HAPPY HALLOWEEN, and a massive thank you to Bandai Namco for sending me a copy of Dark Pictures Anthology: Little Hope the sequel to the hit game, Man of Medan. This third-person horror experience is pretty much an interactive movie where the choices you make will affect the characters in the story and will determine who lives and who dies.
Little Hope follows four college students and their professor who while on a field trip got stranded after their bus got into an accident while being re-routed through the ghost town of Little Hope, once there, the group soon begin to notice that the past still haunts the town…
Onto the game itself! The first thing I noticed right away is the animation of Little Hope is way better than Man of Medan as there was a lot of screen tearing and slow frame rate but it’s silky smooth this time around! On the subject of graphics, the art and animation are stunning in this game! The lighting is amazing and the way the lighting passes through the fog is lifelike.
The controls in the game are exactly the same as in Man of Medan so if you’ve played that one then you pretty much have these controls on lockdown. If you’re not familiar with it, don’t worry as there’s a tutorial level.
The soundtrack is amazing along with the sound effects that combine to help send chills down one’s spine as they play as it makes you uncertain where the scares are going to come from, it’s not a question of if the scares are coming, it’s when. That’s another thing that makes the game’s atmosphere amazing is the tension to scare ratio where you’re not sure if there’s a scare coming but when you least expect it, it happens.
The gameplay is phenomenal as it forces you to explore while you’re nervous, just like in Man of Medan the thing I don’t like is when you find lore, you can only read it once and can’t look back in the collection to read it, this honestly is my only complaint about Little Hope.
Overall, Little Hope is an amazing game to play. The story and atmosphere are perfect for this time of year, the acting is great, the sound and music fits, the scares are not forced, the minimal controls with times of button smashing helps keeps you on your toes, and the fact that you will have to play this a few times to see all outcomes is all the more fun. Little Hope is as I mentioned before, an interactive movie that you can play alone or with a friend via online co-op or couch co-op. On my scale of 1-10, Dark Pictures Anthology: Little Hope is a 10.
