After Man of Medan was somewhat underwhelming, I sorta shelved this title indefinitely and almost forgot the anthology was a thing. I'd buy my mum the games for Christmas each year and she'd say they were 'pretty good' or whatever, and I guess her opinion on this one just didn't sell me lol.

Flash forward a couple years, hot off the back of The Quarry I find myself remembering just how much I enjoy this type of game. The tension when making a decision, the gruesome deaths followed by "nooooo!"s, and the frequent cheating by hitting the pause button to linger on a question just a little longer.. I love it.

Admittedly, Little Hope started out a bit too slow for my liking, the prologue was pretty solid, but the whole unlikely-matchings group walking down foggy roads got quite tiresome. It picked up more as it went along and I found myself really enjoying it once the characters with "barely understandable" (Sheffield) accents made an appearance, but I'd be lying if I said that the ending was just a little bit.. lacking.

Now I didn't manage to get the true ending, so I'm sure I'm missing details as much as I should be, but the ending that I did get didn't do a particularly good job of tying up loose ends or answering many of the questions I had. This was unfortunately a pattern I found, with conversations or events often just sort of, moving on without showing you a proper conclusion. Characters being left alone somewhere only to appear suddenly later, it felt like parts of the game were missing even though my only death was at the climax.

If I had one major comment about why I think the game struggles to be consistent and hold up to the likes of Until Dawn and The Quarry, it's that there are just too many decisions in the first place. Some conversations are made up of 5 exchanged lines and you have to pick a response 3 times in process, it's too easy to misinterpret something or become inconsistent, which can actually have consequences if the characters' personality traits aren't strong enough. The traits thing is a really interesting idea and more choices makes sense for it, it's just a shame it fell a bit short for me.

Anyway, rambles aside, I'm glad I checked this out. It was by no means on the same level as Supermassive's mainline titles, but it definitely wasn't disappointing either. A step up from Man of Medan... Here's hoping House of Ashes is yet another step in the right direction!

Ecstasy of Gold

If this was the first one I would totally understand the clunkyness, but knowing that this came out after the critical darling that Until Dawn was, I can't help but wonder what was going on in the studio during the development, because the end result feels extremely amateurish from a narrative point. The game is honestly terrified of you not understanding what's painfully obvious, with characters and even the narrator of the game taking it's time to spell out for you every single second of the plot while making absolutely sure the "twists" are fully explained to you and your friends.

The one thing I can commend this game is the fact of how it absolutely feels like watching a B horror movie with friends, although I doubt they expected it to be a really bad B movie experience with friends shooting the shit. Even when understanding that the game wants for you to have fun while also playing with other people, it also has ZERO reactivity to anything you do. I played this alongside 4 other friends and by the end we were pretty sure nothing we actually did would change the plot in a meaningful way aside from maybe reducing the kill count. Every chapter is written in such a robotic way that you can clearly see what choices you made before made it ever so slightly different, with characters badly tacked on with zero dialogue or items you managed to bring but prove to be useless in the situation (or outright dropped by the character at the start or during a chase sequence).

Overall a pretty mediocre affair, saved by being unintenionally funny on a vc with 5 people and listening to some rapper singing about how he likes to get fucked in the ass.

Can't wait for Little Hope.

I always like the idea of these narrative driven games where you can make significant choices and alter the fates of certain characters but these Dark Pictures games are a bit dull. Horror lends itself well to anthologies and shorter stories but Man of Medan just feels very basic. A creepy abandoned ship is certainly a good setting for horror but I quickly grew tired of wandering down the same looking halls. Perhaps I'm misremembering Until Dawn but the level of interactivity in Man of Medan seems pretty limited. It's mostly just deciding between two dialogue options (three if you count "say nothing") and some wandering around and looking at notes with a quick time event thrown in here and there. It seems more built for a co-op experience which is cool but it's just not something I'm personally interested in. I didn't hate my time with it and getting four of the five characters killed maes me curious to dig into how to change certain outcomes.