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dkirschner's The Dark Pictures: Little Hope (PC)
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| [February 10, 2023 09:38:08 AM]
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Forgot to update this. Patrick and I have been playing it an hour here and there on Tuesdays for a few months and finally finished last week. These Dark Pictures games are all given mediocre reviews, but I got one for free or $1 or something in a Humble Bundle and figured I'd give it a shot because I like horror games and it seemed like a fun couch co-op game. Sure enough, it provided some good entertainment for us after our long work days on Tuesdays. The games are an anthology, all connected (I assume) by this mysterious storyteller. I think he writes the episodes, which each explore a horror theme. There's something supernatural about it. I'd have to play more of the games to understand, but the storyteller guy was this posh English man in a library who eggs you on.
Little Hope (and I assume the rest of the games) have an interesting premise. You play as a group of characters, alternating one at a time as the story progresses. In this game, they were a college professor and four of his students. They were on a bus for a field trip and the bus crashes in the town of Little Hope (gloomy!) where a dense fog descended. In the fog are demons, a mysterious little girl, and a cranky resident. You explore the town, wind up being able to interact with the past, as the two timelines impact one another. The five of you uncover the mystery of the town through a story about witchcraft. It has a Salem witch trials vibe, and we found the story generally interesting, but confusing as well.
There seem to be two main thrusts of gameplay here. The first is the exploration/horror stuff and the second is managing social relationships between the characters through dialogue decisions. The first is straightforward. The game is linear. There are jump scares (effective!). There are some items to examine or read (boring, but give more context to the story). There are quick-time events (intense and fun, especially watching Patrick fail them). If you fail a series of quick-time events, the character you're controlling is probably going to die in a wonderfully gruesome way. These often happen when you're being chased by a demon. I think that any of the characters can die. We finished the game with two alive.
The fact that anyone can die affects that second thrust of the gameplay, the social relationships. The decisions you make affect the characters' personality traits, which will permanently change. I don't know if this affects subsequent dialogue options or possible interactions with other characters or what, but each of them has an elaborate profile, and when they die it'll tell you what their dominant traits were (maybe the traits influence their life chances?). It would require another play through to gain a better understanding of the personality traits. If we were to play it again, we said we'd try to role-play the characters (like make the professor arrogant, one of the students scared, another one combative, etc.). Instead of switching "attitudes" as the mood struck us, we'd make them stick with personality traits.
Since anyone can die, the writers had to create dialogue for any combination of characters at many points in the story, depending on who was still alive. The dialogue is not the game's strong suit, and by the end of the game it could get absurd. For example, we had three characters alive for a while toward the end, but it was like one of them should have died a while back. She wasn't in cut scenes, she barely said anything, anything she did say was generic that could have been said by anyone. She'd disappear off screen while the other two characters had conversations. It was weird. Then she did die. She had...little hope...of living (sorry).
We were let down by the ending, but realize that the ending may be impacted by the fact that this is an anthology and the stories might be connected. If I got another one of these for free, I'd play it co-op. I wouldn't seek it out alone; it'd be boring without another person to get scared and laugh with.
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dkirschner's The Dark Pictures: Little Hope (PC)
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Current Status: Finished playing
GameLog started on: Friday 21 October, 2022
GameLog closed on: Wednesday 1 February, 2023 |
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