Game #1101: The Dark Pictures Anthology - Little Hope

  Man of Medan done better.

 Well, I wasn't too keen on Man of Medan, but it seems like they finally got the hang of things with The Dark Pictures Anthology: Little Hope. It does a lot of things right, some thing even better than Until Dawn, however, it has one key issue....

 Well, first I will praise how they fixed the game. The framerate is super smooth and stable, character animations are much more fluid and faces emote more. Walking animations are still the stuff of nightmares but they move much faster now. The game as a whole doesn't feel as glitchy, however, some screen transitions pre-patch definitely are glitchy. Still, overall, it's clear that they had time to polish everything, so it doesn't feel like the game is about to fall apart every step you take.

 You are warned before a QTE comes, which is both good and bad, and you can change QTEs to a single button in the options menu. People that care about challenge will probably be very peeved about this, but considering this is more like a 'choose your own adventure' kind of deal... I actually welcome it, so you can fail the QTEs if you want to fail them, or get them right if you want to get them right, thus giving you more control over what happens, which, once again, in a game of this type I feel is the better choice.

 And now the key issue... This is a walking simulator kind of game, just like the previous one, so it lived and dies by its story. If I were to talk about this game in a vacuum, I'd say that I really liked the story, it wasn't super original, it wasn't super tight, but for a horror story-driven game I can play with a friend... I think it got the job done. I cared about the characters much more than I did with Man of Medan's, and while some plot devices are poorly explained or don't have a satisfying explanation.... I still think it was a better story. The problem is... the twist is very similar in nature to the one in Man of Medan. I can't go deeper into it without spoiling both games, but it was a very misguided move to follow up Man of Medan with this plot.

 I feel like Little Hope is every way a superior game than Man of Medan, and in some ways, it's even better than Until Dawn. However, they really screwed the pooch by having such a similar plot device, which will just leave a bad taste on every horror-media aficionado.

 7.0