There are spoilers in this, but I put them all at the bottom so I didn't bother tagging it so beware! Also don't read this if the mention of animal abuse will make you very upset!

For reference, I played this on challenging difficulty and I have never played any of these games before with the conceit of just not having to. I watched someone else play Until Dawn a loooooong time ago, and I watched someone play Man of Medan and that game seemed OK.

I've seen a lot of horror movies. I've seen a lot of bad horror movies. This is a bad horror movie, but not in the fun way. Do you like... Slasher films with little to no slashing? Do you like... bad Saw movies? So just most of Saw, don't answer that regardless because you won't like this either way. I really don't have anything against these vaguely interactive cinematic type games, they seem pretty cool honestly, I hope there are better examples than this one. I very rarely feel like I've had my time wasted playing a game or watching a movie. Watching bad horror movies that take themselves too seriously is fun! It's not fun when it's a 7-8 hour long game with literally no payoff! Every time characters are running around, hiding, unlocking doors, climbing walls, running from man, it's for nothing. I literally every time some character getting split from the gang and then scene resolves said out loud, "you didn't do anything you didn't learn anything you did nothing", and they continued to do nothing.

Also the conceit of this guy just being down on his luck and having someone randomly call him that can seemingly fix all of his problems that this RANDOM guy couldn't have possibly known about, is very funny in hindsight. There is nothing supernatural afoot here, at least they never say so. They sure make you want to think there is early on, but they don't really care. This killer is just a guy. He's not an animatronic, he's not a ghost or a "Devil", he's just a guy. He gets fucked up a lot and never seems to care, he fell off a fucking roof and did a literal slapstick family guy broken limbs pose and just stood up immediately, he gets his face cut open in a boat that crashes into a rock and explodes, totally fine. I assume the conceit is that it's something supernatural but they don't fucking TELL YOU THAT.

Again hackish horror stories like this can be fun but this overstays it's welcome badly and half of this cast is just insufferable. Also they aren't people. Director CEO guy who is CEO pilled and treats everyone like shit, guy who's scared of heights and also dumped his girlfriend that's pretty much it, girl who got dumped, girl who likes audio, girl that can hack things. These things don't even dominate their personalities it's just all they have going on. Their personalities are hating on each other insufferably for no reason, except audio girl and hacker girl who are lesbians and carry this game on their back until the very end when they are the product of one of the worst scenes in the game.

I guess I'll get into the spoilery stuff now. This fucking bozo is literally teleporting across the entire island constantly and they never explain how. "Oh well he had that sci-fi maintenance tunnel that he toooootally built himself" how did he get out of the wall he got trapped behind LITERALLY IMMEDIATELY. For the longest time playing this I just assumed there were multiple people involved, one of the characters even brings up that possibility at one point and is immediately shut down. So are there multiple people involved? I don't know, they don't fucking tell you anything ever! He even completely whiffs the boat they escape on and misses them and is SOMEHOW on the boat when they're in the middle of the lake, gets his face cut open, crashes into a big rock and explodes, and is still alive. Is there something supernatural afoot? Idk didn't seem like it don't ask me. Also I don't care if you don't have to do it but them giving you the option to kill the dog to make it stop barking is fucking gross. Especially when if decisions are already made so that both of the normal people will survive the scenario it literally doesn't change anything. I didn't do it obviously but I was still upset that I even had the option in the first place, feels fucking gross.

Bottom line, if this were a bad horror movie that took itself way too seriously for like an hour and a half it'd be fun! But it's an 8 hour long 40 dollar game! It's not fun and the few moments of gameplay that were literally just find a door to open move a thing and jump on it was fucking boring I would have rather they'd just not been there. Also I had a bug where one of my decisions I made got a character killed EVEN THOUGH I did exactly what I needed to do for them to live, so I restarted the scene from the beginning, did it again, still died, restarted, tried another method that lets them survive, still died, tried the last possible one, still died, fuck you. Fuck you especially because that specific scene is so overly gross out gross. Maybe this is a PC thing but I looked it up and other people also had this happen at this exact scene so seems like a pretty fuckin big oversight.

I knew going into this that this wouldn't be a pleasant experience based off of other reviews but I still went in open-minded having played it a full year after it's release. The bar was low man, but holy shit. What happened between House of Ashes and this?

