The Dark Pictures Anthology is a series of interactive horror dramas, each featuring a handful of characters. Players interact with the story through making choices that affect its outcome and which characters survive, reacting to quick time events, moving characters from scene to scene, and exploring the world to unlock additional details or outcomes. Little Hope is the second installment in the series. The latest installment is Directive 8020.
I’ve played Little Hope two and half times. The first was in Movie Night mode with a group of friends. In this co-op mode, two or more players select which characters they want to play as the start of the game and pass the controller accordingly as the story unfolds and the perspective character switches. We played Little Hope shortly after its release in 2020, so I can’t remember exactly, but during my most recent playthrough, I imagined we passed the controller quite a bit during a couple of the fight and chase scenes.
My second playthrough was on PS4. I played it while a friend watched, and we didn’t finish it. We attempted to leave the creepy building where a phone without a cord rang for our characters when the game crashed, and we couldn’t proceed any further. It turned out my PS4 had shut off while in the middle of downloading and installing the game. Still, Dark Pictures games have a reputation of being a little janky. My friend group and I have played them all and have never forgiven The Devil in Me for failing to show a quick time event prompt, resulting in the death of one of our characters. By the time I realized the problem with my Little Hope installation, the friend I was playing for and I had tried so many times to get past the problem doorway where the game crashed that we were wary of trying again.
Until about three years later. This time, I bought the game for PC. Steam didn’t fail me in downloading and installing it properly. The only strangeness is Dark Pictures games on Steam come with a “Friend’s Pass.” This is a second complete installation of the game that automatically downloads and installs alongside the main game installation. For a month after the games initially released, this version could somehow be used by a friend without the game to play with a friend who owned the game in online co-op mode for free. This promotional period expired years ago, but this non-functional addition continues to be included by default.
Still, my friend and I were able to play through the whole game this time. Unfortunately, I played most of it with mouse and keyboard controls. Until then, I’d played all Dark Pictures games on PlayStation. The mouse and keyboard experience is awful. I’d think the mouse would control the camera. It doesn’t. WSAD moved the characters as expected, but I had no control over the camera or flashlight. This frequently resulted in me walking aimlessly into a dark abyss or shin-high bushes I couldn’t see. I also killed Taylor accidently by failing to click exactly in a quick time prompt. By the way, Taylor looks like she has the same base character model as Eisele from Directive 8020. Taylor, however, is a bitch, and Eisele is merely a busybody. Both of them also look like me. O.O
Anyway, about three-fourths of the way into the game, I finally connected my PS5 controller to my PC and played the rest that way. Finally, I could move the camera and aim the flashlight! What a revelation! My friend and I will play House of Ashes on PC next, and needless to say, I will use a controller for the whole game.
Most of Little Hope’s story centers on a handful of creative writing students and their teacher determining if a creepy little girl is the source of evil happenings in the present town of Little Hope and in visions they all share, seemingly of a witch hunt in the distant past town of Little Hope. This distant past Little Hope mirrors a not so distant past Little Hope in which a creepy little girl apparently burned down her house, killing herself and her entire family except for one brother. Adding to the mystery, the present-day characters all have doppelgangers in the distant past and not so distant past versions of Little Hope.
It turns out all three stories take place from the perspective of the house fire survivor. The witch hunt and present day hallucinations represent him reconciling whether his little sister was responsible for the fire. It makes me wonder whether the distant past Little Hope was entirely fabricated or whether the protagonist saw fliers about the town’s witch hunts and proceeded to project his inner turmoil onto real-world people and events.
The story is intriguing and works for the most part. The characters have a tendency to swing wildly between proclaiming the little girl guilty and being uncertain about her though, perhaps because of the choices I made. I remembered from my first playthrough that my friends and I decided the little girl needed to be shown sympathy to get a decent ending, and I acted accordingly on my most recent playthrough. Apparently, forcing all the characters to sympathize with this little girl was the correct choice. One of the character’s Angela told me so, proclaiming the girl innocent and the town priest murderous, despite having little evidence to support such a conclusion. Sure, lady. Hilariously, I also had one of the characters John drink a glass of strong alcohol and then criticize the character who gave it to him not to drink so much.
It’s also kind of weird that the protagonist imagined his brother and sister as being in a relationship. O.o