The Supermassive Games development team returns a year after presenting the first episode of the horror game series The Dark Pictures Anthology to present to us the second episode entitled Little Hope and we return after our experience of the first episode to try this episode and learn about the improvements it made about the previous part and its story in general, to present you this review.
The story is separate from the first episode and does not require familiarity with its details. It begins with a bus turning away from the road suddenly, which led to its overturning and exposing its passengers, including university students and their teacher, to some bruises and injuries. It is called Little Hope, and with the spread of the thick fog that mysteriously returns you to the starting point, you find no solution except to go forward to the town and here the events become interesting as you are suddenly drawn into the past, specifically to the end of the seventeenth century, in which people were tried and executed on charges of sorcery with the emergence Clear similarities between characters you meet in the past and those you play with in the present.
The general idea of the story is interesting, with its ambiguity and similarities between the present and the past in some circumstances, and it even presents some surprises here and there, but the defect is in the details, the dialogues between the characters are very superficial and many of the interaction options between them are illogical and strange as the characters lose Her identity is sometimes like moving inanimate objects most of the time, but she suddenly becomes angry or finds that the time is right for some humor, the system of relationships between characters returns again, so the dialogues build trust or distrust between the characters as well as develop a specific characteristic of those characters, such as courage or deception, but we did not We find among these traits no fundamental influence on the dialogues or on the characters' behavior, such as the last version.
The graphics are good in general and the details of the characters are excellent, but the facial expressions and lip movements were static most of the time, which enhances your sense that these characters are inanimate objects without feelings, the melodies here are excellent and surpasses the last version as we found them appropriate and breathe some life into the clips in which you are chased or endangered The game offers Arabic translation of menus and texts, the translation is good in general, but unfortunately it was done using a small font and a type of font that is difficult to read, and with the absence of the option to modify the size of the texts at the present time, those who do not know English may suffer in understanding the events.
Like the last episode, the game is an interactive cinematic experience in which you search for clues and secrets in the environment before moving to the next environment and interact with the characters as we mentioned to determine the course of events. It is unfortunate that many of the game's decisions are illogical, and many scenes are full of fallacies and illogical matters. Which makes you feel that you are watching one of the bad horror movies, the previous episode, Man of Medan, was distinguished by its diversity in the output of events and the results that can be obtained, but when you re-experience Little Hope for the second time, we found that the diversity is less and there are many basic events that cannot be changed no matter what you do, which is frustrating A bit, the game is full of scenes that require a timely button press or QTE, and one of the good adjustments made by the development team is to add icons that tell you that you are about to start in one of these scenes, which prepares you for that scene.
If you want to go through the experience collectively, you have the same phases of the last version with the availability of the Movie Night option in which you choose each of the five characters and who will play with them to give the console to your companion who chose that character when the time comes, there is a common story phase that is still One of the features of the experience is that you are going through a part of the experience while another player is going through another part that takes place simultaneously so that your options affect each other, even though the impact is much less in this episode than the previous episode.
The end of the episode took about 4 and a half hours, due to our desire to review the various files and collect secrets, for us the value of re-experimenting in this episode is less than that in the previous episode. This episode was only twice due to the similarities we found, Little Hope presented an interesting story with its general idea, but the details of that story of dialogues and decisions that you have to make were superficial and full of fallacies and illogical choices in many cases. Enough past version errors.
Positives
- The story is exciting with its idea and its connection between the past and the present in mysterious ways - improving the QTE system to inform the player of his interest in these scenes - excellent melodies that evoke the right atmosphere for the experience.
Negatives
- Boring dialogues and characters are superficial, and many of the scenes and options are full of fallacies and illogical things - many of the choices and attributes that the characters acquire do not actually affect the course of events, which gives less value for replay.