Something about this entire premise just did not hit right with me. They already went with the whole "saw trap serial killer" concept with Until Dawn, but this one just full sent it to death, with no believable reasoning behind it. The backstory twist was predictable and completely undermines it's own villain, just turning him into a teleporting superhuman who shows up whenever it's convenient. The game suggests that he's in 3 or 4 locations at the same time while never hinting that there are some supernatural elements at play. It just made the whole 8 hour runtime feel weird and pointless.

This isn't helped by the pacing at all. The first half is outrageously boring, setting up some of the worst characters in the series who all seem to hate each other. The 2nd half is where all the "action" takes place, but it's more like scenes where character A or sometimes B run/hide from discount Mikie Myers interspersed with the most annoying investigation settings in the series. They introduced the most useless collectible ever in this game, on top of the usual lore clues sprinkled about. It basically gave them an excuse to go hog wild with these bland and almost pitch black empty spaces that just exist for you to fumble around in for 20 minutes trying to figure out where the game intends for you to go. If there was any tension at all that you achieved from running away from the killer, these walking around bits usually nuked that feeling every time they showed up. These are usually the worst parts of the other games but they've never been this annoying to deal with until now.

They implemented a new inventory item system where each character has their own light source and bonus "power" they can individually use, such as Charlie being able to open locked drawers. I'm open to this series trying new things, but this one was a bit of a flop. I kept forgetting that it was even a thing you could do because some characters just use their abilities much more often than others. I found myself locked in a room as Kate for 30 minutes because she's supposed to use this super cool investigative journalist trick with a pencil that the game gave no indication that she even fucking had in the first place. She used it literally once in that moment, and then never again, so what was the point?

Trying to dabble into this part without spoiling, but if the game wants me to utilize what we know about the character's and their individual personalities to our advantage, then they need to really consider writing better characters? This series isn't well known for having the most stellar casts and I'm usually able to swallow it fine, but this one in particular has some of the most one-note, insufferable barbarians at it's helm. You learn almost nothing about them and yet the Curator's smug ass treats you like a dickhead for not picking up on what you're supposed to do with the little information that's thrown at you. This, coupled up with the fact that the villain is basically Homelander, made the deaths and failures feel extremely cheap.

The optimization itself is also still pretty stinky a year after release. I almost refunded it because it was doing some weird audio de-syncing and displaying extreme desaturation that I never turned on. Opening the game itself was like opening malware; it just death gripped my whole system and refused to exit fullscreen mode no matter how hard I struggled to change it. Subtitles were written incorrectly and had words spelled wrong sometimes. The first fuse box mini-game had the wrong inputs listed. I thought for sure that the game was just broken, but it turned out that you're supposed to use your keyboard to do them even though the UI tells you to use the mouse. Just straight up forehead mechanics.

Please just be a fluke, Supermassive. I really like their games but they need to slow down the release times if they're gonna try to make longer, bigger games like this. Not every story they put out can be golden, but there's some formulas they refuse to change and it's starting to ruin the experiences. Each game has worse looking models with zero souls behind their eyes. I would love if the next one has a cast of characters who are actual friends that don't snipe each other with every line of dialogue, but it's set in space so who the fuck knows. They're probably miserable co-workers, again, who all have a previous past of dating each other, again. At least that one looks like it has a monster.

The conceit behind Supermassive Games’ body of horror games was a noble one to begin with. The simple idea of a playable slasher film pushed to the extreme; taking after the likes of “choose your own adventure” novels but most notably the interactive dramas of David Cage- which at this point stand as some of the most potent pieces of camp entertainment the medium has seen (that’s another conversation though). With Until Dawn they delivered on this promise with a game that was effectively curated in its tone and pacing, balancing between the joyful excesses of the genre with some genuinely visceral gnarliness (no doubt borrowing influence from Larry Fessenden who has a starring role in the game and had a pronounced hand in the writer’s room). After the game’s success, Supermassive went on to produce “The Dark Pictures Anthology” which was in essence a collection of ‘Until Dawn’ clones with what essentially felt like half the budget, production time, and length. The ambition had me excited but within the first hour of playing ‘Man of Medan’ I realized just how short it falls from their potential after how good Until Dawn was. Fast forward to now and we’re on ‘episode four’ of ‘season one’ of this project and its safe to say that Supermassive is utterly washed. I think I gave a lot of credit towards the bigger vision they were aspiring to but at this point I simply don’t have the patience for this brand of lazy, copy-paste development anymore- especially after seeing the refreshingly moderate effort placed into their spiritual successor to Until Dawn, 'The Quarry'.

