Releasing just in time for Halloween, The Dark Pictures Anthology: Little Hope looks to bring Supermassive Games’ brand of interactive, cinematic horror to a new story and setting. Featuring the likes of Will Poulter and David Smith, it seems primed to be the studio’s spookiest games yet, tackling witch trials and other supernatural occurrences in the small town of Little Hope.
Of course, to achieve the movie-quality cutscenes present in most Supermassive games, the team relies on advanced motion-capture to make the performances of its protagonists more believable. In a recent developers’ diary published by Bandai Namco’s YouTube channel, the studio showed off exactly how the process of filming these motion-capture cutscenes works, highlighting both the technology and the efforts of several actors involved.
Throughout the short diary, the filmmakers talk to a number of the body actors and animators about how the technical side of the game comes together. There are several intriguing revelations within these short interviews, with one actor revealing that the body doubles have to completely alter their performance to fit the delivery of the vocal and facial animation actors. It definitely makes for a different way to perform, which seems to be the overriding talking point of Little Hope’s newest dev diary. It’s also a great indicator of what goes into making video game cutscenes, with the actors donning mo-cap suits to jump off raised platforms onto safety mats, being dragged across the floor by ropes, and impersonating all manner of demonic entities.
The footage also gives a little bit of additional info as to what players will encounter within Little Hope, with the game appearing to have a lot of intense action sequences that demand quick reaction times from the player. There are even a few suggestions as to what kind of monsters will be stalking Little Hope’s protagonists, with one sequence featuring a zombified monster grabbing Alex Ivanovici’s character, David, while he’s fleeing.
Overall, it looks to be an impressive technological showcase that’ll once again amount to a fantastic, narrative-driven horror experience. It’ll join a number of other impressive-looking games debuting before Halloween this year, including Amnesia: Rebirth and Remothered: Broken Porcelain. Both games are already bringing the big guns when it comes to terrifying scares, with Amnesia recently getting an eerie gameplay trailer and Broken Porcelain’s recap reminding future players of how terrifying its 2017 predecessor was. With Little Hope joining the pair, it seems this Halloween has a lot of solid frights for video game fans.
The Dark Pictures Anthology: Little Hope will be available on October 30 for PC, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One.
