The Dark Pictures Album: Trivial Hope gives me a little hope for the future of Supermassive Games' horror serial. Some smart gameplay tweaks ensure that Lilliputian Promise still highlights Supermassive's vital part in the modern take chances space, but it also highlights why the studio'due south future games need to be better than this for those smart changes to actually smooth.

Little Hope, like its firsthand predecessor Homo of Medan, is a mashup of horror tropes and subgenres. It borrows iconography from The Blair Witch Project. It borrows its Puritan-era paranoia from The Witch (and Arthur Miller's not-horror play The Crucible). And its conceit, which finds a group of college students and their professor stranded in the wood after their bus crashes, hangs on a premise that will be familiar for fans of Stephen King's The Mist or John Carpenter's The Fog. Every bit the game progressed, I became increasingly skeptical that those threads would come together in a satisfying way. In the end, they don't, but I still had a good fourth dimension on the ride to that disappointing conclusion.

Little Hope begins with a flashback to the 1970s and a brief introduction to a troubled family of six. Dad is a heavy drinker. The older sister feels isolated and depressed. And, in a hint at the spiritual warfare that will boss much of Lilliputian Promise's second half, the younger sister has been held back repeatedly after church building to speak with the reverend. These glowing embers of drama before long blaze up into a literal raging fire when the younger sis leaves her doll on the stovetop. In the ensuing blaze, every fellow member of the family meets their grisly demise, save Will Poulter's Anthony, who helplessly watches on.

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Our focus soon shifts to another grouping--a professor, John, and 4 students, Andrew, Angela, Taylor, and Daniel--who are attempting to regain their bearings after a double-decker crash leaves them stranded in the woods. The bus driver responsible for the crash is missing, and the field-tripping group finds themselves surrounded past a mysterious fog that sends anyone who ventures into it dorsum in the direction they came. Each member of this group is a dead ringer for a member of the family from the game's opening. And, as the group ventures into the abased boondocks of Little Promise, they brainstorm to accept visions of earlier doppelgangers, former inhabitants of the town caught upwards in the lethal paranoia of 17th-century witch trials.

Despite the sprawling cast, you simply control the present-day versions of the characters. Every bit you do, you make dialogue decisions past pointing the needle of a compass at 1 of ii spoken options or the e'er-present pick to just be silent. Your choices affect the dynamics of character relationships and also cause changes to their personality traits.

Equally this story unfolds, information technology becomes increasingly clear that Little Hope'southward time-hopping ambitions impede its power to exercise much successful character work in the here and now. I have only vague ideas of who John, Angela, Taylor, Daniel, and Andrew are. In previous games, Supermassive has presented characters as well-acted archetypes, so allowed players to further ascertain their personalities within those boundaries--playing to or against type. Here, the types are and then ill-defined that it becomes difficult to even have an stance on what each character would or wouldn't do. In a bonus unlockable interview with Will Poulter, the actor described his grapheme as socially awkward. "I guess he was socially awkward," I idea. Simply, equally I thought dorsum through the game, I realized that impression came from a line where his character, in effect, told another character that he was socially awkward. There isn't nearly enough in the moment-to-moment character interactions to surface these details. As a result, Little Hope'south primal bandage don't feel like three-dimensional characters. Some of them aren't even successful archetypes.

Equally you explore, yous control your character's movement and flashlight beam every bit the photographic camera frames them in onetime-school Resident Evil-style angles. This is one of my favorite quirks of Supermassive design; it's one of the few studios in modernistic mainstream games carrying the torch for fixed camera horror. Merely the fact that much of Little Hope takes place on a lonely road means that Supermassive doesn't take as much room to play around with point of view. Most of the time, Piffling Promise employs what amounts to a slightly zoomed out third-person perspective, which feels like a missed opportunity given Supermassive'southward talent for shot composition.

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There are some positive changes, though. Fiddling Hope seems far more technically sound than Man of Medan, and the story handles Supermassive's trademark branching paths more than smoothly than e'er as a consequence. While Man of Medan noticeably hitched at times as information technology attempted to bring everything together and, presumably, cycle betwixt different versions of cutscenes depending on which members of your party were yet alive, Petty Hope feels like information technology'south telling one seamless story. Trivial Hope genuinely nails the feeling that everything that is happening is authored. For instance, in one scene that could play out with burgeoning couple Taylor and Daniel alone or with the pair accompanied past older nontraditional student Angela, Daniel says something to the event of, "We'll both become out of this, you'll see." It works as is when it'due south Daniel and Taylor solitary. But it becomes a character-edifice moment when Angela is present and, excluded from Daniel's "both," pointedly clears her throat. In this manner, Little Hope manages to utilize the constraints inherent to its flexible narrative to practise some practiced character work, even if that work is squandered in their overall development.

Additionally, the QTEs that define Supermassive's adrenaline-pumping approach to life-or-death action are at their all-time here. Instead of just popping up randomly, the timed button presses now appear commencement as a alert--smartly positioned on-screen to mirror the placement of the button on the controller--earlier you are required to press them. This doesn't remove the tension, simply it does requite y'all a better chance of succeeding without first spending multiple playthroughs learning the timing.

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The Traits system, nevertheless, pushes the other management. As you lot make decisions, the personality traits, like "Fearful" or "Reckless," are accentuated. If yous make enough decisions leaning in 1 direction, a padlock symbol will appear side by side to that trait in your character profile, indicating that that trait is now an unchangeable part of your personality. I can explain it now, but it took me 2 total playthroughs to empathise how this system works because none of this is explained upfront. This arrangement, which is opaque and not tutorialized, has major consequences late in the game. Just as you lot play, no context is given for the lock appearing next to the trait, and it's immensely frustrating to run into a graphic symbol'south fate tied to a arrangement the game didn't explain. Tying personality traits to a character's fate may make narrative sense, simply it'south presented in such a murky mode that it results in certain late-game character deaths that feel completely out of your hands. While the UI has been improved to its best iteration in Petty Hope, the Traits system ensures that shepherding your characters through the game is still a frustrating five-hour-long practice in trial-and-fault.

Still, despite its faults, Little Hope tin can't help but remind me of the reasons I dearest Supermassive'due south take on the modernistic narrative take chances game. The studio is masterful at producing tension through gameplay equally simple equally a well-timed push press, and Lilliputian Promise is a high-water mark for the studio's technical proficiency. While the story and character work are uncharacteristically lackluster, Petty Hope still manages to offering a solid foundation for Supermassive'south future.