Much of the appeal of horror to me is its sheer devotion to sensory affect and how far it can tease the participator, whether it be a film, novel, or video game. I believe with the latter medium we’re able to gauge the most potent application of the genre and what it can accomplish regarding the player’s interaction with the environment as well as other characters. There is literally so much you can do within the genre, so it makes it frustrating that Supermassive skimp and stumble away achieving the bare minimum almost every time. The typical slasher runs about eighty to ninety minutes so it’s shocking to me that these Dark Pictures games are en masse paced so poorly and proceed to take up an interminable six hours. It’s over an hour of gameplay for ‘The Devil In Me’ to reached its primarily location and half of that time is spent on a pointless opening set piece that acts as a tedious tutorial and also bears no real significance to the overarching story. The rest of this hour is its own dirge of setting up the ensemble’s dynamics and basic plot points in the blandest, most expositional manner possible- and rest assured reader, this is the worst and most cynical band of personalities Supermassive has conjured yet. Unfortunately, if not even Ashley Tisdale can sell the dialogue and development her character was given in House of Ashes, then Academy Award nominated Jessie Buckley certainly won’t here.

What's left beyond the uncanny valley-ass performances and the expressionless blocking in the cutscenes is a game that never moves at a natural pace; instead playing like being trapped in the apathetic body of a rusting tin man at all times as well as littered with jittery camera angles and glitches and lacking any sense of motivated lighting to add visual flourish or at the very least helpfully guide the player. As all these Dark Pictures titles go, once the violence ramps up its silly attempts at raising the pulse of the player get slightly more fruitful but as in the case of all the Dark Pictures titles, it's hollow thrills with no lasting resonance. No intricacies, nothing for the inquisitive player to glean or discover of its characters or setting that won't be explained away by the dialogue or needlessly made obvious in the lore newspaper clippings cluttered around the map. At the end of the day, there really was no point in me spending time writing about this prime example of dubious corporate horror when there's no shortage of real darkness in the world, but it's defeating when these small pleasures could be crafted to be so​ much better. If anything I feel as though this is a personal epitaph for a developer that suggests I may not be returning for 'season two'.

I don’t like pointing out quote-unquote ‘plot holes.’ It’s a pedantic, lazy way of judging a work and often feels like it’s missing the forest for the trees — not questioning, say, broader issues with the structure or writing or something to instead point and go “but why didn’t they do [thing I, a rational mind, would instead do in this situation]. this is a problem with the work. ding!” What it ignores, in particular, is that literally everything has these inconsistencies or little mistakes if you squint hard enough — and that it’s up to the work as a whole to… work as a whole, in a way that patches these small issues over and makes any inconsistencies not seem as glaring. Some of my favourite books, films, games, etc. usually do have problems… but they’re either minor, or I enjoy the work to such an extent that I don’t feel guilty ignoring whatever those issues might be. To me, it’s always ‘does this thing I’ve noticed actually impact the work, or my enjoyment of it in a meaningful way?’ If it doesn’t, and there aren’t any major issues, then hey, look, nobody’s perfect, and you did a good enough job otherwise, so thumbs up. If there are issues, and they’re a bit more meaningful, then… the work has some problems on its hands.

The Dark Pictures: The Devil In Me is a game I feel has some major issues preventing me from enjoying it. And while I’ve seen comments online, and heard comments made while I was streaming the game that say it’s objectively bad because what the characters did was not what the person commenting would do… I feel comments like those are only surface level, and if I’m really going to try and get into why I felt the game fell flat I think it’s more important to look at the bigger picture, and what these small issues represent on a larger scale.

The game follows the crew of Lonnit Entertainment, a true crime investigative team who specialize in digging up the history of famous old serial killers, as they receive an invitation to a replica of a hotel owned by H.H Holmes, with whom the game seems convinced was “The First American Serial Killer” (the only accurate word in that declaration is “American”). Upon arrival, however, their host disappears on them, and they start to clue in that none of this is quite what it seems. Soon, they find out that the replica hotel (supposedly) possesses just as many deathtraps as the real thing, and that somebody’s hunting them down, one by one. It’s up to the player to explore the hotel, solve puzzles, and make tough decisions, that’ll either mean escape for all five group members, or make sure they don’t make it out of the hotel alive…

Gameplay-wise, I’ll give it credit: it functions well. That might sound rather backhanded, but what I mean by that statement is that regardless of the elements around it, the skeleton of the game itself works. To its core: The Devil in Me is a game where you influence a story in motion and choose what the characters do, with the intent of determining whether they live or die. To this extent, it succeeds fairly well: for its rather small scale, the game does a good job of letting your choices influence the narrative, and the sections where you can potentially get characters killed… mostly feel fair — if you’re observant, and can key into the game’s logic, you can get everybody out okay. If you don’t, you can at least understand what went wrong, and how exactly your choice got that character killed. There are also some really effective individual setpieces, ones where you have to think your way out of a situation, that really work to amp up the stress and make you worry about whether you’re making the correct choice, and these sections… honestly do make it work as a horror game — keeping the stress level up for the rest of the runtime and… never really stopping once it gets started.

