When I was a boy, my father taught me to play chess. Or at least, I think he did. My memory of these things was blurred by fear; they appeared vaguely behind me like demons in the mist, one QTE short of dragging me down. I don’t believe my father is good at chess, but he does have a strategy that always works for me. Whenever I choose a work, he nodded, raised his eyebrows, and said something like “Oh, so you are doing this, right?” Or he would sit down like Caesar and discuss the Wimbledon, a barbarian A supplicant in the tribe, but dismissive of himself. After five minutes of flying reflex, I was like a trembling pile. When I looked at the board dumbfounded, Clarkson screamed in his head, paralyzed by a million potential reversal thoughts. What can we learn from it? Well, first of all, my father is a terrible bully, and now it’s time for me to come back, this is my life in charge of a thousand PC strategy games in revenge for the humiliation. Secondly, my father is actually a super game in nightgown and slippers.
Hyperscale games like watching you wriggle. If amnesia is a snake around the neck, then the second small hope “Little Hope” in the “Dark Hope” anthology is a kind of bald eagle, which has been drinking from a distance for several seconds until it falls. The horror of these games does not really lie in the phantom-like phantoms appearing in the foreground or lingering in the background, they are never dedicated to attacking you until the end. It exists because the game is constantly measuring your behavior-everything you do or say, everything you pick up or ignore has to pay a heavy price.
Little Hope puts you in charge of another group of fierce quarrels triggered by supernatural (or they?) events, the lost souls of Hollywood actors. When you try to leave a nominal town with a nominally reassuring history of witch trials, you can manage the tension between these mismatched personalities and switch between them at preset time intervals. As usual, most actors may die without ending the story, and every choice you make is or seems to be a weight on the scale. Choosing a dialogue option (for example, responding peacefully to someone’s outburst of anger), you will often enhance the characteristics of “Whitty” or “irritability” while changing one character’s preference for another. Relationships and traits will affect your choice: if the trait is triggered too many times, it will always be locked in the character’s character, and may determine their fate in the future.
Some decisions will obviously make you swing between the tracks of the basic multi-terminal graph. These are recorded by the “bearing” gauge, which is similar to the astrolabe filled with skulls in Brighton’s souvenir shop. For example, the location system will indicate that you have a good, clumsy boy, Andrew, who keeps a secret with the rest of the gang. It will point out that you made Taylor, a beautiful and obligatory girl, tell the troubled professor that John was in trouble when he wanted to teach her. Although you will find the artifacts-the dark picture of the title-giving an ambiguous vision of the future again, it will always make you doubt whether you have chosen the right one.
It feels like there are hundreds of fine stitches piercing into your flesh one by one. The changes in orientation, traits, and relationships pop up continuously in the upper left, like hellish phone spam. Does it matter if I give him the knife instead of her? Does it matter what I did to the doll? Maybe I shouldn’t let her follow him on the bridge, oh my goodness, we are dying. We all die in some way. Responsible for and personifying all these surveillance systems is the curator, an impeccable British writer, who wanders in the dark library. This is the framed narrative of the anthology, issuing reminders and orders when chapters are interrupted Frustrating judgment. “What is possible to link all these souls together?” He waved the candlestick, wondering about you. How I hate curators. Bet he is good at chess.
All these concepts are derived from “Until the Dawn”, just like the first “Shadow” game “Medan Man”, Supermassive’s challenge is to integrate the disturbing possibilities of the game into a shorter, more economical experience. in. Compared with last year’s installment, “Little Hope” (which can be completed in the evening) does a better job, and its characteristics and interpersonal relationships are more confident about the ending of certain stories. In “Medan Man”, I sometimes feel that rotating character tags are being displayed there, for example, redundant statistics or weapon levels can fill a smaller RPG. I don’t have that feeling here, but more talk will destroy things.
I also found this story more interesting, although it will take about half an hour to find the answer after the exciting prologue. The long night of the game spans multiple time periods, and the characters are regularly dragged into the 1600s to witness the atrocities that the town is famous for. In the process, you are deeply fascinated by the thought that you might be able to prevent these terrible things, thereby disarming the demons that trouble you. Except that all these are just metaphors, aren’t they? Little Hope keeps you guessing the taste of the torture chamber, and the characters often quote the revelations from the plots and conversations of general horror movies. Admittedly, these jokes are rarely so subtle. Sometimes you will hear someone say “this is indeed what happened in a horror movie”, and then followed by “Those movies are stupid, and I just left without you.”
The final revelation disappointed all speculations, but this time the mystery has more dimensions: in particular, the idea that you are trapped in a huge drama. Sadly, Little Hope itself lacks Medanman’s ghost ship stage performance. There are some great individual elements: street lights burning red on claw leaves, covered bridges remind me of John Carpenter’s “In The Mouth of Madness” , There are puppets hanging in this museum. But for all the local history, you gather scattered documents together, and for all the perspectives and lighting skills of Supermassive, the area of the game does not really merge into one “place”. Perhaps this is a connective tissue problem: many times you are disappointed on fuzzy forest trails or foggy tarmac roads. Tell me your satisfaction with Silent Hill, but at least I can see it from the other end.
The action sequence is also very perfunctory. The most exciting choice depends on the role you choose to save-if you have Andrew to help others, then I am a bit too fond of watching other people’s nonsense, or John, he is a complete donkey, but has a certain sense of responsibility . group? No matter who you are with, you will be prompted to dodge attacks or keep your feet on the run. Sometimes you can also choose to hide, which involves tapping the character’s heartbeat button in time. To my liking, this is a bit too simple. This is not what people usually say to avoid blowing spears in the face.
I will always enjoy the crazy self-examination atmosphere created by Supermassive’s story and its support mechanism-it feels like doing anything is to deal with the knuckles of the sword of Damocles hanging overhead. Nevertheless, it feels like the studio has reached a turning point in Telltale style, and the house style is beginning to get better-not necessarily, this is a weakness, but it must be a series of metaphors that need to be deconstructed. This shows that although the writing of “Little Hope” is happy to make fun of movie clichés, the characters have never thought about what the surrounding events have in common with horror games. After spending a few hours in “Little Hope”, you can imagine how these conversations would proceed: “Well, a brightly lit door! Let’s collect all the nearby debris before we walk through.” Or: “Oh, damn, I have opened such a cabinet several times before-something incredible is about to happen this time, or my name is Leon Kennedy.”
Nevertheless, the latest “Shadow” series is a good Halloween choice, especially if you bring a group of controversial and/or mean friends. Men in Medan passed the Controller Movie Night and Online-only shared story mode, although they are hardly killer features, they are worth your time. “Movie Night”‘s trick to award suspicious rewards to individual players between scenes is as pleasant as ever: it turns all these vicious surveillance systems into a source of jokes. However, the next issue of “Dark Pictures” needs to be more radical. If playing a super quality title is like playing chess, then I am like the person waiting for the opponent to advance.