Warning: Heavy spoilers for The Dark Pictures Anthology: Little Hope
Ever since The Dark Pictures Anthology: Little Hope came out in October 2020, it’s received harsh criticism from gamers and reviewers alike. Most of the complaints I observed revolved around the speed of the quicktime events, the ineffective nature of the multiplayer mode (in contrast to Man of Medan), and most of all the narrative’s ending.
The main argument I’ve seen is that the ending negates the player’s choices and ultimately their investment in the narrative at large. Essentially “nothing you do matters, and nothing in the game actually happened” because it was “all in the protagonist’s head.” While this argument has some legitimate concerns, I’m concerned by the lack of nuance here. I’m worried that if this is how we ultimately interpret games like Little Hope, we’re throwing out the baby with the bathwater. While there are certainly a lot of problems with Little Hope, there are also many things it does incredibly well--and I think it’s worth our time to examine both.
I Can’t Stop Thinking About this Game
Some reviewers call Little Hope “a waste of time.” I have to strongly disagree. As someone who has followed Supermassive Games’ titles for a while, I find that they tend to have an interesting hook, and much potential, but ultimately leave me dissatisfied for them not reaching their full potential. Little Hope is not different in this way, except that I have never felt as passionate and engaged with their other titles since Until Dawn. Man of Medan left me bored, The Impatient disappointed, but Little Hope got my husband and I analyzing it for hours afterwards, coming up with arguments for how to interpret the game and evidence to support our claims. I found the last few minutes of the story redeemed what I was starting to find to be a repetitive, frustrating experience. My husband and I fell into a lengthy discussion and analysis after reaching the ending, passionately making arguments with evidence from the game, trying to interpret what it all meant. That, to me, is the indication of a great success. We cared enough to analyze, as well as critique. We saw enough that was good and interesting to keep talking and picking it apart.
I’ll be the first to admit that this game has a lot of problems. Little Hope fails with choice—the choices rarely feel like actual choices with consequences, and the endings lack enough diversity to feel like your choices ultimately matter. The game leans so heavily on red herrings that it invalidated some good and interesting clues, and leaves much unnecessary confusion. A story can have red herrings without spending 80% of its time on them. The quicktime scenes lack urgency (perhaps because they felt so repetitive). The narrative is incredibly repetitive (argue, go into an abandoned building, encounter a scene, run out, run away from a monster, repeat), not to mention obtuse and inconsistent, no matter how you interpret it. The game feels slow as there’s a lack of progression in action, and an aimlessness with the lack of stakes. We are limited to Anthony’s POV for the vast majority of the game, which prevents us from getting objective perspective (unlike Man of Medan, where we could see unreliable narration when we went to a new character POV). I found the characters incredibly unlikable and annoying. So with all of this not working effectively, why do I care so much about this game?
In short, it’s the place: Little Hope. Little Hope is the character I care about. I want to know what happened to this town, what went wrong. I want to know more about Mary and Megan, the girls who seem to be almost physical embodiments of the town. I want to know more about Anthony, who cannot let go of this town. While the narrative has some bad holes, it also has some good holes, leaving lingering questions and spaces for my imagination to connect the dots. Little Hope haunts me because it gives my brain lots to chew on. If it was up to me, I’d forget the monsters, and just wander around Little Hope to keep picking up objects.
What If It Was Just a Walking Simulator?
I would argue that Little Hope would’ve been a more successful game if it embraced its exploratory moments to become more of a psychological thriller walking simulator. Where this game is most strong is in its interesting premise, interweaving of multiple timelines, and its rooting in the psychological and human. If it wanted to be more like Until Dawn, there had to be more significant and meaningful choices, more narrative momentum, and more emotional investment in the immediate. I cared more about the mystery, putting the pieces together of what happened in this town decades and centuries ago, than if I was attacked by a monster, which tells me this game was more walking simulator and literary than horror quicktime.
Honestly, this is what I’ve found strongest in Supermassive’s other games as well. When I think of Until Dawn, I’m haunted by the journal entries of a girl slowly turning into a monster. The only reason I kept going in Man of Medan was because of the history and objects from the past—the characters and plot certainly weren’t keeping me there. What this studio needs to realize is that their strength lies in interesting premises and environmental storytelling. These games’ settings are the biggest threats—as players, we’re trapped in detailed, interesting sanatoriums, ghost towns, and abandoned ships. The tension and engagement for me as a player is in the looming environment: what has happened here? What might happen if I stay here? I’d love to see Supermassive Games play into these strengths, and stick to what they do well instead of overcomplicating and overstuffing their narratives.
Does Any of It Really Matter?
