The Devil in Me

The Devil in Me is the grand finale to “season one” of The Dark Pictures Anthology. While it’s larger in scope than the previous games and unquestionably boasts the greatest technical leap in the series, it feels like that came at the expense of the story. That doesn’t mean it was bad, because it wasn’t. There’s very little in the game that I would call bad, but also very little I’d call great. It’s a decent entry in the series, but the high point of season one remains House of Ashes.

Like all other entries in The Dark Pictures Anthology, The Devil in Me is a co-op focused narrative horror game following a group of five people caught in a terrible situation, where you and your partner each rotate control through the cast members as you try to guide them to safety. (Or not—while I do want to save everyone, I think it’s more fun to play towards the dramatic and narrative arc of the story when appropriate rather than prioritizing survival above all else.)

This time, the cast is a documentary crew creating a film about the first (publicized) American serial killer, Henry Howard Holmes. They receive a call from a man called Du’Met, who explains that his late uncle was a fan of Holmes and had many documents and artifacts related to him, and invites the crew to his mansion to film footage for their documentary. The documentary is not in good shape, so the group is desperate enough to pursue this lead. And since this is a horror game, you all know where this is going....

The Devil in Me inherits the same core gameplay as its predecessors: exploration and examination, dialogue choices that affect traits, premonitions, and quick-time events. But it also introduces many new mechanics and game systems—more than any of the previous entries.

The first and most important: A run button. Technically all the previous games had a “move faster” button, but the change in speed was so slight it was impossible to tell whether it was actually working. In this game the characters actually run, which feels much more appropriate for a genre that’s based so heavily in watching people flee from monsters. (Previous entries got away with it because exploration sequences were always safe and chases always took place in cutscenes, and The Devil in Me maintains this pattern, but the ability to run feels much more in-line with the genre.) You can also duck under and vault over obstacles, as well as climb up ledges and balance over narrow beams, making the space you can traverse feel more natural and dynamic.

This game introduces an inventory system. A prompt shows up when you can use an item in your current character’s inventory, and each character begins with a unique item or two that gives them additional and unique gameplay mechanics. For instance, one character has a tie clip that can be used as a lockpick, while another has a mic that can pick up faint and distant sounds.

The final new gameplay system is “hiding,” which is essentially a new QTE type (but uses exploration controls, rather than slotting into cutscenes). Whenever somebody you don’t want to be caught by comes around, you need to manually move into a hiding spot and press a button to hide. The game will show massive arrows pointing towards the valid hiding spots, so it’s about reacting in time, not choosing the proper spot.

They also added a few collectibles to the game, which don’t do much, but they’re new and they’re there!

(This isn’t a new “mechanic,” but as far as improvements from previous games go, in previous games, if both players were in a joint exploration segment, the game would move on as soon as one player reached our interacted with the exit, but The Devil in Me often waits for both players, so your investigation will get cut off by the other player much less frequently than in previous entries.)

I appreciate Supermassive’s efforts to deepen the gameplay of the Dark Pictures games, and while they now have the technology to build upon and include in future entries, in The Devil in Me, the new features unfortunately feel under-utilized, and almost like a prototype or demo. The run button is perfect, no notes. But the inventory feels... unnecessary. We don’t find many items beyond each character’s starting items, which to a certain extent is fine because needing to actually manage and keep track of five separate characters’ inventories sounds horrible. However, because there are so few inventory items, it feels like the game could have just kept track of which item each character has without an explicit inventory system (which is exactly how the previous games operated). I don’t think I had to balance or hide a single time in the third act, so those mechanics felt like they were introduced without any payoff. (I think my friend used them near the end, though, so it’s not that they were completely forgotten but that they weren’t evenly split between the players.) The Devil in Me also adds puzzles, but there aren’t that many, and they generally can only be handled by one player which means the other player has to sit there twiddling their thumbs, which is a much less elegant execution than I expected from Supermassive.

My sense is that a lot of resources went into developing these new systems, which didn’t leave as much bandwidth for actually integrating them or planning the scenario. The story is fine, but that’s it. Du’Met mostly doesn’t kill directly but chases the characters into traps, more like Saw than other slashers, but, like with its gameplay mechanics, the plot doesn’t go far enough. The characters run around the mansion, get caught in traps, but eventually escape and triumph over their captor (or not, depending on your choices). There’s no big twist or grand reveal, which is honestly fine because the focus should be on the traps, but unfortunately there aren’t enough of them, and they aren’t particularly inspired either in concept or how they play out. Again, there’s nothing wrong with any of them, just... nothing iconic or clever. There’s a moment where the characters discover a pair of mannequins in a trap and watch it operate, so I assumed that later on the characters would be placed in the same trap and would need to use something they learned from previously witnessing it to escape, but... no, it never came up again. The characters also somehow manage to constantly get separated and wander off on their own, which could probably be forgiven if the rest of the story was stronger.

