Little Hope
LITTLE HOPE is a ghost tour that’s better with friends.
Cerebral horror is fine, but I like my scares to come from monster chases and stuff jumping out of the shadows. Idiots in peril, abandoned towns, maybe some ghosts—that’s where I get my thrills. Little Hope, the second game in the Dark Pictures Anthology, has all of that, along with multiplayer modes that help it simultaneously capture the experience of watching and being inside a goofy horror flick with your pals.
Like its predecessor, Man of Medan, it’s through the co-op modes that the game reveals all of its mysteries. In singleplayer, you’ll control different members of the stranded quintet, trapped in the town of Little Hope by fog and plagued by visions of 17th century witch trials. The shared story, however, lets you experience these scenes from a different perspective, and when the game splits you up, you’ll have to rely on your co-op buddy, listening to them investigate ruined buildings or get ambushed by a monster, with only a QTE between them and death.
The frantic QTE sequences made me feel like I was always just about to die, but they’re actually easygoing. To make them more accessible, there are unobtrusive alerts ahead of the prompts now warning you that a QTE is coming. This extra second to prepare doesn’t diminish their impact, but it does make it less likely that you’ll hit the wrong button.
Little Hope is a social game. You can enjoy it on your lonesome, but you’ll miss out the best parts. You’re meant to yell, swap theories about why the gang is trapped and develop these characters together. After every surprise, I found myself hitting pause so we could talk about what just happened and build the full picture from our individual perspectives. This was the magic that made Man of Medan work, too, and good co-op can make it easy to overlook places where the game is less refined. But Little Hope doesn’t really develop it further, and it actually takes advantage of it less. Where Man of Medan used it to foster paranoia and sow distrust between players, Little Hope’s approach to co-op seems more straightforward.
Nobody really gets along that well in Little Hope
ABANDON HOPE
There’s still lots of character drama, mind you. The gang is made up of three students in their 20s, a mature student, and their professor. Two of them are dating, but nobody really gets along that well in Little Hope. They’re stressed, but they’re also just kinda jerks, with one bland exception. They’re all familiar archetypes, like the vanilla do-gooder, the tense academic, and the Queen of Karens. Being painted in broad strokes makes it easier to slip into their personalities when you take control of them, though, and while none of these characters are particularly nuanced, most of them are fun roleplaying subjects.
Between QTEs and conversations are opportunities to explore, mostly by looking at objects the game clearly highlights. The camera has been freed up to give you more control, and while there aren’t any puzzles, Supermassive uses the time to ramp up the tension and tease some hints about what’s really going on.
Sometimes its cinematic notions get the better of it, however, and the camera abruptly switches to a dramatic angle, like maybe you’re being watched from some bushes. Perfectly fine for a movie, maybe, but every single time this happened, my co-op partner and I stopped in our tracks because we thought we’d hit a cutscene. There are quite a few awkward scene transitions, too, or places where the pace abruptly speeds up and it’s not clear what the heck is actually going on.
Most of the time, though, it’s like being stuck in a schlocky horror movie. It’s Final Destination meets The Crucible, where you’re watching yourself die one minute and attending a dimly lit witch trial the next. The co-op doesn’t impress quite as much as it did in Man of Medan, but this is still one of the best ways to get spooked with some mates.