Little Hope

This review contains all the spoilers. All of them.

The second game in the Dark Pictures Anthology, the collection of short horror stories presented by a sinister entity called the Curator, Little Hope is a disappointing follow-up to the already mediocre Man of Medan, falling into the same narrative pitfalls that so marred the first game: it once again suffers from a deeply problematic ending that retroactively breaks the story, and from an overreliance on cheap jump scares that quickly overstay their welcome.

It all begins with a bus driver getting into an accident when he’s arriving at the town of Little Hope. Since it’s too dark inside the bus, we don’t see his passengers, but just hear them through a strange filter, as if the voices were coming from a distant memory. After the crash, we jump to Anthony, a boy living the worst night of his life as he watches a fire consume his house and his loved ones – a fire started by his little sister Megan, who may be in league with the devil. Then, we jump to the Curator – who is still effectively eerie, like a librarian version of Death – as he introduces the story and the concept of the game, where our choices supposedly “matter”. Then, we quickly move to a funeral, and then we’re finally back to the crash, but now following the passengers instead of the driver, who is missing. It’s a bumpy start, then.

It may be convoluted, but the setup here is at least interesting, for the passengers are Anthony’s family, the ones who died in the fire, who now appear to be all alive and well, except with different names and backstories: Anthony is now called Andrew, his sister Tanya is now called Taylor, and his drunk father is now their college Professor, John. Some of them, like Taylor, may even bear the signs of their death: if Taylor hangs herself during the fire, there will be a bruise on her neck here. This raises many questions, immediately framing the action in a more allegorical light: is this some kind of purgatory? Was the bus driver leading them to the beyond when a spirit caused the crash? Why does only Andrew seem to remember the fire? Everything is pushing us to pay more attention to the symbols behind the events than to the actual events themselves.

The setting, which draws huge inspiration from Silent Hill, helps to build this nightmarish atmosphere because few things seem tangible, concrete, and real in Little Hope. There’s a fog preventing the characters from leaving, pushing them further towards the town. The barely-lit roads they traverse seem endless, with fog or darkness always obscuring whatever lies ahead. Buildings are abandoned as well, for Little Hope is basically a ghost town, where it’s hard to find a living person. And when they finally come across one, there’s something off with their interaction, the conversation is too vague and weird as if they were all acting in a dream.

The characters themselves quickly bring up the possibility that they may be dead, but the story gets more complicated when they start to have glimpses of the past – witnessing more doubles of Anthony’s family, but now as Puritans living during the witch trials.

In other words, there are three layers to the narrative here. We have Anthony and the fire with his family, Andrew with the other bus passengers, and finally their Puritan counterparts in the past. They’re all connected, mirroring each other: if a character dies in a certain way at the witch trials, such as being crushed by rocks, their possible deaths on the other layers will follow the same motif. This starts to add tension to the story because when the characters notice the pattern, they realize it doesn’t bode well for their future each time they witness a flashback showing how their counterpart died.

But the connection between these layers is also the game’s biggest weakness. We’re dealing with an allegory with Little Hope, (the narrative whose elements are part of a cipher, meaning another thing altogether), so events are not to be taken in isolation, by themselves: the strength of this type of narrative usually lies in the connective tissue between its layers, on the symbols that arise from that connection, the hidden meaning behind the cipher. And the issue with Little Hope is that the symbols here simply… don’t make much sense.

We must start with the ending. True to the game’s aesthetic, we discover that everything we were witnessing wasn’t real: the monsters and most characters were all imaginary. But the rub lies in the details. The twist is that Anthony survived the fire, that he grew old and became the bus driver, who is now hallucinating the other characters after the crash, to come to terms with his loss. He’s imagining himself younger, at the age he had during the fire, and his family as the other passengers. He may even be imagining the witch trials as well, projecting his family into the events he read in a book after realizing it mirrored the central conflict he’s facing: he blames his sister Megan for the fire, just as the Puritans blamed a little girl named Mary for witchcraft.

