Developer: Supermassive Games
Publisher: Bandai Namco Entertainment
Platform: PC, Xbox One, PS4
Tested on: PC
The Dark Pictures Anthology – Little Hope – Review
It’s been slightly over a year since we dived into the first game of The Dark Pictures Anthology, Man of Medan. This game presented us with the typical horror tropes of a bunch of teenagers having to wade through horrific situations and scenes. This time we abandon all hope when we enter Little Hope, pretty much the modern equivalent of the ancient burial ground, albeit with the bodies of those accused of witchcraft. For us, Little Hope was somewhere between dope and nope.
Story
The story of the game starts off with the tragic demise of an entire family. While not going to deep into spoiler territory for this one, you soon after play with characters that look a lot like the recently deceased, albeit in a more modern setting than the initial characters. When you eventually end up in a town called Little Hope, things turn even more strange when the doppelganger fest expands into the territory of witchcraft.
The flow progresses a bit to your own liking, albeit with choices you have to make within a certain timeframe. You can choose between limited options during dialogues, strengthening bonds with certain characters, destroying them with others. You can be the nice guy or gal, but you can also be an intolerable douche if you wish to be.
Graphics
Having played the PC version with a fairly heavy setup, we can conclude that the game is by no means optimized. You’ll have a lot of laggy moments, frozen sections, and overall texture popping that goes through the roof. Sure, the game does look pretty at times and just oozes the proper atmosphere for a horror experience, but the many bugs and rough edges make the game somewhat staler than it should be. Nonetheless, the clear use of motion capture and the proper depiction of the cast members is a very impressive feat for a game such as this. Many of the backdrops do look very impressive as well, but often feel like the old Resident Evil games, where everything around you was basically a static picture.
Sound
The sound design is superb in this game with the voice acting taking the cake here. However, we simply love the overall atmosphere thanks to the backdrop. The sync can get messed up from time to time because of the aforementioned stutters, but this is often fixed a scene later. There is not much more the developers could have done to improve the audio experience Little Hope brings to the table.
Gameplay
Little Hope is just like its predecessor a survival horror game, but on the PC version, you can somewhat trade in the QTE gameplay of a controller to a more point-and-click focused playstyle. In the game you’ll be exploring Little Hope as a group of five very diverse characters, hoping to find a way out, preferably alive. The game pretty much relies on you having to select dialogue options, click on certain things on the screen within a specific time frame and of course explore the environment to progress the story and uncover certain clues.
What you have to do in the game is actually quite easy, and you’ll never really be stuck. You just have to walk around, explore environments, make choices in terms of conversations, and hopefully make it out alive when having to perform QTEs. You can be rewarded by looking in every nook and cranny, as this might show you visions of the future, somewhat motivating completionists and even prolonging the fairly short length of the game.
If we have to be completely honest, the game’s controls are simply horrible. We played with the mouse setup, as we played the PC version of the game. You simply have to click on where you wish to walk and have to do the same when you are prompted on what conversational options you wish to pick. While the latter is straightforward and okay, it’s the walking, in combination with the semi-fixed camera view that is so atrocious to work with. More than once your character will go the wrong direction, not actually walk to where you are clicking, halts its movement because another character came close, etc. If the camera completely turns on you, you are in for a treat to sometimes just get away from that fixed point of view, and actually continue playing. The second issue lies with the QTEs that require you to click on a specific spot on the screen. Sadly during these sequences, your cursor disappears, making it so you don’t see where you have to start with your cursor, to reach the desired click-zone. If you are somewhere dabbling in a corner you are basically fucked for every single QTE the game throws at you. This isn’t our vision of having fun and it quickly becomes frustrating, especially if it causes one of the characters to get killed.
Conclusion
The Dark Pictures Anthology – Little Hope is still a nice title to play, but it could have been so much more with some well-needed polishing. The game provides an interesting story, albeit a not so scary one. The atmosphere is properly set, but it lacks those finer details to make you sleep with one eye open after playing the game. The PC version could still need a few patches to improve the game’s running stability, as well as some tweaks to the control scheme.
The Dark Pictures Anthology – Little Hope – Review,
Related Items
1 Comment
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
[…] but the stories themselves were often quite interesting to play through. While we have dealt with witches and vampires in other titles, this time the topic will hit closer to home, as the game revolves […]