Merry merry! It’s Christmas today and part of the fun is Christmas, for us anyway, is eating a big breakfast, knocking back a bottle of bubbly with a hint of orange juice and staying in your pajamas all day while fiddling with your presents. And when we want a change from all that fiddling we turn to our favorite friend, video games. This year we didn’t see any games under the tree but while browsing the eShop for sales we saw The Dark Pictures Anthology: Little Hope was on sale and not to disappoint Andy Williams who always reminds us that Christmas time brings “scary ghost stories” we decided today would be the perfect day to knock our way through this game.

Catrena and I really enjoy these games. It all started a some years ago when we played through Until Dawn with a few friends during Halloween time. The mixture of choose your own adventure, point-and-click and tense QTEs really do just tickle our fancy. Something great the DPA games do is allow you to divvy up the characters to a specific player. Since we’ve never played this one before we just went off gut and tried to choose people we thought looked interesting not knowing how and if they they’d be grouped up. Sometimes this can lead to one player getting stuck on a big run - say you chose three characters and then they get stuck together in one chapter and the game goes from one to the next to the last, player 1 will play through all three of those. I dont think this is a problem, even during intense moments because it makes those moments more intense; the stress compounds!

I liked this story! It takes place in rural Massachussetts and opens with a foster family complaining about one another. Soon it becomes clear that the youngest ain’t quite right. She’s so not alright that this beat crescendos with her purposefully setting the house on fire and as you try to control the main character to save everyone, I began to wonder if that would even be possible. The main character wakes up on the side of a bus after an accident with the family that just died crouched around him - all with different names - and it becomes clear nothing is as it seems.

Dec 26, 2025 / 5:41 pm

We pushed through the game all the way to the end yesterday and came out the other side a little wiser, more scared and super confused. The story is weird! It has a Final Destination meets Groundhogs Day set during The Scarlet Letter thing going on that I like. Buffalo likes a time loop story, that’s for sure. Later on through the game we realized that the first ending we got was the bad ending. Not the worst ending, because that involves some … light suicide, I guess is the best way to put it, but it was the one where we saved no one and got carted off the to the sanatorium in the back of a police cruiser. We have a specific way to get through one of these for the first time. The first play through is done blind; no looking up anything before hand, avoid all spoilers, complete media blackout. We want to make our decisions in the moment because we feel they were right. I’ll give an example. As you come to take control of the character Taylor, she and her professor John are standing over the injured Andrew and John barks some kind of order at Taylor, which I found rude. When the dialogue options came up I dove right into the venomous attacks on John because he was acting like a shit head and I did not appreciate that! Snap judgement! You can imagine that these first runs don’t go great, in fact we don’t ever get the good ending the first time.

A big complaint I had with this game is the way the Quick Time Events work. There are three distinct flavors of QTEs; the “hit this button when prompted” event, the ever-popular “press a button in time with the heartbeats” and finally “move the cursor until it lights up and press a button” to shoot or hit or throw. I think I’ve talked about this before but I like QTEs in games when they are used well and if Supermassive Games didn’t use them well I don’t think we’d have gone back so many times. This game is frustrating, though because when the heartbeat prompt comes on it just shows the button press alone “first” so if you’re quick you’ll hit that button first and fail immediately. Boo! Then the aiming mechanic is super frustrating because after the tutorial we couldn’t remember the button to press so we failed like 3 of these. Eventually we looked it up (ZR) and managed to get through the rest of them. These failures led to the death of 3 of our party members, Tanya, Daniel and Angela, in that order. By the time we got to the final set piece - which, in this game the set pieces are all almost just bombed out dilapidated colonial houses or the pathways that lead between those structures, sometimes the house is a factory or a bar or (most interestingly) a witch trial historical museum, it does start to feel a bit formulaic but by then you’re probably done anyway - back to that final set piece, this is where we lost our last party member and got carted away.

There is something going on in this game (in fact it’s in every Supermassive game so far) that I don’t really understand - you find little secret pictures or tarot cards or (in Little Hope) post cards and they will show you a premonition, something that could possibly come to pass. These are pre-defined and will show you something that happens somewhere in the storyline on some trajectory of events. I have never really figured out what to do with that information but occasionally when one of those events happens we point at the TV and say “oh hey that was that post card from that one time.” I’m either missing the point of these or there really isn’t much more to them. Sometimes they show you things that you’ve never seen exposing the fact that there is MORE to the game than you have had a chance to see, which is incentive to replay, I guess.

Final Thoughts

Now that we’ve finished the game twice we’re ready to call it, done. Earlier when I mentioned how we like to play these I walked us through the first time. After that all bets are off. Catrena has a memory like a steel trap but specifically for decisions we’ve made in past run throughs of adventure games. She’ll remember that we told Daniel to act aggressive and yell to “pull him up” 14 hours earlier. We rely on our memory, we’ll look things up, we’ll watch videos if necessary, and also retry specific chapters if things don’t go our way. Generally we do this because we aren’t trying to play these games 3, 4 or 5 times… there comes a terminal limit for me, with almost any game, the most time I’m willing to spend with it and with Supermassive games it seems to be 2 full play throughs. After that, we’re ready for something else! Little Hope doesn’t let you skip cutscenes which helps in causing playing fatigue.

After some trial and error trying to keep Daniel from dying (that was all my bad) we managed to get through the game for the second time, and kept everyone alive. The story is pretty good, though it ends up being an allegory for trauma just like seemingly everything these days (which is either an indictment about the way we treat mental health in this country or because everyone’s being lazy… or both), but also crossed with a pretty fun supernatural witch trial that spans multi-generations. The characters are all generally likable which can be the crucial element to a game like this - if I don’t like them or respect them or at least find them entertaining, I don’t want to keep them alive! In the end, we’re both happy we chose to play this, though it didn’t really add to the Christmas spirit of things outside of being “a scary ghost story” but there were much worse ghost stories to be had! Oh and a quick aside, we played this on Switch 2, but it was a Switch 1 port, which is why all the screenshots look like this. It took us a a minute to get used to the graphics, which were not great, but it ran well and never crashed. Score!

After we wrapped up the last run we looked up what the best, good and bad endings were. This left us with more questions because as entertaining as the story was, there were some serious plot points that seemingly were left by the wayside. For instance at one point the little girl is shown standing with a demon, which we had assumed was the influence of the reverend from the 1600s, but that never came to pass with no explanation. Was the reverend doing something nefarious with the little girl, is that why he guided her to make the accusations? Was she just an evil brat? There were plenty of questions that we had and apparently, replaying the game more wouldn’t have answered them. Still an enjoyable way to spend a few pajama days. If you long for an adventure game that will give you a fright and get that heart rate going you could do worse than with Little Hope.