The characters we control – the bus passengers – are imaginary versions of Anthony’s family, they’re products of his subconscious, but this reveal raises more questions than it answers. First, there’s the logistics of the situation: it’s one thing to accept that Anthony is imagining the bus passengers interacting with each other and the environment while he’s there, physically present in that same environment (the flashbacks after the reveal show precisely that, Anthony standing where the other characters were, doing their actions). But what exactly is happening when the group splits up and each goes their own way? Is he imagining one group and then the other or both at the same time? Which one does he imagine first and why? Is Anthony imagining the actual places they visit as well, the streets, the broken bridges, the cars, as if from memory? Even the newspaper articles they come across, and the many items they find, are they all a product of his imagination? Or are they the projection of a photographic memory that is never hinted at? And if nothing the characters are finding in the game is real, did Anthony really discover the truth about Megan in the end, or just imagine it?

The game’s structure is already beginning to crack, but let’s move to more important matters regarding the final twist. Such as the fact that Anthony is imagining his brother and sister – Tanya and Dennis – as a couple now – Taylor and Daniel – and a couple that wants to keep their relationship a secret. This should mean that Anthony saw some signs of nothing less than incestual desire between his siblings. However, this huge realization is never shown or hinted at during the initial sequence that culminates with the fire: the closer we get to this is Dennis complaining that Tanya is never around (which could very well be read as a sibling pissed off because they have to do all the work at home while the other can go out). In other words, Anthony’s siblings are a couple now… for apparently no reason.

And when we start to look at the Puritan versions of these characters, things get even more random. Tanya and Dennis, for example, are back to being brother and sister… for apparently no reason. Anthony’s father and mother are a couple in Puritan times but are not together as the passengers of the bus… for apparently no reason. Anthony himself is related to the other characters in the bus – Andrew is a student at the same University – but his Puritan version is just a concerned neighbor… for apparently no reason. Andrew remembers the fire but his Puritan counterpart doesn’t. And why the difference? Well…

The main problem with Little Hope is the lack of development. We can think of many different reasons for all these questions, but the fact that the story barely acknowledges they even exist stifles any in-depth discussion on the matter. The game doesn’t give us enough meat to chew on: the symbols that arise from the connective tissue in this allegory – such as the incest with the siblings – remain too loose to work. The story could have hinted more heavily that Tanya and Dennis harbored feelings for each other in secret but Anthony found out, and that due to the prejudices of their society, their Puritan versions must remain in silence despite still loving each other – the game could have showed their frustration and repressed desire, for example. But it doesn’t do any of that, so when we start to analyze the allegory in Little Hope, trying to understand what its many symbols might mean, we just discover that… there’s not a lot to go on.

The (possible) death scenes of the main characters are also deeply problematic, especially when viewed in hindsight. During some climatic moments in the game, Andrew’s friends are grabbed by monstrous versions of their Puritan selves and the only way that they can survive is surprising, to say the least: they must possess certain personality traits, which can be unlocked during conversations. When the monster grabs them, we can see those traits written in the creature’s eyes (something that immediately breaks immersion and takes us out of the experience) and if they are locked, the character dies.

Take John, for example, who is a version of Anthony’s alcoholic father: he’s a coward who likes to believe he’s a leader. He wants to take the reins in any situation and make big decisions but is quick to run at the first sign of danger. So, if during conversations we act the part and make him choose to be a leader, he dies. But if we make choices that turn John into someone a bit more humble, he may live… if we don’t fail some quick time events, that is.

But this already flawed system falls completely apart when we realize that John is not an actual character making these choices, but a figment of Anthony’s imagination. It’s Anthony who is choosing John’s answers and it’s Anthony who is deciding John’s fate based on the answers Anthony himself picked. He’s jury, judge, executioner… and victim.

And to add insult to injury, this also means that Anthony is blaming his family for their own deaths: if they had different personalities, got along better with each other, and were generally nicer people, they would have survived. It’s a startling conclusion that the game, true to form, doesn’t even acknowledge: Anthony is imagining his family dying as Puritans and then coming back as monsters to hunt and kill new versions of them unless they act in a way that pleases Anthony more. And all of this is the result of a last-minute twist that has absolutely no room to breathe.

And the issues with this ending don’t stop here either. Take the moment where John is offered a drink when they get to a bar, for example. If we refuse, the character grimaces to show how difficult the decision was, revealing how he has trouble with alcohol just like Anthony’s father: that they share not only the same body but the same vices. But the final twist robs this moment of the weight it had on John as a character, as there was never a John to begin with, the choice was Anthony’s alone, who was just projecting this random version of his father during the scene because of… thematic similarity, I guess.

