The Dark Pictures Anthology: Little Hope (2020)

Hi! So, I just found out i have Stage 4 colon cancer and my chances of living another 5 years are slim (but not impossible) So my Stepson and I (I'm 29 and he's 17) have a new goal of beating as much Co-op games as possible. Ill be logging our adventures here if that's ok. Our first game was Little Hope! we had a blast with this. These games our top tier co-op games (i still can't get over the weird face animations) and I'm glad I'm just now getting into them so there's a nice catalog for us. Next up is Gears of war 2 :) Oh and im very conflicted about what actually went down at little hope. I cant tell if its a good twist or a lazy twist lol

Putting this game in the Played category for now, even though we couldn't finish it. The most recent update seems to have broken the game, taking out certain features (can live with that) and introducing consistent crashes which sometimes corrupt your data. After reaching a crash we could not navigate around (other crashes we would replay the chapter and make a different choice and could get past it), we decided it's not worth continuing until it's patched. Bummer, too. This one was pretty cool!

This has some of the worst character writing I’ve encountered in a game. These characters oscillate wildly between seemingly sympathetic to one another all the way to what seems like disdain within the same breath. And none of these people’s motivations make any sense. Nothing about where they were going of their “field trip”, their relationships to each other nor any of their responses to what is happening around them makes a lick of sense. They also collectively seem incredibly uninformed about the word in general, i.e. they are a bunch of dummies.

After three corrupted saves on PS4, it took about 8 hours to actually finish a single playthrough. The art and cinematics are nice, but that's about it. The entire draw of Supermassive's games are based on a lie that the game overeagerly sells you - that your choices can meaningfully affect the outcome of the game. In Dark Pictures Anthology, they make the grift even more maddening with the pompous Curator character who occasionally interrupts to condescendingly suggest that every choice you are making is of dire importance and maybe you've already made the wrong ones. The truth is actually pretty simple, there are only two endings with any meaningful difference, and throughout the game you are only given a handful of choices that affect the outcome in any way. This has always been the case with Until Dawn, and with Man of Medan, but the disconnection between what the game tells you about how it works vs how it actually works has never been as blatantly apparent as it is here.