Unfortunately, it takes a long while to start. You might think, by my writeup above, that the main plot gets going rather quickly. It doesn't. The first four hours of what’s only a 7-8~ hour game are dedicated to having… basically nothing happen. Instead you’re subjected to endless gameplay segments of exploring the island and the mansion which take up so much time and establish nothing in the meantime. Other games by Supermassive had these sections too, but they were much shorter — and mostly served either to bridge two parts of the story together or represent something, such as you, as the player, trying to dig up info in a specific place. Here they felt so bloated, especially since there seem to be a lot more puzzles gating progress than I feel these games ever had: each character has their own unique talent they can use to interact with things around them (and none of them ever feel like they’re particularly potent or meaningful) there’s a whole system around object physics and using them as a stepping stone to continue your way into the next room you can’t find the exit to because the game is so poorly lit that after nightfall hits it’s almost impossible to see what’s around you. There’s one I particularly liked — one where the feeling like you’re getting lost seems intentional, in a way that diegetically leads you into a later plot point, but as a whole all the puzzles, all the parts where you had to traverse from point A to point B felt like padding. Like, maybe the intention of the first was to start the story slow and build up the characters, but…

…aside from one, maybe two of them I really didn’t feel the cast of five was all that well defined. A good majority of them feel like blank slates of people. While some people get traits or character beats attached to them, they seem rather superficially applied: one character has a whole scene stop to establish that they’re deathly afraid of heights, and then later on when he and another character have to walk across a plank over a sheer drop into the ocean… he just crosses it immediately, without the player’s input, without even so much as a reaction, and it’s the other dude who you have to navigate to the other side. Then, later, when the same guy is up in a lighthouse… suddenly he’s afraid of heights again? Literally the only distinct trait we’re given for him and it’s not even handled consistently. And also… it doesn’t really feel like anybody changes as people during the course of the story, or has some sort of arc. There are token gestures (oh, I’m a hardcore smoker because it helps with my Anxiety that definitely comes up through the game, totally, absolutely, but now that I’ve survived death island….... nah, I think I’m gonna quit…......) but it really feels like, for a game that at points seems as if it’s trying to personalize the death traps to the people going in them, you could have put switched them around and put them in other people’s situations and they all would’ve turned out the exact same. Which would be fine, maybe, if that wasn’t really meant to be a focus… but then at the end of the game, when it recaps who lived and who dies, it specifically states that the survivors lived because they learned and improved as people which, like… no they didn’t. That didn’t happen. Nothing about what you said impacted whether they lived or died or not. Don’t try to pretend you did more with the characters than you actually did.

And, like, going back to my preamble for a second, there are complaints I’ve read and heard about the game’s stories which maybe address the surface level of a problem, but also I feel like these things speak to deeper flaws in the overall construction. Yes, the killer teleporting everywhere and being able to keep up with the main characters is kind of mind-boggling and tiring (like, maybe it’s a reference to how Jason does this in some of the later F13 movies? but also why would you do a throwback to one of the most decried elements of those movies?) but it also speaks to how poorly defined the island is — where is anything on this island in relation to each other? How can the killer go back to chasing one group of characters, then head over to a different building that seems to be nowhere near where he was before and menace a different group of characters there, then just as easily go back to chasing the original group again? What’s the point in that whole segment where we put in the work to get away from him when he can instantly just catch up again? In addition… look, “the plot requires people to act stupid!” is more universal of a critique than the people who use it seem to realize: if whoever writes it can sell it well, then I’m totally willing to buy that maybe a character can be a dumbass and get himself into trouble. It’s much harder of a sell when I, as the player, am being forced to do… things that seem kinda blatantly suicidal in the name of progressing the plot forward. There’s a part of the game where you’re exploring a basement where I came into a room, explored, and found no way forward other than some locked doors a conveyor belt which the game made quite an effort to establish would be insanely dangerous for a human to enter. So I went “okay, so I won’t” and then looked up a walkthrough to see how to get through the locked door… only to find out that the only way out was to go on the conveyor belt. If the game maybe had a cutscene where, say, the character jumps on it because the killer was threatening them at that very moment and the conveyor belt was the only way out, I’d buy it (IIRC there’s a similar thing in Until Dawn during a chase scene) but when I, as the person trying to explore and escape the room, are repeatedly denied other options beside something I wouldn’t want to do… it gets grating. Real quick.

