The Dark Pictures Anthology: Little Hope

I came in with high expectations for this second outing in The Dark Pictures series, but came away ever so slightly underwhelmed. It looks and sounds great, and the atmosphere and tension building is excellent. Sadly the all-important characters just didn’t quite resonate with me thanks to some sudden shifts in tone between sentences, and an overall feeling of disjointedness between scenes. Little Hope may not quite live up to Man of Medan then, but it’s still a passable bit of teen horror to fill up an evening or two.

The Dark Pictures: Little Hope is a horror game better than the first game of this Supermassive Games anthology. The story and setting will make the game a very enjoyable experience for lovers of the genre.

The Dark Pictures: Little Hope makes an earnest attempt to build upon the formula established by Man of Medan in many ways. It offers an engaging and well-paced story, great characters, and an intriguing yet typical twist that genre fans will no doubt appreciate. Despite numerous improvements to the underlying gameplay and excellent production values, incessant jump scares prevent Little Hope from standing on the shoulders of Man of Medan, instead merely beside it.

Little Hope on the Xbox One is a substantially different horror game than Man of Medan, and that is one of the beauties of The Dark Pictures Anthology. However, that does mean that gone are the tight corridors of Man of Medan, replaced by a lot of walking on empty roads and dirt paths in Little Hope. It was a tale that I personally found a lot less scary, though this could be down to familiarity of the anthology starting to creep in. It is still more than capable of producing a decent amount of scares though as the nights start to draw in.

The Dark Pictures Anthology: Little Hope provides an entertaining horror romp that is high on tension, but perhaps a little too low on actual scares. Regardless, its mix of good performances, excellent visuals and an intriguing mystery will keep you engrossed throughout, even if it falls a bit flat in the finale.

While still creating horror games with fairly visible flaws, Little Hope is a vast improvement of Man of Medan. With another — and perhaps the last — in The Dark Pictures anthology seemingly teased by the mysterious Curator in this one, I’m rather excited to see what Supermassive learns for next time around.

Like any other game from Supermassive, the visuals in Little Hope are superb and the atmosphere is super engaging, making you feel everything that the devs wanted you to feel. That said, the implementation of gameplay mechanics sometimes go horribly wrong and prevents the game from delivering a solid final product.

Little Hope does provide a grasping story in general but fails to enrich it with more details and meaningful interactions between characters.

Overall I think Little Hope is just alright. I don’t think there’s anything special to be found here. The twist in the story has been done way better as well as the gameplay by the same studio from all accounts. I guess that the good news is that if like me this is your first Supermassive game it apparently only gets better from here.