In previous Dark Pictures Anthology games I praised Supermassive’s scenario design and how they’d always give you just enough rope to hang yourself with so that deaths didn’t feel cheap, but I felt they got a bit sloppy and lazy in The Devil in Me. In particular, there are a lot of “coinflip deaths,” by which I mean a scenario where you’re presented with a choice where one option results in a character death and the other doesn’t but there’s no reasonable way of knowing which is which, so it’s essentially a coinflip. For instance, take the first possible death in the game. One character, who has asthma, wanders into a room, when the door suddenly shuts and locks behind her. The rest of the cast hears this and rushes over, and begins working to break the door open. The character in the room begins to have an asthma attack, but can’t find her inhaler. She discovers one of the walls in the room opened, and a tall, menacing stranger stands there—holding her inhaler out to her. She can either accept the inhaler, or attack the intruder.

Obviously she needs to attack. This is the maniac who has kidnapped the group and intends on killing them all, and he just isolated her from everyone else. He’s probably offering the inhaler as a ruse to get her to drop her guard and force her to approach. Our only hope to get through this is to get the upper hand with a preemptive strike; if we hesitate, we’re dead.

Except obviously she needs to take the inhaler. The offer is probably genuine—if he wanted to kill us, he could just attack or withhold the inhaler. There’s no way an attack will succeed (physically it’s no contest between us, and that’s before even taking our asthma attack into consideration), so antagonizing him is likely to just cause him to withdraw what little mercy he’s showing. We need to play along and wait for a more opportune time to break away.

Either way of thinking about the scenario is reasonable to me, but there’s no way to know which the game will actually go with, and guessing wrong will result in the character getting killed. I’m not complaining about having choices that lead to deaths, because that’s what the game is about, but in other entries there’d always be some hint or indication, even if it wasn’t clear at the time or I didn’t realize it until after the fact. In The Devil in Me, there are multiple choices (that can’t be avoided) with no way of figuring out the correct choice beforehand.

One interesting element I noticed about The Devil in Me is that it’s the only Dark Pictures Anthology entry that doesn’t have a supernatural premise. That’s not a good or bad thing, but it did affect how my friend and I approached the games. I found The Devil in Me more unnerving than the previous games, since you never knew when you’d walk into an unfair trap, whereas in other games, if a monster popped out you could just QTE them to escape. On the flipside, my friend found The Devil in Me a bit more boring, since the villain is just a single dude who can be taken out in a fight, while previous games featured monsters. (The counterpoint for The Devil in Me is that, while the villain is just a dude, he manipulates everything from the shadows and doesn’t put himself in a position where you can physically attack him.)

But I think that does highlight the issues that can occur when you have a narrative that need to permutate but don’t give it room to branch. If you had a character that was alone or with one other person it would make sense for them to run away from the killer, but you’d think a group of five would rather overwhelm him than keep running into his traps. But the game needs the cast to cower and run regardless of whether you’re down to the final girl or haven’t had a single casualty. Obviously I don’t expect branches everywhere, but having none is a bit too inflexible. Man of Medan had a couple of small branches, but they never did branches of that sort again in the series.

On that note, I didn’t like the ending. The Devil in Me essentially has one ending, with a second “secret” ending that is only unlocked by achieving certain conditions. It needed more. Not a ton more, but more—and, unlike plot branches, you don’t need to worry about linking them up later, so it doesn’t feel like there should be any barriers to adding them. The issue is that we got what I’d call the best ending with everyone alive (we reloaded a couple of times, but only undid one death), but the ending we got just didn’t feel like it followed from what we did. I could definitely see a scenario where the ending would flow naturally, but it didn’t for us. (And perhaps it would be different if the ending was unique or interesting, but it’s pretty much the most cliche ending for the genre.)

The Devil in Me is... an ending to a Dark Pictures Anthology season. It tried to take a big leap forward mechanically, but forgot to take one in the narrative. It’s fine—overall I think I like it more than Man of Medan and Little Hope—but not great. It’s a shame that the high point of season one ended up being House of Ashes rather than the actual finale, and I just hope that Supermassive is able to capitalize on the technology they developed for The Devil in Me in future entries will elevating the story and characters.