And honestly… the game as a whole felt fairly grating, given how much stuff there was obviously padding and how some of the stuff that isn’t is in service to… ‘develop’ characters who never really felt all that defined in the first place. There’s neat stuff — cool setpieces, and it does mostly work well as far as choice and consequence are concerned, but… I didn’t have a particularly fun time with this game. And when you look past the surface level stuff you see people point out and try and look at the bigger (dark) picture, these issues are painted by deeper problems overall, and given how these rot the frame in which this story is built on… I think this one needed to go back to the drawing board. 4/10.

Definitely don’t know how I feel on them trying to make these more game like also think most the characters and drama aren’t as good as they were in Until Dawn (They need to bring Fessenden back!!) but this is like definitely the scariest supermassive game right?? The Erin audio segment is maybe supermassive’s best and the jump scares in this one are so good lol. Most the dark picture games kinda just rip on popular horror genres I’m beyond surprised that this is doing The Collection/Maniac!!?? also this has a Monster reference wtf???? Anyways very happy they finally found their footing with these.

This one is now my favorite of the anthology series.
I liked the setting - even I don't like how the story ends.
But that doesn't matter.
Everything till the end was thrilling. I even screamed on one point. ( And I really don't scream often)
At the beginning the gameplay was a bit buggy, but that was just the first half hour. After that I had no glitch or bugs anymore.
I recommend this game to everyone who is a fan of this genre.

If this game worked, it would be right up there with the best of the 'Dark Pictures' games. I did like how the two players are given very different paths through the game. The problem is, it doesn't work. On PS5, the glitches, some of them game-breaking, make it a nightmare to play. I could deal with the broken interaction points, the parts of the game wherein my character was invisible, the deaths that were impossible to prevent, etc. What I couldn't deal with is the broken Options menu that doesn't allow you to change your controls. Fighting with the sluggish camera speed and non-inverted camera direction for the entire game length made the game a chore to play. And my co-op partner and I had to attempt the final sequence three or four times, with the game breaking every time. Left it alone, came back a week later, changed some in-game decisions, and somehow made it to the ending. We fought against this game and somehow won. Not the experience you want with a piece of entertainment.

I like the concept of the resurrected murder hotel. I didn't like the storytelling, in that nothing really makes sense unless you connect the dots among all the documents and photos you encounter along the way. But none of that really matters if you're considering playing this on PS5. The game barely works. Damn shame to end Season 1 of 'Dark Pictures' on this note.

As the final entry in Season 1 of the anthology, The Devil in Me makes for an interesting time to implement new mechanics like a simple inventory system, some light climb/crouch prompts and even a couple of puzzles. None of these add any more to the game than they take away in my opinion, with most of them - puzzles especially - just dragging the already slow pace in those sections to a crawl, but it's nice to see Supermassive trying new things to keep the series fresh. Hopefully this was a test drive that future entries will improve upon.

That aside, this game definitely suffers from a pretty slow start post-prologue, and personally I didn't find any of the cast particularly interesting until after reaching the hotel, which is around the time it picks up anyway, small shame there.

I played this game on lethal, following the footsteps of my lovely gf and her thirst for seeing as many brutal deaths as possible :p Not gunna lie some of the minigame sections are pretty hard and I lost a character to failing one so that was fun! The premise and the deaths are pretty great, they could've maybe done a little more with some things but I wasn't disappointed at all with the experience that I got.

