The Dark Pictures Anthology: Little Hope (PS4, 2020)

The potential of Supermassive Games’ Dark Pictures Anthology project is obvious. Building on the success of Until Dawn, it presents a series of interactive horror B-movies starring motion-capped actors, familiar genre conceits and a cast of eminently killable stereotypes.

Despite a couple of reservations I really enjoyed first entry Man of Medan.. It felt like it was fully aware of what it was trying to achieve – nicely emulating the tone and goofiness of a straight-to-VOD supernatural thriller. The game also introduced the incredibly fun ‘Movie Night’ mode, in which you gather friends who each play a character and pass the controller around. I played it twice with different groups of friends, saw two very different outcomes and was subsequently extremely hyped for Little Hope.

Supermassive seemed to be on a great learning curve and I was sure they’d listened to feedback on what did and didn’t work with Man of Medan and that this would be their best yet.

But. Damn. They fucked it up big time.

Before we get to why, Little Hope has some good stuff. The facial and motion capture looks great, the environments are beautifully designed and I still love the gothic cheesiness of Pip Torrens’ ultra-hammy cryptkeeper style narrator.

I just wish I had more positive things to say. I’ll avoid getting into specifics as I don’t want to spoil the plot, but the main pleasure of these choice-based adventures is that your decisions (and your friends if you’re playing multiplayer) decide who lives and who dies. For some bizarre reason, Little Hope ruins that conceit in its final moments with a all time terrible late game twist.

Look up the specifics if you want, but let’s just say the writer commits what’s perhaps the classic Creative Writing 101 sin and instantly renders large swathes of the game’s narrative effectively pointless. This would be crappy enough in a movie, but in a genre where the whole attraction is feeling like your decisions affect the outcome it makes for a stupendously bad call.

Even leaving that aside, Supermassive somehow also screwed up Movie Night mode. As in Man of Medan you and your friends each control a specific character – and you become quite attached to yours as the story develops. In Little Hope, without so much as a sniff of a prompt, the viewpoint switches between characters mid-segment, meaning a player is suddenly making life and death decisions and performing QTEs for someone else’s character.

I genuinely don’t know how Supermassive could have screwed up this badly. All they had to do was polish the Man of Medan formula and they’d have nailed it. Maybe it’s a COVID thing…? I dunno.

The game ends with a teaser for the next game in the Dark Pictures series: House of Ashes. I’m going to sit that out unless it gets really good reviews. You might say I have…. ‘little hope’ that it will be good.