The Dark Pictures Anthology: Little Hope

The development team at Supermassive Games returns a year after presenting the first episodes of the horror game series The Dark Pictures Anthology to present us the second episode entitled Little Hope. We return after our experience of the first episode to try this episode and find out more about the improvements over the previous part and its story in general to present you this review.

Story and Gameplay

The story is different from the first episode and does not require knowledge of the details. It begins with a bus suddenly veering off the road, causing it to overturn and its passengers, students and their teacher, to suffer some bruises and injuries. From there, events begin with you searching for the driver of the missing bus and trying to call for help. The bus overturned near the entrance to an abandoned city. It’s called Little Hope and with the spread of dense fog this has mysteriously taken you back to your starting point, you find no other solution than to keep walking towards the town and this is where events get interesting as you suddenly find yourself in The past is transported back, particularly to the end of the 17th century, where people were tried and executed on charges of sorcery with the appearance of… The clear similarity between the characters you meet in the past and those you play with in the present.

Story and Characters

The general idea of ​​the story is interesting, including the ambiguity and similarity between the present and the past under certain circumstances, and it even offers some surprises here and there, but the fault lies in the details. The dialogues between the characters are very superficial, and many of the options for interaction between them are illogical and strange, and the characters lose… Her identity sometimes consists of moving inanimate objects most of the time, but suddenly she becomes angry or thinks the time has come for some humor. The relationship system between the characters returns again. The dialogues build trust or distrust between the characters, and they also develop a specific characteristic of these characters, such as courage or deception, but we have not found that these characteristics have no fundamental influence on the dialogues or on the actions of the characters, such as in the previous version.

Graphics and Sound

The graphics are generally good and the characters’ details are excellent, but facial expressions and lip movements were static most of the time, reinforcing the impression that these characters are inanimate, moving objects with no emotions. The tunes here are excellent and superior to the previous version as we found them fitting and adding some life to the sections where you are being chased or exposed to danger. The game offers Arabic translation for menus and text. The translation is generally good, but unfortunately it has been made due to the use of a small font and a font that is difficult to read, as well as the current lack of the ability to adjust the size of texts, it may be difficult for those who are not fluent in English to understand the events.

Gameplay and Decisions

Like the last episode, the game is an interactive cinematic experience where you search for evidence and secrets in the environment before moving on to the next environment, and as mentioned, interact with the characters to determine the course of events. Unfortunately, there are many Decisions in the game illogical and many scenes full of fallacies and illogical things. This makes you feel like you are watching a bad horror film. The previous episode, Man of Medan, stood out for the variety of events and the results that can be achieved, but when we relived Little Hope for the second time, we found that the variety is less and there are many basic ones There are events that can’t be changed no matter what you do, which is frustrating. To some extent, the game is full of scenes that require pressing a button at the right time or QTE, and one of the good modifications that the development team has made is the addition of icons that inform you that you are about to start one of these scenes, which prepares you for that scene.

Co-op and Replayability

If you want to go through the experience together, you have at your disposal the same stages as in the previous version, with the availability of the “Movie Night” option, where you select each of the five characters and specify who will play with them, allowing you to receive Pass the controller to your companion who selected that character when the time comes. There is a common story phase that still exists. One of the features of the experience is that you go through one part of the experience while another player goes through another part, which takes place simultaneously, so your decisions influence each other, although the effect is much smaller in this episode than the last Episode.

Conclusion

The episode took about four and a half hours to complete as we wanted to go through the various files and collect secrets. For us, the value of repeating the experience in this episode is less than the last episode, and while the last episode can satisfy your curiosity about the different possibilities, we were satisfied with its completion. This episode only appeared twice due to the similarities we found. Little Hope presented an exciting story with its main idea, but the details of this story, including the dialogue and decisions you had to make, were in many cases superficial and full of fallacies and illogical decisions. It’s an experience that might appeal to those who enjoyed the previous episode but didn’t learn from it. Errors from the last version enough.