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They have little to no backstory John, the 40-something class teacher, is a recovering alcoholic, apparently, but there’s no meaningful exploration of that beyond the ability to test his will with a glass of whiskey. It doesn’t help that they’re not a very interesting bunch - which is weird considering they’re meant to be part of a creative writing class! – even when you try and choose dialogue or relationship options that might introduce more depth.

Little Hope’s characters spend the majority of this time freaking out or bickering at one another, with rarely any levity to balance out its ubiquitous sense of dismalness – barring the occasional supernatural time jump to the past where an ongoing storyline about the 1692 witch trials briefly distracts them from their misery. Ultimately, your goal is to find the missing bus driver, but that’s broken into smaller, more mundane tasks, like ‘find a phone,’ or ‘find something to break this window.’ This would be fine if there was a ratcheting sense of needing to survive, but there’s not much tension to speak of within its first two hours. In fact, when you’re not actively running from monsters, it’s.kinda dull.ġ1 Images You spend most of your time in Little Hope wandering around town trying to figure out what to do. Nor does it have the sense of glee that came from slicing and dicing the characters in 2019’s first Dark Pictures game, Man of Medan. It’s an odd, anemic thriller that I struggled to get invested in, and its choice and consequence system feels strangely superficial.Little Hope’s story about a group of college students stranded in the abandoned, eponymous New England town after a bus accident lacks the overt love of the horror genre woven through the DNA of Supermassive’s 2015 gem Until Dawn. It’s such a shame then that Little Hope, the latest in its Dark Pictures Anthology, feels like a step backward compared to the studio’s previous games. When you have the freedom to make your own decisions it can inadvertently interrupt the building moods and provocative themes the genre is built on, but developer Supermassive has proven before that it can still tell a (mostly) cohesive story no matter what players decide to do. Horror can be hard to get right in an interactive story.

Download the dark pictures anthology reviews