The Devil in Me é o quarto jogo da franquia The Dark Pictures Anthology, e este fecha a primeira temporada de jogos da franquia. Como todos jogos da franquia a obra apresenta uma trama interativa com elementos de drama e terror, o elemento de terror não é surpreendente já que a obra é desenvolvida pela SuperMassive Games, a produtora de The Quarry, Little Nightmares e Until Dawn.

Antes de mais nada, é preciso deixar claro a forma como a obra pode ser consumida, é possível jogar solo controlando todos os personagens, jogar multiplayer online com outras pessoas ou jogar presencialmente com outras 4 pessoas com a mecânica de passar o controle para outra pessoa. Eu consumi a obra presencialmente com meus amigos.

A história conta com 5 personagens que fazem parte de uma produtora de filmes, temos o diretor, a repórter, o fotógrafo, a menina do som e outra da parte elétrica/iluminação. Esses foram chamados para produzir um documentário da réplica do hotel onde o famoso assassino em série HH Holmes fez sua fama, o hotel é habitado por um assassino que se inspirou em Holmes para continuar a série de assassinatos. Está dada a trama da história, o objetivo é descobrir o que está acontecendo e tentar escapar com vida do hotel infernal.

Como proposta, a obra apresenta uma trama interativa, onde cada personagem pode fazer uma série de escolhas que mudarão o rumo desta. O grande ponto é a quantidade de possibilidades de finais, já que dependendo das escolhas dos jogadores é alterado quais personagens sairão vivos ou mortos no final. Diferentemente de outras obras com possibilidade de escolhas onde não há grande impacto na maioria das decisões tomadas, em The Devil in Me as escolhas realmente importam, pois elas afetam o futuro de diferentes maneiras, permanecer com a posse de uma chave de fenda ou entregá-la para alguém pode mudar completamente o destino de um dos personagens.

A obra consegue entregar tensão e desespero em vários momentos, é tenebroso e amedrontador, mesmo sabendo que se trata de um ser humano há um ar sobrenatural rodando o jogo a todo momento, isso se dá também pelas diversas armadilhas, e paredes falsas presentes no hotel. Os jumpscares são mais impactantes ainda quando se joga presencialmente com os amigos, pois os sustos em conjunto funcionam em cadeia e consequentemente se tornam maiores.

Sempre é possível escolher entre 3 opções nas escolhas das ações, e essas escolhas vão traçando a personalidade de cada personagem, mudando inclusive a relação entre eles. Essa personalidade é importante na construção da personagem, que não é tão profunda, até porque é quase impossível desenvolver a fundo 5 personagens independentes em 6h de gameplay. Esses personagens estão prontos, eles tem um passado bem construído e consolidado, os acontecimentos testam a personalidade destes e fazem alguns delineamento de certos traços como companheirismo, confiança e até uma certa compaixão.

Um elemento da jogabilidade que se comunica com o modelo dos personagens é o inventário com itens ligados à profissão de cada personagem, como a garota do som ter um microfone para ouvir através das paredes ou o fotógrafo com sua câmera, flash e pau de selfie. É complicado fazer as escolhas em momentos críticos que podem mudar completamente o rumo da história sem nenhuma ideia das consequências, para remediar isso há o elemento das premonições, há momentos que é necessário escolher entre correr ou se esconder e uma dessas escolhas pode ter um final desastroso, as premonições auxiliam na previsão desses acontecimentos dando dicas para os jogadores, e obviamente isso não é dado de graça, é uma recompensa pela exploração de cada personagem.

O elemento de mistério presente na obra está envolto na ideia de tentar descobrir quem é o sucessor do famigerado serial killer HH Holmes, a sequência narrativa e as pistas expostas fazem positivamente uma progressão gradual até o mistério ser revelado. Porém, acredito que falte algo nessa descoberta, pois ela perde seu objetivo imediatamente após ser revelada, não há benefícios extras em relação a ela, como por exemplo descobrir uma fraqueza emocional ou física do herdeiro maligno. A função exclusivamente narrativa diminui a relevância do mistério em relação à jogabilidade.

Um problema claro, é o quanto as escolhas impactam não somente o personagem do jogador mas os personagens dos outros jogadores, por exemplo na minha gameplay meu personagem morreu pela escolha de outra jogador, eu não tive opção de escolha, ele escolheu e eu morri, acho essa ideia complicada pois o jogador sente que está atado aos outros a um nível exacerbado. Essa modelagem auxilia na criação do companheirismo mas atrapalha em uma competição sadia que é criada entre os jogadores para se safar das situações. Esse elemento pode ser negativo ou positivo, depende bastante do tipo de jogador e o que ele entende ser mais importante na obra.

