Hopes for Little Hope
Supermassive Games invoke the same vibes as M. Night Shyamalan and his films did back in the late 90’s and early 2000’s. If you weren’t around, what made them special is they transcended the genre of horror or thriller and became mainstream. They were more than just scary movies by fusing together great acting, sharp writing, great pacing with a relatively unknown director and limited budget.
From the massive success that was The Sixth Sense, Shyamalan movies became must see events. Studios figured that with more budget, increased marketing and expanded casts these movies had even greater potential. On a budget of approximately 40 million The Sixth Sense went on to gross over 670 million globally. This doesn’t even include the VHS or DVD sales that exceeded 2.5 million copies. That’s a lot of rewinding. No one could have seen this level of success coming both commercially but also critically. The Sixth Sense had such mass appeal that word of mouth spread virally before things were able to spread virally.
You could argue that Unbreakable and Signs captured some of the magic that The Sixth Sense had, but the shine definitely began to wear off with movies like Lady in the Water, The Village, The Happening and After Earth. Gone were twists that you weren’t expecting, as well as the goodwill that the first three movie created. Audiences now felt like they were being sold the same overindulged bill of goods with big reveals that never felt earned. To this day it still feels like Shyamalan is trying to recapture the magic that was created with The Sixth Sense over twenty years ago.
Until Dawn felt like it had the equivalent word of mouth in the gaming world and people are still talking about it. Supermassive Games followed the same path by staying relatively unknown until 2015 when studio caught their big break with Until Dawn. A interactive survival horror game with the ability to choose your own adventure. A game where almost character can die with the wrong decision and different choices lead to different outcomes which they called the butterfly effect.
Both adventure and survival games in 2015 were a unpopular opinion. Until Dawn felt like something familiar and yet new at the same time by the way it fused together elements that made early Shyamalan movies special. Excellent pacing, great performances, and impressive visuals from a hungry studio that wanted to prove what it could do Supermassive Games created an almost movie like experience that you could enjoy multiple times either alone or with friends. It looked amazing with its use of the new Decima engine created by Guerrila Games. It was only the second game to use Decima. It also featured notable celebrities which helped the realism. Hayden Paniaterrre of Heroes fame and Rami Malik just before his fame caught fire helped anchor the game. Until Dawn is now a member of the ‘Greatest Hits’ collection for PS4.
Unfortunately, the road that Supermassive has taken after Until Dawn feels eerily similar to M Night Shyamalan as well. After Until Dawn, they released a VR experience that was a shooter on rails based on the universe that didn’t connect with me. It was fun but I didn’t quite understand why it was tied into Until Dawn. Hidden Agenda tried to capture the interactive magic with PlayLink and The Inpatient did the same with VR, however both games struggled to find audiences.
Supermassive figured out that the reason for the success Until Dawn was not that it needed a gimmick but instead people like the interactivity of horror game that could be shared. In late 2018, Supermassive announced The Dark Pictures Anthology. A series of eight interactive survival games that will be separate from each other however connected through a narrator akin to The Twilight Zone.
The first game in the series was Man of Medan and it was released in August of 2019. While it felt like the team had figured out what made Until Dawn a success back in 2015, it still felt like components were missing. In our review, which you can see here, we criticized the games poor facial animations and the voice acting, both of which failed to deliver the proper tone in the right situations. These technical elements hurt the immersion, which is crucial in a survival game. The writing also struggled to deliver consistency. It lacked pacing, as Man of Medan got off to a very slow start and had a very uneven tone for the whole game. Until Dawn did have the luxury of being an homage to 80’s and 90’s slasher flicks which were inherently somewhat cheesy.
Criticisms aside, it was the closest thing that Supermassive Games had come to duplicating the magic of Until Dawn. The Dark Pictures Anthology supposed to be released with a cadence of two per year which works out to about every six months. According to the studio, this was possible since all eight entires would be using a lot of similar assets. With Man of Medan being released in August before the big fall releases, it was able to find moderate success. At the end of Man of Medan, we were treated to a teaser for the next installment, Little Hope, based on the assumption of two per year, should have been released around February. This would have been a perfect time to release a game with the first two months of 2020 feeling like the driest start of a year in gaming that I can remember. Not only did Little Hope not get released, we also hadn’t heard any news from Supermassive regarding its development since August 2019.
The silence has finally been broken as we were given a new trailer, release window and a statement from the CEO of Supermassive Games. The bad news is that Little Hope will not be released this spring as we have a release window of summer 2020. Pete Samuels, CEO of Supermassive Games, said that they are “Delighted by the reaction from players and the success of Man of Medan." He finished by adding they "really appreciate feedback from the community and the team remains committed to the goal of making each new instalment deliver further thrilling horror experiences”
As lucrative as being released in the slower spring, the team has made the tough decision to go for summer of 2020 and this move actually gives me.....hope. Man of Medan was much closer to Until Dawn than anything released since and it sounds like the team is taking feedback and trying to improve upon issues the first entry in The Dark Pictures Anthology carried. If Supermassive Games can make the proper adjustments after Man of Medan then they may be able to capture Until Dawns lightening in a bottle again. Some see dead people but I see potential or hope.