I'm not the first to say it but it really does hold true: It's not the best of the season, but it's probably the scariest. Some really great slasher/thriller scenes and stellar atmosphere throughout. Definitely recommend sticking through the slow build and occasional dip to get play for yourself :)

I really enjoy The Dark Pictures Anthology, it's so much fun with friends and it became our yearly ritual. But the Coop mode for The Dark Pictures Anthology : Devil in me is sadly a buggy mess. There are
character pop-ups everywhere, you fall through floors or the flashlight doesn't work sometimes so you have to reboot the game because otherwise it's too freaking dark. Also the camera and other tools are buggy and sometimes choose to fly around the character and have a mind of their own. For some voicelines the audio is missing and the face animation are really weird.
The characters don't show any emotions and sometimes to much. But behind all the bugs lies a pretty good game with Erin's first big segment probably being the scariest segment since Until Dawn. The story in it's core is interesting but not my favorit of the anthology and drags a little bit at the beginning. But I appreciate that they tried to do something different regarding the story. The characters are pretty much the typical Dark Pictures Anthology characters which doesn't make them bad but also not special. Overall a fun experience especially with friends which was impaired by the many bugs that destroyed the great atmosphere and tension. I recommend you to wait for a few patches so you have better experience. But I'm still excited for season 2

½ Star bonus for the dog ending.


Edit: seems like only the first playthrough was buggy. But I stand by my rating because it was the experience that I had and my other points are still valid.

What a mess. For a game that takes place in a location that feels a bit out of the movie The Collection (2012), you would expect a maximum number of ways to die and all the agency to get yourself ruined. Instead, it's one of the most linear "walk your way to our next trap" situations you can possibly get.

One of your characters can't even die for about 80% of the game and actively uses information they can't have access to based on what others have found out because that information never got shared with this person, but since the developers didn't account for certain permutations in who lives and dies, that information just gets used like it's common knowledge anyway.

I don't care if the Obol system allows you to purchase dioramas later on, it's just a worse Totem/Whatever system because its sole purpose is collectible currency for Extras.

Why are some of the doors marked with "locked" symbols on them, but some aren't, but neither can be entered in either case in any of the scenes where these things happen?

Why can I play through the game to completion but not get the trophy for completing the game unless I actively sit through the entirety of the credits without skipping through them, even though the game drops a gigantic prompt that urges me to skip the credits?

What a mess. Despite my complaining, I'll still play the Sci-Fi Space Horror game they drop for their Season 2 Premiere. Maybe we can get another House of Ashes in terms of fun. Here's to hoping.

4/10
After i completed the suddenly beautiful "House of Ashes" I was filled with great hope and hype for the next part, which, moreover, is the finale of the 1st season of the anthology of horror-games "Dark Pictures", before HOA I was very cold about the first 2 parts of the series, but devs clearly showed me that in the right shell with a rather interesting concept, the formula is working.
But then "The Quarry" happened.. the studio's next game, which was riveted in a little over half a year. This movie no longer belonged to the class B games - Dark Pictures, being an AAA "spiritual successor" of the Playstaion-exclusive Until Dawn for PC users, and the game also turned out to be relatively good. After that, it would be foolish to wait for the third high-quality product released in just 12 months, I was hoping for at least 6/10.. well, because it’s simply physically impossible to make a good interactive movie every half a year. In the end, everything turned out to be even sadder and Supermassive released a new worst project in its portfolio, which not for the better outperformed even "Little Hope", which could still have at least some advantages, and already in a couple of months the studio will release another project in the universe, for Playstation VR 2 - "The Dark Pictures: Switchback", the workers there probably very very crunching.
I don't even know what to say about "DIME", 10-hour sleep even with the company, even for fans of the genre, I can’t advise this game to anyone. The concept of a follower of the real-life maniac Henry Holmes, who built a hotel full of traps, was used as ineptly as possible, everything is limited by moving walls blocking the passage, most of the time you wander around absolutely default rooms, and you will dying either from a maniac knife or from a moving mannequin with knife, no, of course there are rooms of "death", but they are as banal as possible and are not remembered. The characters are also the worst, they don't have charisma or an interesting personality, their plot "branches" are not completed, not to mention the fact that devs are using the same faces from part to part, and earlier in each of their games there was at least 1 little-known, but at least somewhere noticeable actor from films, here, of course, money or imagination was no longer enough. I will also leave out the terrible technical state with a bunch of bugs and backdrops at the level of the Playstation 2, as well as a terribly uncomfortable camera that only starts moving a second after your mouse turns.
But, they added a lot of new mechanics, like now you can run, climb on ledges, in principle, there are more “walkable” locations, now we have an inventory and you can somehow use character`s items, added a simple mini-games, but all these innovations look somehow too primitive, crooked and "alien", it is impossible to lose in them, it would be better if there was nothing new at all than such a micro-, but still a waste of time, it`s also spoiling the impression a bit, by the way, they even made crooked mechanics moving garbage cans, like in The Last of Us). But I'm sure that the creators enjoyed the development, they were testing new features/ideas, but how it will be played by the players.. no one gave them time for such thoughts. Damn.. I remembered, here you also need to collect ebola.. obols, which the narrator does not need, like, for eg. cards in "The Quarry".. they are generally not needed in the game itself, only in the additional section of the menu for them you just can buy some 3d models.

