VeryMelon
Since: Jul, 2011
04/16/2023 00:00:00
Yeah agreed. Little Hope will always be the worst one of these games because when you get down to it there are no stakes. You aren\'t trying to free people trapped in a magic town, you aren\'t trying to save the soul of a little girl, you aren\'t defeating any sort of antagonist, but you sure are tricked into thinking you are!
Like you said, Man of Medan still had real dangers even if they weren\'t supernatural, and thus had real stakes involving the lives of the characters. Comparatively speaking, I don\'t care if Andrew goes to jail or not because I don\'t really get to know him and it\'s such a yawn of an ending anyway.
Leave a Comment:
Would've been great, if not for the ending
SPOILERS
for Little Hope
and Man of Medan
below!
Little Hope is an interesting and well-done game for 99% of its run, but the idiotic Cruel Twist Ending absolutely ruins the experience. What's worse, it's been done already in the previous game in the series, Man of Medan, and done way better.
In Man of Medan, a group of amauter divers pursued by Ruthless Modern Pirates are trapped on a decrepit military ship whose crew died under mysterious circumstances. They see strange things that hint at some supernatural evil, but all the "ghosts" are later revealed to be hallucinations caused by a chemical weapon that the ship had been transporting.
In Little Hope, a group of students and their teacher are stranded in an abandoned town after a bus crash. While they try to find a way out and search for the missing bus driver, they start seeing visions from the past and strange monsters start attacking them. When they finally get through this and escape the town, it's revealed that everything, absolutely everything in the game (aside from the prologue) was just a hallucination by the bus driver. And yes, this includes the player characters who, it turns out, never existed in the first place.
So what makes the twist in the first game good and makes this one absolutely terrible?
In Man of Medan, the twist merely changed one source of danger (evil ghosts) to another (hallucinogenic chemical weapon). Everything else remained the same. The ship was real, the pirates were real... And most importantly, the divers, the player characters that we spent the entire game getting to know and caring about were real. And since your actions in the game determine whether these characters live or die, saving them all gives the player a sense of accomplishment for achieving a happy ending.
In Little Hope, the characters that we got invested in and spent hours upon hours with, aren't real and were never real. The only character who does exist is the bus driver, but we've only known him for a few minutes at most in the very beginning of the game (and by this time, likely forgotten about him entirely), so there's no reason to give a damn about him. And since the other characters are only his hallucinations, there's no reason to care about them either.
That's the why I consider the ending to be the absolute worst part of this game: it completely destroys any reason to care about these characters and renders any sense of accomplishment from beating the game moot. Your actions accomplished nothing, because nothing was ever real.