Recent reviews by Doctahfail

The game is spectacular, but I'll get to that later on in this review.

First off, I have not had a horror game with such an evocative set of characters before. You will find that in this game, no character is written poorly, they are all five unique personalities thrown into a set of circumstances that they do not, and can not, understand. Without spoiling anything, you are four college students and a professor on their way to a field trip related to your field in Creative Writing. Your bus crashes and from then on you are plagued with the need to locate your bus-driver, while also being stranded, given the totaled bus.

The game has almost everything, monster-design, good voice-acting, amazing looks and beautiful animation, triumphant showdowns, intuitive and impressive writing, as well as an extremely-talented cast of voice actors, for the most part. (Some lines are hit or miss, but the lines that are meant to hit home, do exactly that.)

Let's get to some categories, Story, Characters, Scare-Factor, Design, and Ending, to be exact.

Story (6/10): This game doesn't do the most original things as far as story-telling is concerned, sure, it pulls from a lot of other media and historical events to make it's point, but I never felt bored, or like anything they did was cliche or particularly unforgivable. I found myself leaning in when characters spoke and listened to what they had to say, which is a rarity for adventure games in the modern era. I would make decisions that benefited the story, and what would keep everyone alive, and as someone who enjoys feeling tricked by a narrative, personally, having 3 people die on my first playthrough near the end of the game was a real slap to the face. I tend to enjoy that in choice-based games, being able to brainstorm critically on what I could've done differently to save those characters. I consider it an above-average story.

Characters: Let's get onto the characters. Each character starts with a trait that could be considered their good trait, and bad traits. Your job, if you choose to hunt for achievements, is to raise these traits to the max with your choices, which isn't the hardest thing to do. Read your choices, use common sense, and pick the one that goes most hand-in-hand with the certain outcomes you want.

There are five playable characters in Little Hope, and each one you may max out either their positive, or negative traits, they are as follows, (at least as far as achievements are concerned.) Along with a short, spoiler-free synopsis of their character.

Andrew - The Unifier (6/10)
Positive: Compassionate
Negative: Detached

Andrew's a self-insert, for lack of a better term. He's definitely the blankest slate that you have to work with out of the entire cast, this is achieved from a writing point of view by making him an amnesiac from the bus-crash, given his obvious head wound post-accident. Regardless, he still manages to become his own character from the choices you make, there are still personality traits, or pieces of them that you may begin to put together like a puzzle, and that is my best way to describe Andrew, as a puzzle that you get to put together yourself. One of the better self-insert characters I've seen in a video game, at least in recent memory.

John - The Professor (8/10)
Positive: Rational
Negative: Overbearing

John is a man trying to do everything right in his position. You can relate to his desperation to be a decent leader and to look after his own. He isn't very agreeable in the beginning of the game, having quite a bit of a "My way or the highway" attitude after the bus-crash. If you are capable of putting yourself in his shoes, it makes it very easy to relate to the "I'm doing the best I can, given the circumstances."-attitude, but as with any character in the game, your job is to make them more likable by the end, and John is not hard to make likable, given your last few scenes outside with him. No spoilers, but he gets much better, as do all of the characters that you play as, moving on!

Angela - The Mature Student (9/10)
Positive: Understanding
Negative: Abrasive

Now, if you're like me, and you saw the promotional material, you confused Angela for John's wife as well. They are not married. Angela is merely a 48-year-old woman going back to college after not being there for quite some time, enrolling in John's creative-writing class. It slipped my mind completely that old people can go to college, too. Regardless, Angela wound up being my favorite character, and you learn just about everything you need to know from her first line in the game, which I won't spoil. Nevertheless, Angela can grow from a bitter old shrew into an understanding woman who knows the most about her environment and learns to cool her attitude a bit. Her story is... understandable, ironically. You learn to commiserate with her plight, and can understand why she was written the way she was when you listen to her speak. All in all, a very well-written character. Not to mention, Ellen David's performance as Angela was very impressive. The voice matches the character perfectly, in my eyes. I definitely felt the worst watching Angela die in my second playthrough. She was the only one to survive my first go-around.

Taylor- The Hothead (6/10)
Positive: Headstrong
Negative: Sensitive

Taylor reads to me as a confident, proud person, but deep down hides a lot of insecurities. You can definitely draw comparisons to her and Jessica from "Until Dawn", another Supermassive title, where proud bravado secretly yields itself to troubled insecurities. Taylor isn't hard to like, either, though she can seem loud and obnoxious at times, you commiserate with her plight to understand that which is happening around and to our main 5, and getting frustrated with herself when she simply cannot figure it out, as the world around you can defy rational logic. Taylor is stubborn, and to pop her achievement of "Headstrong Heroine", which is maxing out her Headstrong trait, you may have to make her appear more-so, but I never felt negatively toward her as a character.

Daniel - The Backbone (4/10)
Positive Trait: Amiable
Negative Trait: Sensitive

There isn't a lot to say about Daniel when it comes to character, so I'll keep this brief. There isn't the most here, but he is kind, and a little goofy. A character that remains lighthearted through most of the game, if you can keep him that way. It's very hard to say a lot of good things about a character whose biggest characteristic is that they're Amiable. Kindness isn't much for a primary personality-trait, though he hammers his redeeming traits home quite well.


Scare-Factor (5/10) - It is right down the middle for me on this. There is some atmospheric horror, and some beautiful cinematography to this game. Tight corridors and fixed camera-angles give you a sense of claustrophobia when playing, though most of the actual payoff in scares are jumpscare-related, if you're squeamish, some of the monsters are terrifying. And yes, I did say "monsters". Play the game to see what I mean. I do not feel negatively about the scares in this game, as some of them actually got me, though it pains me to admit.

Design (10/10) - The best thing this game has going for it are it's looks. It's absolutely gorgeous with it's rendering of characters, shadows, light, and special care to realistic motion-capture. Though this isn't anything new for Supermassive, it will still always be a mainstay to a good Supermassive game, to be able to catch every gross twitching facial muscle on a human being's expression. Incredible!

Ending (6/10) - The ending leaves some to be desired, as the game breaks the Cardinal Rule of what makes a good horror game. Your choices have impact, whether you know it or not. I would think about any ending you get from an abstract point of view. You might like it more.

Overall Score: (8/10) Good game! For only $30, it's well-worth it if you've got it lying around!