YMMV / Little Hope

• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • Mary Milton: Did she accuse Amy of witchcraft because Mary despised her? Because Mary feared Amy would reveal her secret? Because Carver told her to do it and he was her priest? Or was she afraid of Carver? She also begs Carver to spare David. Is this because witnessing Tabitha's brutal execution made her realize what she was doing? Because she realized Carver would never stop using her confessions to kill people? Or because she witnessed Daniel, who looks like David, trying to save her? Or perhaps David was her blood sibling and she didn't want to lose her last family member: Tabitha is referred to as her sister, but in the 1690's, Tabitha would've been referred to as Mary's sister if she was married to David.
  • Megan Clarke: Did she use the doll to start the fire deliberately? Or was it an accident as the police stated? Were Anne, Dennis, and Tanya the victims of circumstance, or did Megan engineer the attempts to ensure they'd die in the blaze? Evidence against Megan setting the blaze includes the fact that the spare key was in the clock, which would've been very hard for Megan to return to the clock if she set the blaze herself. Evidence for it includes the fact that Megan was the last person seen in all of the places, and Anne was definitely locked in the bathroom.
  • The "shadow" talking to Megan just before the blaze: Was it actually a devil? Did Megan develop a mental illness due to being abused by a Pedophile Priest? Or was she already suffering from it and the priest just made it worse? Or did Anthony hallucinate the whole thing because he's desperate to attach a reason to his family's death?
• Awesome Video Game Levels:
  • Daniel and Taylor's escape from the demon at Tabitha's execution site. The pace is frantic and shifts rapidly between the two of them as they try to escape.
  • The battle at the churchyard, when both David and Tabitha's demons show up for a battle between Daniel, Andrew, and Taylor on one side and the two demons on the other.
  • The battle in front of the Ruined House with John and Angela. Like with the aforementioned chase involving Taylor and Daniel, it is a very intense and high paced scene as it shifts control back and forth between the two as they help each other escape from the demons of Amy and Joseph.
• Broken Base: The ending has split players into three groups: The people who found the ending a moving and satisfying conclusion to the game; the people who liked the game but didn't care for the ending; and the people whose experience of the rest of the game was ruined by the ending.
• Captain Obvious Reveal: Simon Carver being the true Big Bad would be shocking...if he wasn't ridiculously and cartoonishly evil. It's obvious from the start he's a scumbag, despite the game trying to make you wonder if it's him or Mary.
• Contested Sequel: Some consider the game to be an improvement over Man of Medan, pointing to the tighter, more focused story and gameplay improvements, as well as the less-cliched characters. Others have called the game a downgrade over its predecessor, claiming that the characters are less interesting and that the Twist Ending is just the same one from Man of Medan except done worse.
• Esoteric Happy Ending: Even if the player gets the best ending where everyone made it to the diner scene, there's a strong probability that Anthony might end up getting fired given that his boss and/or company won't be happy to hear that he crashed and wrecked the bus he was driving.
• Fan-Disliked Explanation: Quite a few fans disliked the "it was all in Anthony's head" explanation that the game gave. Many fans preferred the quite common theory that the protagonists were trapped in some sort of time loop caused by Reverend Carver, and that they would keep getting reincarnated over and over and dying the same way unless they found a way to break the loop and free themselves.
• Fan Nickname: Yahtzee of Zero Punctuation would often call the game Five Abrasive Dipshits Who Never Shut the Fuck Up... Hill (after Silent Hill).
• It's the Same, Now It Sucks!: A lot of criticism of The Dark Pictures Anthology as a whole now centers around the fact that both Man of Medan and Little Hope have the same basic twist: that the characters are just hallucinating the supernatural elements. It plays out quite differently in both games and opinions are divided on which story did it better, but the fact that they both boil down to the same core concept has left some players less than impressed, especially since there are six planned games left in the series that might now be expected to follow suit.
• Narm:
  • While the house fire in the prologue is genuinely horrific, Tanya's death is so contrived it almost robs the scene of all its gravitas. She's "trapped" on the balcony outside her house - a balcony that's barely on the second floor. Even if she flat-out jumped from there, she wouldn't be at much risk of even breaking her legs, but instead of just dropping down off the edge, she'll either crawl back into the burning house or try to shimmy down the drainpipe and somehow have her neck be instantly snapped by her scarf, depending on the player's choices, and either death is pretty ridiculous.
  • Reverend Carver. Who is so over the top evil that his scenes can be hard to take seriously without snickering at his obvious evilness.
• Nightmare Fuel: The deaths of almost the entire Clarke family in only the span of a few minutes. In detail, James is crushed under a collapsed ceiling, his body broken. Anne dies of smoke inhalation locked in the bathroom, coughing up blood. Megan burns to death. Tanya either goes back inside the house and burns to death or tries to climb down the water pipe outside, being hung when her scarf gets caught on the railing. Dennis attempts to climb from the attic to the balcony, slips and is impaled on a spiked fence. And Anthony can do nothing but watch the entire time.
• Porting Disaster: The game's controls are clearly designed for a controller rather than a keyboard and mouse. While it's still playable, it's definitely not intuitive.
• Realism-Induced Horror: While there is foreshadowing that supernatural elements may have been the reason behind it, the game's first scene that has the horror level at its most intense is when Anthony discovers that his house is on fire with the rest of his family trapped inside. What's worse is that he's the one to survive while everyone else dies a cruel death (being crushed by flaming debris, inhaling too much smoke, getting completely burned and fatally falling from a tall height while trying to climb to safety).
  • Also, the extremely heavy implications that Megan was being molested by a priest are likely to be more disturbing than anything else in the game.
• Writers Cannot Do Math: A possible case. According to the ages given for them in the prologue and present-day character intros, Anthony would be 66 in 2020, while Vince, assuming he's roughly Tanya's age, would be around 70. Their present-day character models are middle-aged in appearance but not exactly elderly looking, and given the lives they've lived it seems highly unlikely that they'd both be Older Than They Look by this stage.
  • The inverse is true of Angela and Anne, who use an elderly-looking character model but whose shared age is given as just 48, making them a case of Younger Than They Look. This suggests that perhaps the character models were finalised before the characters' ages were settled on.^note Angela was de-aged from 53 to 48 relatively late in production, for example.