He doesn’t spell out what’s happening – at least he didn’t for me, as I didn’t ask for any of the various hints he offered.
The hints you are required to listen to are literary references, which are of a far better and more subtle level than his other hints in the previous game, wherein he basically spelled out the twist. So the classic Supermassive twist in this game comes with purpose and emotional context, which raises it from a good b-movie horror story to just a genuinely good story on its own.
There are a few quality of life improvements which I noticed. There are now contextual warnings for Quick-Time Event button prompts, which, in the absence of other gameplay elements, is a welcome change. Now the QTEs are easier to see coming and easier to succeed in – or deliberately fail at, should you so wish. There are also a variety of accessibility improvements in the options menu, including options for dyslexic people and colour-coded subtitles.
Finally, the menus are crisper, and the graphics and animation overall have a level of polish that Man of Medan was desperately in need of. It runs smoothly on PlayStation 4, and has all the extra multiplayer options that the other one had – online play, where players experience two sides of the same story and often split up, and “Movie Night”, where players select which character(s) they want to control and the controller is passed around the room to whoever’s character is up.
Little Hope is a marvellous comeback in many ways for The Dark Pictures Anthology, and the ideal way to spend a cozy evening in the dark. It’s not exactly on the level of a cerebral Silent Hill-esque horror game, but it is clever enough to keep you hooked, and if nothing else, it has a polished atmosphere and a story good enough to see you through to the end.
Not to forget a few genuinely pulse-pounding moments, which while not being scary, were tense enough to make me pause the game and wonder what I should do next. Very much recommended for horror enthusiasts, and narrative-driven game fans.