The Dark Pictures Anthology: Little Hope (NSP, XCI) ROM

The Dark Pictures Anthology: Little Hope is a 2020 interactive drama and survival horror video game with psychological and folk horror elements developed by Supermassive Games and published by Bandai Namco Entertainment. The second installment in The Dark Pictures Anthology, Little Hope serves as the sequel to the anthology’s season premiere, Man of Medan. Will Poulter stars as the game’s leading actor and plays the role of one of the protagonists, named Andrew.

Set in the fictional eponymous town, located in Massachusetts, the game follows four college students chaperoned by their professor. After their bus crashes by the area, the group finds themselves trapped within Little Hope by an impenetrable fog. As they explore the deserted town, the characters are pursued by demons whose appearances are reminiscent of how the townspeople of Little Hope’s colonial era died.

Little Hope contains many decision-making scenes that dictate how the plot will progress and how the characters will develop over time. With these choices, which players make on behalf of the characters, any of the ensemble cast’s five playable protagonists can die permanently or survive the night. Quick-time events determine whether a protagonist will live through the very end.

To guide players in navigating the story, the game features a set of collectible items called “pictures” that give premonitions of what may happen later in the plot. The developer, Supermassive Games, decided to tackle the topic of witch trials for Little Hope’s story and explore the reasons why mass paranoia around witchcraft happened in the first place.

The game was released for PlayStation 4, Windows, and Xbox One on 30 October 2020 to mixed reviews. On 27 September 2022, the game was released on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S. A Nintendo Switch version was released on 5 October 2023. Another installment in the series, House of Ashes, was released in October 2021 and stars Ashley Tisdale.

GAMEPLAY

The Dark Pictures Anthology: Little Hope is a survival horror video game played from a third-person perspective in which the player assumes control of five characters who are trapped in the ghost town of Little Hope. The player needs to choose different dialogue options, which will influence the course of the narrative and the relationships between the protagonists.

The game can be played multiple times, as there are multiple endings and multiple scenarios based on the decisions that the players make. Depending on the choices of the players, some or all characters may or may not die by the end of the story. Action sequences mainly feature quick time events, most of which, if missed, can lead to dire consequences for each character. Similar to Man of Medan, the game features two multiplayer modes. “Shared Story” allows 2 players to play co-op online and “Movie Night” allows up to 5 players to select their characters and prompts them to pass the controller at each turn.

PLOT

Little Hope is presented as an unfinished story in the possession of the omnipresent Curator (Pip Torrens/Tony Pankhurst), who requests the player’s assistance in completing it.  In the present day, a bus driver is taking four students, Andrew (Will Poulter), Angela (Ellen David/Rachel Dobell), Taylor (Caitlyn Sponheimer/Eleni Miariti), and Daniel (Kyle Bailey/Jonathan Burteaux), and their professor, John (Alex Ivanovici/Sukesh Khosla), on a class trip, before crashing after being forced to take a detour through the ghost town of Little Hope.

The story then jumps back to a prologue set in 1972 regarding the Clark family: the parents, Anne (David/Dobell) and James (Ivanovici/Khosla), and their four adopted children, Anthony (Poulter), Tanya (Sponheimer/Miariti), Dennis (Bailey/Burteaux), and Megan (Ella Rose Coderre). Megan places her doll onto a stove lit by Anthony, starting a house fire where each of the family members dies except for Anthony, who runs back into the burning house as the prologue ends.

Back in the present, the group set off into Little Hope to search for help as the bus driver goes missing. They enter a bar to use a phone and encounter Vince (Kevin Hanchard/Winston Thomas), Tanya’s boyfriend at the time of the house fire, who reveals that there is no power. On the way up the road, Andrew and Angela find a doll and are dragged backward in time by a ghostly figure named Mary (Holly Smith).

The group all begin to collide with Mary and see flashbacks where Reverend Carver (David Smith/Leonardo Patane) is blackmailing Mary into helping him frame residents of Little Hope (doppelgängers of the present-day group) for witchcraft. Each member of the group except for Andrew witnesses their doppelgänger be executed before being attacked by a demonic version of them and either successfully fleeing or dying based on player choice.

Ultimately, the group ends up at the Clark family household and witnesses one final flashback where Carver has betrayed Mary and has her framed for witchcraft. Andrew can instruct his doppelgänger to either blame Carver and have him taken away, have Mary’s doll burned, or blame Mary and have her executed.

Returning to the present, Andrew is revealed to have been the bus driver, Anthony, who hallucinated the present-day group and the residents from the flashbacks as figures from his past, including his family, after being forced to return to Little Hope. Depending on his treatment towards Vince, whom he ultimately blamed, and whether he has a gun, Anthony will either be arrested, commit suicide, continue to blame himself for his family’s deaths or accept that the house fire was not his fault.