Rishabh Borde
Ever since the original Telltale ‘The Walking Dead’ games, narrative-driven, dialogue-based adventure games with branching story paths and multiple endings have sharply risen in mainstream popularity, spawning numerous other games following the same gameplay formula.
One sub-genre that has always been uniquely suited to this style of game is interactive horror, something that was aptly demonstrated by Supermassive games with the 2015 PlayStation exclusive ‘Until Dawn’. Inspired by their success with ‘Until Dawn’ and wanting to further explore and enhance the genre, the studio released a game titled ‘The Dark Pictures Anthology: Man of Medan’ in August 2019.
The series is planned as an anthology of eight unique games, with the studio planning to release two games per year until the series wraps up. With the second planned game titled ‘The Dark Pictures Anthology: Little Hope’, set to release very soon, read on to find out everything we know about ‘The Dark Pictures Anthology’ and its upcoming second installment.
The Dark Pictures Anthology: Little Hope Gameplay: What to Expect?
The original ‘The Dark Pictures Anthology: Man of Medan’ is an interactive survival horror video game presented from a third-person perspective. You play as one of five different characters, switching between them at predetermined moments in the story.
The game presents you with numerous choices throughout the course of the story and players can choose from a three-branch dialogue system. You can either choose to go with your “head” or your “heart” or do nothing. The decisions you make affect your character’s moral compass, which in turn dictates the course of your interactions with other characters in the game.
The choices you make for each character also modify their personality traits, thus affecting their relationships with other characters as well as the potential dialogue options available to them. Based on your choices, all, some, or none of the main characters could end up surviving the game.
The gameplay is fairly basic and mostly consists of quick-time events and exploration of linear environments to collect items and uncover secrets. ‘The Dark Pictures Anthology: Man of Medan’ also features two unique multiplayer modes – Shared Story, which allows two players to play cooperatively online, controlling characters in the same or different environments, and Movie Night, which is a couch co-op mode allowing up to five players to choose different characters and take turns playing, as the game switches between characters.
In all likelihood, we can expect the upcoming ‘The Dark Pictures Anthology: Little Hope’ to retain a lot of the same gameplay mechanics introduced by its predecessor. However, what will be new is the cast of characters and the plotline. The franchise is an anthology series, which means that individual games will tell self-sufficient and contained stories with unique stories and characters, although they are all set within the same universe.
So this means that the seafaring and nautical themes of the original game, along with its primary cast of five characters will not be returning for the second game.
What little we do know about the story of ‘The Dark Pictures Anthology: Little Hope’ is understood from the game’s trailer, which showcases two people, Andrew and Angela running frantically through some woods in terror of a purported stalker. We also see a child called Mary dancing disconcertingly around a bonfire and showing the couple a creepy handmade doll.
The trailer ends with Angela being grabbed by a mysterious figure and a shot of a dilapidated sign saying “Welcome to Little Hope”. The developer has previously revealed that each game in ‘The Dark Pictures’ anthology will feature a different horror theme. While the first played with the theme of being trapped out at sea, this one seems to be going for the ‘small town in the middle of nowhere’ trope.
The Dark Pictures Anthology: Little Hope Developers: Who Are the People Behind the Game?
‘The Dark Pictures Anthology: Little Hope’ is being developed by Surrey-based British video game development studio Supermassive Games and published by Bandai Namco Entertainment. Supermassive Games is best known for the interactive horror game ‘Until Dawn’ and the interactive crime thriller ‘Hidden Agenda’.
Based on the trailer, we already know that ‘The Dark Pictures Anthology: Little Hope’ will star English actor Will Poulter (best known for the Netflix interactive movie ‘Bandersnatch’) as Andrew, Canadian actress Ellen David as Angela and English actor Pip Torrens (best known for Netflix’s ’The Crown’) as The Curator, the in-game narrator and omniscient keeper of stories.
The Dark Pictures Anthology: Little Hope Release Date: When and Where Can I Play It?
‘The Dark Pictures Anthology: Little Hope’ is set to be released on an as-yet-unspecified date sometime in 2020. Based on Supermassive Games’ plan to release two games in the anthology every year, we can expect ‘The Dark Pictures Anthology: Little Hope’ to release in the first half of 2020.
‘The Dark Pictures Anthology: Little Hope’ will be available to play on a number of platforms including PC (Microsoft Windows), PlayStation 4 and Xbox One.
The Dark Pictures Anthology: Little Hope Trailer:
You can watch the trailer for ‘The Dark Pictures Anthology: Little Hope’ right here.
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