Little Misfortune is a walking simulator masquerading as a point and click adventure game. There are no puzzles of note here, and the game is a strictly linear path from start to finish.
I don’t have anything against walking simulators, but a walking simulator lives and dies on plot and presentation. And unfortunately, Little Misfortune falls short on both.
This is a game that is deliberately ugly. The characters are all deliberately drawn to be “off”, and everything is drawn to have a run-down and often outright creepy vibe. The main character has a veneer of innocence but obviously has had a messed up life with a messed up family, and the only really nice thing in the game – “Mr. Voice”, the voice in her head – is obviously evil, with the first thing he tells us being that Little Misfortune, the “protagonist” of the work, is going to die.
And while all of this can work if there’s a strong plot and purpose to it, honestly, this game isn’t impressive at all in that department. The problem is that Little Misfortune isn’t a particularly interesting character – she’s a little girl from a messed up family, and she is more or less the same person at the start as she is at the end. The entire plot of the game is an excuse to take us through a series of rather morbid areas while being led on by Mr. Voice, and while the game does try to misdirect us about when and how Misfortune is going to die, that’s really the only “trick” it has up its sleeve. The game is very transparent about almost everything that is really going on, and the overall morbid and gross-out “humor” that the game leans on wears on the audience after playing for only a short while. It is just too one note, and as I never actually came to care about Little Misfortune, there was nothing to connect with here.
I can’t recommend this. It is endlessly morbid, but the messed up humor of the walking simulator is basically three hours of variations on the same joke, and there is a great deal of meandering around before the work finally goes somewhere.
.5