Little Hope’s story is told in three timelines: a 17th century witch trial, a family home in the 1970s, and a current road trip where a group of students have just survived a bus accident with their teacher. Starting in the 1970s, a family of six died when, at the behest of some shadowy presence, the youngest daughter used the kitchen stove to set fire to a doll and set the house on fire. The entire family is killed in the fire, except for the youngest son, Anthony, who runs back to the house as it burns.
Next, we are introduced to a group of four students, Andrew, Angela, Daniel, and Taylor, and their teacher, who have just been in a bus accident. At this point, it should be immediately apparent that these are the exact same people who died in the house fire. With the bus driver missing and the bus (called “The Boatman”) out of service, the “survivors” set out to seek help.
Of course, things quickly get supernatural. After encountering a dejected drunkard in a nearby abandoned bar, two of the students are seized by a ghost that transports them back to the 17th century. There they meet a girl named Mary, the same girl who started the fire, and the story of a witch trial and a malevolent reverend begins to unfold.
As the group explores the abandoned city of Little Hope, each person is gradually transported back to the 17th century to watch the witch trial. It turns out that each of them has a “double” present, all of whom are executed at the behest of Reverend Carver, who forces Mary to accuse them of communing with the devil. For every character whose double dies in the trials, a demon is born today who relentlessly pursues the group.
Eventually, the group learns that their stuntmen can see and hear them in the past. Unfortunately, their attempts to intervene and stop the executions fail and eventually four different demons, one for each character that is executed, are born in the present and begin to hunt down the group.
In the end, Reverend Carver also turns on Mary and tells the court that she is controlled by the devil and that everyone has been deceived. If the group can convince Andrew’s doppelganger, the only one still alive in this timeline, to defend Mary and deliver evidence against Carver, the current demons will disappear and the night of terror will end.
No matter who survives the night and what decisions are made, the big reveal comes when the group finally makes it out of Little Hope alive. Vince, the drunk from the abandoned bar, will return and tell Andrew that he knows what happened was not his fault. He tells Andrew where to find a phone to call for help and tells him never to go back to Little Hope. When Andrew and the group arrive at the nearby restaurant, it is revealed that Andrew is actually the missing bus driver, who is actually Anthony, an adult. Having survived the house fire, he was as overwhelmed with guilt, made worse by the people of Little Hope as his sister’s boyfriend, Vince, that he suffered a psychotic attack.
All the Little Hope events that began after the bus accident are 100% imaginary. The story of the 17th century witch trials and the fight against demons were on Anthony’s mind. His family died in the house fire. Bringing them back to life to fight their demons and save “Mary” from Reverend Carver was his way of processing his guilt, forgiving his sister for starting the fire, and finally being able to move on.
Once you realize that the events of Little Hope didn’t happen literally, you have to think about the sequence of events metaphorically and thematically to appreciate what Supermassive Games did with this story. Anthony is rewarded with a nice character arc at the end of the story, but that’s not to say that the narrative is not without logical flaws.
Anthony has to deal with a major trauma through Little Hope, and his mind has created an elaborate Shutter Island-style story to process his pain. Andrew is mistakenly seen as responsible for the fire by the community. We know this from the way Vince looks at him at the funeral and because Vince forgives him in the end. Also, the judge who convicts each of the 17th century characters is also the neighbor who finds Anthony holding a box of matches outside the burning house. Part of processing his trauma is making peace with his survivor’s guilt, and he can do this by obtaining Vince’s forgiveness and convincing Abraham to show the judge the evidence against Carver that ends the witch hunt.
The other thing Anthony must do to process his trauma is forgive his sister Megan for initiating it. This one is definitely much more difficult to reconcile. Anthony imagines a story about an evil preacher in the 17th century who tricks Mary into condemning every member of Anthony’s family. Each of them is killed in ways that reflect their deaths in the burning house. To get a good ending, Anthony must realize that the deaths are not actually Mary’s fault, but that she is under the control of Reverend Carver. If he convinces “himself” then the curse is lifted and Anthony can finally make his peace with the fire and forgive his sister.
This is where things become more open to interpretation. Anthony imagines an evil force ordering Mary to do evil things, which of course reflects what actually happened: a dark entity convinces Megan to start the fire and kill her family. We are left wondering who or what the dark entity was, why he manipulated Megan, and furthermore, how Anthony came to the conclusion that it was some kind of evil force that was responsible for the fire and not his sister.
As I explored Little Hope and collected secrets, it is clear that Carver’s figure reappeared in each generation to manipulate and control a girl. Players can find a rather draconian parenting book on childhood behavior, as well as the correspondence between a preacher and the father of a misbehaving child. Of course, these details are also part of Anthony’s hallucination, so it is difficult to determine if these clues inform the story thematically or if they are just red herrings.
There are other little threads to connect, like the meaning of Megan’s doll that lights the fire and Mary’s doll that can also be burned, but in the end, the only thing that actually happened is the fire, motivated by some kind of mysterious dark entity. Perhaps this spirit will return in the next installment of The Dark Pictures Anthology, but it did not appear in Man of Medan, so it seems unlikely that it is a connecting narrative thread between the stories.
