When I was a boy my dad taught me to play chess. Or at least, I think he did. My memories of these things are blurred by dread; they loom behind me like demons in fog, one QTE away from dragging me under. I’m not convinced my dad is any good at chess but he did have one gambit that always worked on me. Whenever I selected a piece he’d nod, lift an eyebrow and say something like “oh, so you’re doing that, are you?” Or he’d sit back, like Caesar regarding a supplicant from one of the meeker barbarian tribes, and ho-hum ominously to himself. After five minutes of this I’d be a quivering bundle of flight reflexes, klaxons howling inside my head as I peered owl-eyed at the board, paralysed by the thought of a million potential reversals. What can we learn from this? Well, firstly that my father is a monstrous bully and it is high time I returned, charged with the lifeforce of a thousand PC strategy games, to exact a humiliating vengeance. And secondly, that my dad is actually a Supermassive game in dressing gown and slippers.
The Dark Pictures Anthology: Little Hope reviewDeveloper: Supermassive Games Publisher: Bandai NamcoPlatform: Played on PS4Availability: Out October 30th on PS4, PC and Xbox One
Supermassive games love watching you squirm. If Amnesia is a snake wrapped around your neck then Little Hope – the second game in the Dark Pictures anthology – is a vulture drinking in your movements from afar, counting the seconds till you fall. The horror of these games doesn’t really lie with the apparitions that skulk half-seen in the foreground or lurch through the backdrops, never quite committing to attacking you till at long last, they do. It lies with the sense that the game is constantly taking your measure – that every little thing you do or say, every object you pick up or ignore is subject to a terrible accounting.
The Dark Pictures Anthology: Little Hope – Launch Trailer | PS4 Watch on YouTube
Little Hope puts you in charge of yet another group of bickering, Hollywood-acted lost souls thrown together by supernatural (or are they?) events. As you try to find your way out of the titular town, with its reassuring history of witch trials, you manage the tension between these ill-matched personalities, switching between them at preset intervals. It’s possible, as ever, for most of the cast to die without ending the story, and every choice you make is, or appears to be, a weight on the scale. Pick a dialogue option – a calming response to somebody’s angry outburst, say – and you’ll usually alter one character’s fondness for another while strengthening a trait such as “Witty” or “Irritable”. Relationships and traits affect the options available to you: should a trait be triggered too many times it’ll be locked into that character’s personality for good, possibly deciding their fate later on.
Some decisions jolt you more obviously between the rails of the underlying, multiple-ending plot. These are recorded by “Bearing” gauges which resemble astrolabes crammed into skulls by the grimmer variety of Brighton souvenir shop. The Bearing system will note, for instance, that you had dopey good boy Andrew keep a secret from the rest of the gang. It will note that you had Taylor, the obligatory bratty pretty girl, tell stuck-up professor John to bog off when he tried to give her a lecture. And it will always leave you in doubt about whether you’ve chosen correctly, though there are once again artefacts to find – the Dark Pictures of the title – that bestow ambiguous visions of the future.
The feeling is of having hundreds of tiny pins driven one by one into your flesh. Bearings, trait and relationship changes pop up continuously in top-left like phone spam from Hell. Did it matter that I gave the knife to him and not her? Did it matter what I did to the doll? Perhaps I shouldn’t have made her follow him onto the bridge and oh god, we’re going to die. We’re all going to die, somehow. Presiding over and personifying all these surveillance systems is the Curator, an impeccably English authorial persona who hangs around the murky library that is the anthology’s frame narrative, dispensing hints and gloating judgements during chapter breaks. “What could possibly tie all these souls together?” he wonders at you, waving a candlestick. How I hate the Curator. Bet he’s good at chess.