The Dark Pictures Anthology: Little Hope

Review

“Four college students and their professor become stranded in the abandoned town of Little Hop. Trapped by an impenetrable fog they try desperately to escape whilst witnessing terrifying visons from the past. They must figure out the motivation of these apparitions before the evil forces at work drag each of their souls to hell.”

From the main menu you have two choices, to Play Alone or Don’t Play Alone. I had to Play Alone as my mummy wouldn’t hold my hand as I played the scary game. Your story begins by a Roadside Diner; it’s 9:42pm and a bus driver slowly walks back to his bus and sets off on his journey. The driver sets off into the night down a dark and gloomy road, fog envelopes all around making visibility poor. Further down the road, the driver is pulled over by a State Trooper as the road has been closed due to a big accident. However, the Trooper is diverting traffic through the village of Little Hope.

The passengers are chatting, and a female passenger points out that they’re going the wrong way after they enter Little Hope. A male passenger says it’s fine and to calm down; this distracts the driver, who takes his eye off the road while he asks them to keep it down. Upon turning back to the road, he notices a young girl standing in the middle of the road. This causes the driver to swerve so that he doesn’t hit the girl; the bus goes left and right across the road as the driver wrestles for control. Eventually the bus turns over on to its side and slides to a stop. Next, the scene shifts to a house, where there’s an argument going off between mummy and daddy. From here the game starts and you’ll start making decisions.

There are Five characters in the game who you’ll guide through the village of Little Hope; they are Andrew, Taylor, John, Angela and Daniel. You will guide your characters around by using gamepad or mouse; I did have trouble using gamepad (Wireless Xbox One) so I ended up just using the mouse. Using the mouse, you click on the position you want to move to, indicated by a pair of feet in a circle; a cross inside a circle indicates somewhere you are unable to move to.

As you move about your surroundings, anything of interest is indicated by a small glimmering light. As you move closer you will be able to examine the interest. These points of interest can be Clues, Secrets, Information or Exit Points (doors and windows). These may help you unravel what the hell is going on in Little Hope. Your group of characters will interact with each other and the decisions you make between each of them will affect your relationship with them. There will also be times when you will have a tough choice to make; who do you save first, do you run away and save yourself? Each of the character’s traits and bearings on the story will determine their actions and decisions.

In the settings you’ll find options for Audio & Language (Audio Pre-set, Home Cinema (?????), Master, Music, Dialogue and Sound Effects Volume Sliders, Sidebars, Subtitles), Text Language (English, French, Russian, German, Spanish, Arabic, Japanese, Brazilian Portugues, Italian, Korean and Chinese) and Audio Language (English, French, German, Italian, Spanish and Russian).

Display (Brightness, HDR and HDR Settings (unavailable if you don’t have a HDR monitor)), Graphics (Quality, Resolution, Screen Mode, V-Sync, AA Quality, SSAO, Texture Quality, Shadows, Depth of Field and Limit Framerate to 30 FPS).

Accessibility (Single Action Prompt, Hold Input to Complete Repeated Actions, Disable QTE Timeout, Dyslexia Font, Subtitle Text Size, Subtitle Colour, Choice Text Size and Sub-Choice Text Size), Controls (Keybindings, Mouse Sensitivity, Key Icons, Input Controls, Camera Aiming, Aiming, Exploration Movement and Inspect Object).

The story isn’t too bad, but I didn’t find it very scary which was a bonus really as my mummy wouldn’t hold my hand while playing the game. I found moving a character around at times to be a pain in the botty, especially when your character was at its closest position to you on the monitor. Also, for some of the actions you have to perform, like when trying to climb up a bank or jump over an obstacle, you would get an icon appear on the screen but there was no real indication of when to correctly hit the button to perfectly perform the required action.

I had troubles with stuttering at first and I have a PC more than capable of playing the game on maxed settings. I was running the game on Ultra settings with V-Sync turned off and the game set my resolution to 2715x1527. However, once I changed the resolution back to my monitor’s native resolution of 1920x1080, the stuttering stopped. I did have the game crash a couple times as well. The game does look good fully maxed out.

You can play the story with a friend online in Shared Story or you can play Movie Night with 2-5 friends locally playing by passing the gamepad. I haven’t tried playing with others, only solo, so I can’t comment on how playing with others would be.

Review written by Piston Smashed™ for Zeepond.com!