🏆 And the funny thing is that the story doesn’t even have a sane ending, or rather, there no ending at all, but finale - is the most important part of the story, you won’t feel any climax/catharsis, the characters just basically run away, at the end, the devs stupidly 30-seconds cosplay the final fight from "House of Ashes", and that's it, we won't know who was under the mask, or how he teleports, no answers, and I remind you, this part positioned itself as the season 1 finale!! Then, supposedly, there will be games for 2 season and 3 season.. and what does this "seasonal" difference mean, when there was almost no "observer" in this part, he gave only 1 hint and learned to turn into a crow, and also someone at his door knocked 1 time, again there is no connection between the games, and the new part comes out again in a 1 year, it seems, seasons are just packs for sales. Now I will not believe in any next Dark Pictures, although the theme of space sounds conceptually interesting. Bandai namco, give back the passports to the poor workers of this crazy coneyor and give them a break.

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После прохождения внезапно прекрасной "House of Ashes" в меня вселилась огромная надежда и хайп на следующую часть, которая к тому же, является финалом 1 сезона антологии хоррор-игр "Тёмные картины", до этого я относился очень холодно к первым 2 частям серии, но мне наглядно показали, что в оболочке достаточно интересной концепции, формула то рабочая.
Но потом случился "The Quarry", следующая игра студии, которую склепали чуть больше, чем за пол года. Это кинцо уже никак не относилось к бюджетненьким Dark Pictures, представляя из себя AAA "духовного наследника" Playstaion-эксклюзива Until Dawn (Дожить до рассвета) для ПК-бояр, и игра тоже оказалась относительно неплохой. После этого ждать уже третий качественный продукт, выпущенный в период всего 12-ти месяцев, было бы глупо, я надеялся хотя-бы на 6/10.. ну потому что просто физически невозможно каждые пол года клепать хорошее интерактивное кино. В итоге всё оказалось даже печальнее и Supermassive выдала новый худший проект в своём портфолио, который смог переплюнуть даже "Little Hope", у которого ещё можно было найти хоть какие-то плюсы, причём уже через пару месяцев кампания выпустит ещё один проект во вселенной для Playstation VR 2 - "The Dark Pictures: Switchback", копец работники там кранчат за копейки, наверное.
Тут же я вообще не знаю о чём говорить, 10-часовой сон даже в компании, даже для любителей жанра, я никому не могу посоветовать эту игру. Концепция последователя реально существующего маньяка Генри Холмса, построившим отель, полный ловушек, использована максимально бездарно, всё ограничивается задвигающимся стенами, перегораживающими проход, большую часть времени вы бродите по абсолютно дефолтным комнатам, а умираете либо от ножа маньяка, либо от ножа двигающегося манекена, нет, тут, конечно, есть комнаты "смерти", но они максимально банальные и не запоминаются. Персонажи тоже худшие, характеры никакие, их ветки недописаны, не говоря уже о том, что они надоели юзать одни и те же лица из части в часть, а ещё раньше в каждой их игре был хоть 1 малоизвестный, но хоть где-то заметный актёр из фильмов, тут, конечно, денег или фантазии уже не хватило. Я ещё опущу ужасное техническое состояние с кучей багов и задниками на уровне Playstation 2, а также ужасно неудобную камеру, которая начинает двигаться только через секунду после того, как повернётся ваша мышка.
Но, добавили и много новых механик, типо теперь можно бегать, залезать на выступы, в принципе "ходибильных" локаций стало больше, теперь у нас есть инвентарь и можно как-то юзать предметы персонажей, есть простейшие кликерные мини-игры, но все эти новшества смотрятся как-то слишком примитивно, криво и чужеродно, проиграть в них невозможно, лучше бы вообще не было ничего нового, чем вот такая микро-, но всё же пустая трата времени, тоже немного портящая впечатление, кстати, они даже сделали кривоватую механику передвигания мусорных баков, как в The Last of Us). Но я уверен, что разработчикам было в кайф, они тестили новые фишки/идеи, а как это будет играться игрокам.. времени на такие раздумья им никто не давал. Блиин.. я вспомнил, тут ещё надо собирать эболы/оболы, которые, вы не представляете, не нужны рассказчику, как карты в Зе Квери, они вообще в самой игре нафиг не нужны, через доп раздел менюшки за них просто какие-то 3д модельки можно открывать, но в игре об этом - не говорилось.