I would disagree with many of the comments that I’ve read that say “none of it matters” or “none of it was real.” We are grounded in a physical place: Little Hope. The game, to the very end, indicates that Anthony was physically wandering through Little Hope, which means at least some--if not most everything--he sees is real. The game gives physical evidence that Reverend Carver was real and hated by the town. The museum gives evidence that the witch trials happened. We get physical evidence of Anthony’s life, as well as his family’s and Vincent’s. We see Vincent also coexist with him in many of these spaces. Because of this, I believe we can take most of the environmental storytelling as real.
Supermassive Games puts an incredible amount of detail into and focus on their environmental storytelling and lore. The objects tell intricate backstories, with Little Hope’s arguably being the most complex thus far of any of their games, having main timelines from the witch trial days, the 70s, and the present. Why all this convolution and detail if none of it has any meaning? It doesn’t make sense that so much time would be spent on these details if they have no meaning. Instead, we may have to rethink how we extrapolate meaning from this experience. Just because it isn’t all literal doesn’t mean there is no meaning.
Clearly the narrative mattered to our protagonist Anthony. Even if not every element of the narrative can be taken at literal face-value, there is an emotional trueness to what happens. The monsters of guilt haunt him. Mary haunts him. Little Hope haunts him. While the characters in the 2020 timeline may not “literally” be real they have an emotional realness to Anthony. Everything in this game happened, but it happened internally instead of externally. There was real tension between Anthony and his guilt, anger and other underlying emotions about his family members’ deaths. There was real tension between Anthony and his environment of Little Hope. And there was certainly real tension between Anthony and Vincent.
Ultimately, the experience of the game mattered to me. It was real to me. Not literally and physically, but emotionally and psychologically. It’s this emotional journey Anthony has with his past relationships and hometown that lies at the heart of this game. This is easily forgotten because the game preoccupies itself in so much of what it’s NOT: black magic, bickering students, monsters that are trying to impale or strangle you.
Lack of Focus
The biggest problem to me with Little Hope is lack of focus. it’s trying to do too many things and in the process contradicts itself. Polygon’s review of the game summarizes my biggest question so well in this quote: “Because of these weird discrepancies, the intro ends up being the perfect example of the problem with Little Hope. Is this the story of a man coming to terms with the fact that his little sister was victimized in the past, and learning to forgive her and himself for the house fire that killed her and their family? If so, why are we going through a schlocky romp with screamy jump scares and freaky demons?”
I love so much about Little Hope, yet I was left wondering why we had the witch trials in the first place. This takes up so much real estate in the game, but if the whole experience was really all in Anthony’s head, you could remove this whole bit and nothing would change. When this happens in a story, you cut those details. You focus. My husband and I wondered if this was all a big metaphor—that by seeing Mary victimized as a Puritan girl and trying to save her, Anthony could reconcile with his guilt over losing Megan. If that’s the case, the execution is not enough to make it compelling or clear. Why have a metaphor for a girl when you also have a ghost of the girl running around? What is the necessity in having both?
It seems like Supermassive Games included digital comics to try to clarify their narrative. While the comics reveal even more plot holes and inconsistencies with the game, they also add some interesting perspective on the game. The comic is in two parts: one in Anthony’s point of view, and the other in Reverend Carver’s. This form connects these two characters in a new and surprising way: we see both of them as people haunted by the ghosts of guilt. Reverend Carver deserves the haunting, while Anthony doesn’t. It seems that the comics are trying to tell us that Anthony and Reverend Carver are both critical characters whose narratives demand equal attention--that we should long for Anthony’s healing, and Carver’s punishment. Yet Carver is fully removed from the ending, and as soon as we discover that the events in this game were in Anthony’s head, the other characters vanish, from the Puritan timeline, 70s and present--what then are we supposed to make of all those pasts? What is the game trying to tell us? A comment on the comics by firecat88 sums it up very well though: “These comics really show how much Little Hope comes across as a game that tried to tell two different stories at the same time and didn't fully connect the dots along the way.”
In short, Supermassive Games would make stronger games if they invested more in their writing. This game feels to me like a really solid rough draft that I would’ve loved to workshop before seeing it fully developed then released. I wish game studios would invest in hiring solid writers with backgrounds in linear storytelling, as I think their perspective would help tighten and focus game writing and make games like Little Hope shine. It’s a shame when you can see the promise, but the final product doesn’t live up to its potential. Perhaps that’s the most honest answer to why I can’t stop thinking about this game; my imagination keeps rewriting it, tightening it, playing with it to make it into the stronger story it should be.
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Meg Eden teaches creative writing at Anne Arundel Community College. She is the author of five poetry chapbooks, the novel "Post-High School Reality Quest” (2017), and the poetry collection “Drowning in the Floating World” (2020). She runs the Magfest MAGES Library blog, which posts accessible academic articles about video games (https://super.magfest.org/mages-blog). Find her online at www.megedenbooks.com or on Twitter at @ConfusedNarwhal.