VideoGame A little hope for the future.
When Supermassive Games released Man of Medan as the first game in their new Dark Pictures Anthology, I found it to be a pretty good game, but lacking a bit compared to Until Dawn. However, the smaller budget and tighter schedule seems to be the reason for this. Nonetheless, I found the game to be pretty enjoyable. Special mention goes to the multiplayer Movie Night and Shared Story modes, which delivered on nearly all fronts(minus some lag and awkward transitions between players). When the next game in the anthology, Little Hope, was teased after the post-credits scene(s), I was excited and hoped that it would surpass Medan and fix some rough areas in the game’s story and gameplay.
When I finally got my hands on the game, I was impressed at how much had been fixed since Man of Medan. From the QTE warning prompts as opposed to appearing without warning(although, some may claim it’s now too easy), distinctly different button-mashing prompt instead of a slightly slowed version of the QTE prompt(a common way of losing a character in Man of Medan was confusion over the two), and smoother “Keep Calm” segments(occasionally, Medan’s “Keep Calm” segments would lag and lead to character deaths).
The story’s more supernatural feel and more focused plot helped push it past Man of Medan’s looser and less-focused story. This was helped by the more interesting characters of Andrew, John, Daniel, Taylor, and Angela. Who all seemed layered in a way, while Man of Medan’s characters felt more one-note and clichéd. The ending, however, was done better in Man of Medan. At least in my opinion.
Overall, a great game and a step up from Man of Medan. Let’s hope the next game teased in the anthology, House of Ashes, surpasses Little Hope and fixes its rough spots.
8/10
VideoGame 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.