🏆 И самое смешное, что у истории даже нет вменяемого финала, точнее вообще никакого нет, а ведь это самая важная часть истории, никакой кульминации/катарасиса вы не почувствуете, герои просто базово сбегают, в конце разрабы 30-секундно бездарно косплеят финальный файт из "House of Ashes", и на этом всё, ни кто был под маской, ни как телепортируется, никаких ответов, причём я напомню, эта часть позиционировала себя, как финал 1 сезона!! Потом типо будут игры уже 2 и сезона, а в чём смысл этого "сезонного" разграничения, когда в этой части "деда-наблюдателя" даже почти не было, он дал всего 1 подсказку и научился превращаться в ворону, а ещё ему в дверь кто-то постучал, опять никакой связи между играми, и новая часть опять выходит через год вроде-бы, походу сезоны - это просто паки для распродаж. Я не буду теперь верить ни в одну следующую Дарк Пикчурс, хоть и тема про космос концептуально звучит интересно. Bandai namco, верните уже паспорта бедным работникам бешенного конвеера и дайте им перерыв.

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The sixth horror game from Supermassive, and the fourth entry in the Dark Pictures series, really shows the flaws with the series. This is probably the buggiest game I played all year, from audio bugs, constant pop in of textures, and once where we had to restart the game since the flashlight wouldn't function. I could excuse all that, but the plot in this one is just really tired. The setting sounds good on paper but doesn't live up to its potential, the villain is an invincible Halloween/Friday the 13th style monster who lumbers around, and they have again used the same tired characters at each others throats. I was fairly interested in this title when they first showed the preview, but within a few minutes I found myself not caring for the setting. They've announced that there will be a break between this one and future "season 2" entries into the series, and I hope they take the time to fix the bugs and the gameplay loop. Once again, the preview for their next title has me intrigued, but we'll see. This game could've been a lot better with some Resident Evil style puzzles and exploration.

It's really funny how SuperMassive's Quarry or Until Dawn style games are like their premiere HBO Original shows, with superior face tracking tech, writing, replayability, etc. Meanwhile, the Dark Pictures games are basically the stuff HBO sticks on HBO Max. Just under-the-radar projects that are thrown out to die at the worst times of the year. Devil in Me is fine. Not the worst Dark Pictures game but still nothing exceptional. It's cool to see SuperMassive move away from the monster-focused villains of the previous titles and swap them for something more human but the overarching problem here is still pacing issues, bad writing and immersion-breaking face capture.

There's just so much time wasted on long, arduous segments that are meant to build tension and explore the characters, but instead just meander. These characters are never going to be interesting because the writing never does much with them outside of going, oh, this one is a bit mean, this one is really scared all the time, and these ones have relationship issues. And that's absolutely fine. You don't have an Until Dawn length runtime to flesh them out and build compelling inter-personal relationships. But it wastes time making them walk down long corridors or across bland open environments solving simple puzzles and chatting when they don't have the personalities to fill the silence.

Just get to the horror, which is largely where these smaller SuperMassive games thrive. This one definitely has a problem picking between being a Saw-like psychological thriller or a Jason-Vorhees-esque slasher, and excels much, much more when it focuses on the former, but it's largely all fine. It just takes a very long time to get into those parts and, once you've eventually settled into the rhythm, the game runs out of creativity fast, devolving into various scenes where you enter a room, the killer shows up, you hide and then he chases you. Rinse and repeat and that's the last two hours of the game.

It's still worth it though to see the characters look at each other with nothing but cold emptiness behind their eyes as they admit they love each other or recoil in fear. It's basically like playing a Yorgos Lanthimos video game, where every character is an alien feigning emotion to understand what the small squishy Earth people feel every day.

Disappointing. Starts out promising and has a few genuinely great moments, but those are few and far between in The Devil In Me's overly long story. There are way too many long sequences wandering aimlessly or fumbling around in the dark that grind everything to a halt. Long QTE sequences where a single mistake is punishable by death and arbitrary decisions with surprise fatal consequences make this the hardest of the Dark Pictures games as well, extra frustrating when the game is already so bloated.

I feel like this game is Supermassive giving in to some of their worst tendencies, and I hope they learn the right lessons from this misstep going forward.