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!
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!
Nancyfly
1 year ago