Do choices really matter in Little Hope, as the Curator advertises? Let’s have a closer look at the most important one. The whole story hinges on a single question: are we going to side with the girl Mary at the witch trials or with the priest who is accusing her of witchcraft? First, there’s the matter that neither the girl nor the priest exists. This is a psychological decision at heart: is Anthony blaming Megan for the fire or whatever the priest represents?

Second, this being the main choice is a bit odd because it’s too obvious. The game paints the priest as malicious from the very start and suggests his relationship with the girl may even be sexually abusive. And if we are already encouraged to side with her by the framing of events, the narrative goes one step further and has the Curator, unprompted, warn us about judging Mary too hastily. The game is basically pointing with blinking red arrows that we should side with the girl… and then we discover that siding with her is the right choice. “That jerk of a priest was the real bad guy,” Taylor says, to absolutely no one’s surprise. It’s not exactly a twist, then, but the big questions here are: what happens if we indeed choose to side with Mary? What does the priest represent? And what’s the consequence of this final main choice, thematically and to the plot?

Thematically, siding with Mary means Anthony is forgiving his sister Megan for the fire. But only because now he’s blaming her teacher, who we discover is the real-life model for the priest (we see old photos of him in a classroom), and who supposedly abused Megan. So, in a way, Anthony is actually still blaming Megan for the fire: the change is that now he’s able to forgive her because he believes she started the fire not because she was in league with the devil, but because she was abused. She was a victim, instead of simply evil. But there’s no proof of the abuse, since the whole story takes place on Anthony’s head. And there’s no version of the priest as a passenger, which means there’s no way for Andrew to confront him directly – he can just accuse the priest in an imaginary flashback and that’s it. And Anthony, as the crazy bus driver, never goes to look for the teacher, either to confront him or to expose the truth to the public and clean his family’s name.

The fact that the character of the priest remains locked into the witch trials plotline – never physically appearing in any of the other two layers – and is still the “bad guy” means that the ending is nothing but anticlimactic. The consequence of siding with Mary/Megan is that Anthony has managed to find one more person to blame for the tragedy… and that’s it, since he does nothing with the “information”. And if he sides with the priest, he may die, committing suicide after being triggered by a jump scare of Megan – but only if he grabbed a firearm during the game. So, the answer to that question “if our choices matter” is… kind of.

Games such as Little Hope usually sell themselves with the promise of branching paths, but the hidden rub of this promise is that a path that branches is not interesting by itself, it’s what the branches mean to the overall story that really matters. In other words, the rub is that this promise can be a red herring, showing us multiple possibilities for each narrative event to distract us from realizing that each one of these possibilities is lackluster.

Finally, let’s talk about jump scares, for there are many of them here and they can become quite grating. Some of them are gratuitous, such as when you are exploring Anthony’s house before the fire: you enter a room and a clock makes a loud noise that is heightened by the sudden music. It feels cheap because it’s motivated by… no reason. The developers probably felt we needed a jolt of adrenaline to not get bored.

Sometimes, the game employs fixed camera angles to better frame the action and prepare us for one of these jump scares, such as showing a monster moving in the foreground as the characters remain clueless about its presence. These scenes are there as a reminder that monsters will eventually appear, so we should not worry that there’s nothing happening right now. The problem is that there are so many of them during the game’s first half that they end up achieving the opposite effect. If these scenes bore us instead of making us anxious about when the monsters will attack it’s because the repetition robs them of tension: there’s a breaking point where suspense turns into impatience, and we start to think “When will this finally happen” instead of dread the moment.

The game’s structure also works against some of these jump scares, making them repetitive. Each flashback to Puritan times, for example, is preceded by a ghost coming out of nowhere screaming and grabbing a character’s arm. Each one of these flashbacks is preceded by this same jump scare. Each one of them. And since there are a lot of them, the jump scares inevitably lose their goal: when loud noise becomes routine its effect turns from shocking to just annoying.

Stories like Little Hope live and die by how effectively their plot twist retroactively adds to the narrative told, but with Little Hope the twist doesn’t even subtract from the narrative, it divides it by zero, making the whole thing a big nonsensical question mark.

July 20, 2024.