Trapped and isolated in the abandoned town of Little Hope, 4 college students and their teacher must escape the nightmarish apparitions that relentlessly pursue them through an impenetrable fog.

You play as five survivors—Andrew, Angela, Taylor, Daniel, and Professor John—who get stranded in the seemingly abandoned town of Little Hope after a bus accident. The town is eerily quiet and full of foreboding. As they try to escape, they begin experiencing hallucinations and visions that blur the line between the present and the past.

The Dark Pictures Anthology: Little Hope is an interactive drama survival horror game with strong paranormal elements, played from a third-person perspective with fixed camera angles. Movement uses tank-style controls, making navigation feel heavy. You control five different characters, solo or in multiplayer, and between chapters encounter the Curator, a mysterious figure who offers cryptic commentary and optional hints. The game encourages multiple playthroughs, as choices affect character outcomes, branching scenarios, and endings.

Choices & Repercussions
The game features five playable protagonists and a branching narrative shaped by player choices. Many decisions can dramatically alter the plot, and any protagonist can die permanently, allowing for all to survive or some—or all—to perish. Each character has many possible deaths.

You choose based on a character’s ‘head’ or ‘heart,’ or can opt to do nothing. Choices occur during interactions or situations, with consequences that may be immediate or emerge later in the story.

Traits and Relationships
Choices also shape characters’ traits and relationships. Traits can change, appear, or vanish based on your decisions, impacting dialogue and cutscenes. Example: a character who begins as a coward can become courageous through consistently brave choices, influencing both their actions and how others see them.

Keep Calm
Keep Calm segments occur when a character needs to stay hidden. You must press the right button in rhythm with on-screen heartbeats—mistiming it alerts enemies. Failure can lead to anything from losing an item to a character’s death. Difficulty affects the speed, button count, and timing, but the number of segments is always fixed.

QTEs
Action relies mostly on QTEs—on-screen prompts during tense moments where mistiming can lead to injury, capture, or death. Some sequences also use button-mashing to push objects, escape holds, or fight back. These mechanics keep encounters tense and high-stakes.

Co-op
Following the success of Until Dawn’s streaming and co-op play, Supermassive added two multiplayer modes: Shared Story, where two players play online together, and Movie Night, where up to five players pass the controller and control different characters.

The game is set in Little Hope, a small, rural New England town with a long, dark history tied to 17th-century witch trials. By the time the game takes place, it’s largely abandoned and covered in fog, giving it a deserted, haunting feel. You explore derelict buildings, diners, streets, a school, police station, store, graveyard, forest paths, and more.

While exploring, players can find collectibles that expand the story and reveal what happened in the environment before their arrival. One type is Pictures (Dark Pictures), artworks that reveal possible future events when viewed by a character. There are 13 in total: six white, six black, and one gold. Black frames show how a character dies or scenes where they can die, white frames show dangerous situations you should avoid, good choices, or the outcome of making good choices, and the gold frame teases the next game.

Little Hope is very dark, using dimly lit lighting and shifting shadows to create a creepy atmosphere. The atmosphere is great and eerie. Classic jump scares abound: loud noises, lunging apparitions, or environmental bursts, often punctuated by musical stings. A core theme is not trusting your eyes—characters and players encounter grotesque demons that may be hallucinations and visions of the past. The fear of losing characters is a scare in itself, as deaths can happen abruptly from missed QTEs or poor choices, creating sudden, permanent loss.

The graphics aren’t the best, but they’re decent—just good enough to carry the atmosphere. Facial expressions can feel a little stiff at times, which weakens the immersion.

Almost the entire game takes place in the town of Little Hope at night. Fog, shadows, and darkness obscure vision, heighten suspense, and direct player attention. Five grotesque demons—resurrected corpses of the protagonists’ 1692 doppelgangers—hunt the players, each with a distinct appearance reflecting the circumstances of their death.

The town is filled with constant ambient sounds—creaking wood, distant whispers, wind, and sudden bangs—while the demons add agonized wails, moans, and breathless groans.

“Heartbeat” sequences are tied to sound — the muffled boom of your pulse in sync with button prompts. Missing the rhythm often comes with a sharp audio sting to amplify panic.

The voice acting is solid overall—convincing enough to carry the story, and better than Man of Medan.

The tank controls feel awkward and clunky, and the fixed camera angles often make navigation more frustrating than tense. That said, since movement isn’t a big focus of the gameplay, this ends up being more of a minor annoyance than a major flaw.

Most of the scares rely on cheap jump scares, often involving objects or situations that pose no real threat. As a result, many moments feel predictable and fail to deliver genuine fear. Every flashback begins with a jump scare of the little girl grabbing a character’s arm, which grows tedious after occurring more than ten times. Overall, the jump scares in this game are even worse than those in Man of Medan.

Backtracking isn’t possible: once a cutscene triggers, the game auto-saves, and reloading resumes from that point. Forks in the path can make exploration tricky. If you take the ‘correct’ route first, you’ll miss valuable collectibles in the other direction. The only way to revisit areas is to replay an entire chapter. While this design prevents players from easily undoing character deaths, it makes exploration feel restrictive.

The story starts off intriguing but is completely undermined by the ending. Once it’s revealed that the entire game takes place in Andrew’s head, much of the investment in the five characters feels pointless—four of them aren’t even real. The game gives the illusion of choice—what’s the point of saving characters that don’t exist? The pacing is uneven and slow for most of the game, with the final sections feeling rushed. The ending is abrupt: five demons approach the house, then it suddenly turns to daylight and the game ends, leaving the conclusion unsatisfying.

Another weak point is the scenes where characters are split up and away from Andrew. Since the entire game takes place in his head, these moments make little sense—if Andrew isn’t present, nothing meaningful is happening.

I didn’t have high hopes after Man of Medan. While Little Hope improves on atmosphere, enemies, and to some extent its characters and acting, the ending drags the whole experience down for me, as nothing matters. That said, it’s more fun in co-op and works well for its short, roughly four-hour length. It’s an okay experience—worth a playthrough, then you can check out character deaths and alternate outcomes on YouTube.

gud gme

Good story/gameplay.