If You Die Offscreen, You Die In Real Life.
Some more notes on Little Hope! I'm just past the church.
A recent patch for Little Hope took away the aiming indicator circle for visual consistency with House of Ashes, a later title in the anthology. This was a very bad decision! House of Ashes was presumably built from the start with the assumption that the player would know where to aim without an indicator; Little Hope was built with the assumption 'the player will be shown exactly where to aim by the UI'. You can't just remove the aiming indicator without making any other changes! 'Work out where to aim, then press R2' is a very different challenge from 'move to the clearly indicated spot and press R2' and cannot be done within the same time limit.
For a low-stakes example: for the aiming tutorial, you're playing darts. Your character declares he's going to aim for the triple 20. The dartboard is not close or well-lit enough for you to see it clearly. With the aiming markers, this wasn't a problem; the game just told you where you needed to aim! Without the markers, if you're not already familiar with a dartboard's layout, you will have no idea where the triple 20 is.
After failing an aiming challenge because I knew the game wanted me to kick the enemy but didn't know where, I ended up turning off QTE time limits. I'd just be very frustrated if I lost a character due to a badly implemented gameplay change rather than through any fault of my own.
(Fortunately, Angela survived my frantic flailing around! I was so sure for a moment that I'd lost her.)
I... don't actually know whether disabling QTE timeouts has worked, because the game still shows the time counting down. I suppose I'll find out eventually and be either relieved or horrified.
Of course I am not going to burn the doll. Having seen what happened in the prologue when a little girl was treated badly, I have a strong policy of being nice to all little girls. Besides, burning an effigy in a horror game generally doesn't seem like a great idea.
Pleased to report that I seem to have patched up Taylor and Daniel's relationship, after a rocky start. I really wasn't expecting to get a 'you maxed out Taylor and Daniel's relationship!' trophy when one of my first actions as Taylor was to declare that my boyfriend wasn't my boyfriend.
I'm weirdly delighted by the fact that Daniel sat on a bench while I-as-Taylor was looking at things. I was just expecting him to stand around waiting; the fact that he can sit down or lean against things is a nice little human detail!
Daniel catching his double in an effort to save him from falling was a really cool moment! He's not the most interesting character, maybe, but I'm warming to him a little; he's not as forgettable as I thought he would be at first.
Both Man of Medan and Little Hope have much less interesting characters than Until Dawn, but they're fascinating games regardless.
The demon designs are rad as hell and also horrifying and I never want to see any of them again. (Not yet having finished the game, I have a strong and unwelcome feeling that I will be seeing them again.)
I think Little Hope might be the scariest game I've ever played. Man of Medan was stressful, but Little Hope absolutely terrifies me. I've started physically shaking while I'm playing it. I don't know what it is about this game specifically that messes me up, but it is really messing me up.
Little Hope isn't a long game, but I'm progressing very slowly because I keep having to take breaks to calm down. Although, come to think of it, maybe that's part of the reason it's freaking me out so badly. I played all of Man of Medan in one go; maybe the problem is that I'm giving Little Hope time to build up suspense and give me nightmares between play sessions.
Well, it's too late now; the suspense is built up and the nightmares are happening. I'm just going to have to push through it.
(It's very possible Until Dawn would take the 'scariest game' crown if I hadn't watched it played repeatedly before I first played it myself.)
A recent patch for Little Hope took away the aiming indicator circle for visual consistency with House of Ashes, a later title in the anthology. This was a very bad decision! House of Ashes was presumably built from the start with the assumption that the player would know where to aim without an indicator; Little Hope was built with the assumption 'the player will be shown exactly where to aim by the UI'. You can't just remove the aiming indicator without making any other changes! 'Work out where to aim, then press R2' is a very different challenge from 'move to the clearly indicated spot and press R2' and cannot be done within the same time limit.
For a low-stakes example: for the aiming tutorial, you're playing darts. Your character declares he's going to aim for the triple 20. The dartboard is not close or well-lit enough for you to see it clearly. With the aiming markers, this wasn't a problem; the game just told you where you needed to aim! Without the markers, if you're not already familiar with a dartboard's layout, you will have no idea where the triple 20 is.
After failing an aiming challenge because I knew the game wanted me to kick the enemy but didn't know where, I ended up turning off QTE time limits. I'd just be very frustrated if I lost a character due to a badly implemented gameplay change rather than through any fault of my own.
(Fortunately, Angela survived my frantic flailing around! I was so sure for a moment that I'd lost her.)
I... don't actually know whether disabling QTE timeouts has worked, because the game still shows the time counting down. I suppose I'll find out eventually and be either relieved or horrified.
Of course I am not going to burn the doll. Having seen what happened in the prologue when a little girl was treated badly, I have a strong policy of being nice to all little girls. Besides, burning an effigy in a horror game generally doesn't seem like a great idea.
Pleased to report that I seem to have patched up Taylor and Daniel's relationship, after a rocky start. I really wasn't expecting to get a 'you maxed out Taylor and Daniel's relationship!' trophy when one of my first actions as Taylor was to declare that my boyfriend wasn't my boyfriend.
I'm weirdly delighted by the fact that Daniel sat on a bench while I-as-Taylor was looking at things. I was just expecting him to stand around waiting; the fact that he can sit down or lean against things is a nice little human detail!
Daniel catching his double in an effort to save him from falling was a really cool moment! He's not the most interesting character, maybe, but I'm warming to him a little; he's not as forgettable as I thought he would be at first.
Both Man of Medan and Little Hope have much less interesting characters than Until Dawn, but they're fascinating games regardless.
The demon designs are rad as hell and also horrifying and I never want to see any of them again. (Not yet having finished the game, I have a strong and unwelcome feeling that I will be seeing them again.)
I think Little Hope might be the scariest game I've ever played. Man of Medan was stressful, but Little Hope absolutely terrifies me. I've started physically shaking while I'm playing it. I don't know what it is about this game specifically that messes me up, but it is really messing me up.
Little Hope isn't a long game, but I'm progressing very slowly because I keep having to take breaks to calm down. Although, come to think of it, maybe that's part of the reason it's freaking me out so badly. I played all of Man of Medan in one go; maybe the problem is that I'm giving Little Hope time to build up suspense and give me nightmares between play sessions.
Well, it's too late now; the suspense is built up and the nightmares are happening. I'm just going to have to push through it.
(It's very possible Until Dawn would take the 'scariest game' crown if I hadn't watched it played repeatedly before I first played it myself.)