Esteticamente, a obra conta com um realismo que auxilia bastante na construção da atmosfera de terror e suspense que acompanha toda a duração do jogo. Essa é bem empregada e conta com uma qualidade fantástica, é um excelente trabalho da SuperMassive Games.

Concluindo, The Devil in Me tem pontos positivos que devem ser levados em consideração, como toda a construção da trama interativa, seja nas mecânicas, seja na história, sem contar a criação da atmosfera tenebrosa que circunda toda a obra e o multiplayer para se compartilhar a experiência de terror. Porém, há pontos negativos que atrapalham na jogabilidade entre os jogadores, como as decisões e atos de um jogador influenciando demasiadamente no personagem do outro, esse tipo de modelagem apela para o apoio e companheirismo entre os jogadores, mas mata a competição sadia que inevitavelmente vai ser construída entre os players em game multiplayer.

For full context I have played all of the Dark Pictures games, Until Dawn, and The Quarry.

The Devil in Me is the Dark Pictures game I've enjoyed the most. (Until Dawn is still the best of this series overall by a wide margin though.)

The ending brings up a lot of questions but in general it was fun and had a lot of interesting death scenes.

The negative: The inventory system was less involved than I expected. I feel like the camera system and the individual characters special abilities could have been better utilized. Some of the character reactions seemed forced and downright weird.

The positive: It's a beautiful game and they made good use of the environments. The pacing had good spots to catch your breath while also keeping you a bit on edge. The overall plot was fun if a little accidentally goofy at times. I enjoyed playing it and thought the information was spaced out well. With every new game they improve the controls and this is no exception. I did have trouble with the hide mechanic but that's more of a me problem than a game problem and there are a lot of instances where it's not so much that success at a quick time is "success" as it is a different action. The introduced that in House of Ashes and I'm glad they kept it as it really heightens the choose your own adventure book feeling.

I haven't gotten all of the endings and achievements yet but I have played through a few times and plan on getting them all at some point.

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.

The Devil in Me manages to keep The Dark Pictures' slow progression and evolution as the first season goes on and builds upon it - with new gameplay mechanics thrown into the mix, like; a basic inventory, balance beams and hiding segments (I'm sure there's more).

What it also manages to keep up is the feeling that The Dark Pictures are "unrefined". Small visual glitches plague the series, and, some moments that completely take you out of it - for example, watching the villain sew up a new animatronic only to see the thread is hanging loose and clips through the doll without so much as interacting with it and then still being vertical when the animation is complete. There's just a lot of these moments, paired with stilted dialogue due to the choices that have been present in all "Episodes" that just really need that extra bit of attention and care.

Back to the Devil in Me specifically though, I appreciated it being yet another case grounded in reality and not a creature-feature (something that, besides House of Ashes, has been present in the other episodes). I thought the characters were all pretty "realistic" and well written (and Jessie Buckley was 10/10), the story itself was interesting with it being based off of H. H. Holmes and his "murder" hotel.

They also ramped up the difficulty on this one and choices that look obvious are not exactly so. This was the first game in the series where I ended up with less than 4 survivors by the ending due to things I really thought would save them.

Fingers crossed there's more of these based-on or involving serial killer type moments in season 2.

While I like this series they are not without their faults and the Devil in Me is no exception. While I do like the idea of a transforming murder house with a stalker killer the execution was a little underwhelming. My biggest problem with this entry is that I feel like my choices really didn't lead to any character deaths but more than naught it was a bad quick time event out of nowhere or a character death happened automaticlly where I feel like I didn't really factor into it. THat and also i feel like a lot of the clues were very misleading. Also the killer appears out of thin air so many times, even in illogical places that even Jason Vorhees is scratching his head. There was one mini game where you have to time the button press to stay quiet as to not get spotted. I think I failed this one everytime and I know i hit it right on the spot. I dunno if it's bugged but it sure felt like it. Which always led to something bad or straight up death. It feels cheap when it's by this instead of a bad call. That's the problem with this series a lot of events feel random instead of player choice or smart descion making. The other thing I think this game drops the ball on is it's pacing. There are long stretches of the game of forced slow walking moments and exploration that instead of feeling rewarding only feels frustrating. Movement in these games always feels stiff and akward. This was a big issue on Men of Medan which I felt the next two games improved on a bit but here it feels like regression. On top of that there are some spots of this game where it is so dark that I can't see where im going or what im supposed to interact with. It happens for so long I just say to myself "Can I just move the story forward a bit and make a choice already?" Despite all of this if you have liked the other games this one isn't much different. It just sucks because I feel like House of Ashes was much better and I had hoped this one would be just as good. Well there is always hope for the next one.

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.

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.

I love the Dark Pictures Anthology. This game is the end of Season 1. Like, what does that mean? There's no meaningful connection between any of these games, I don't think. And the second "season" seemingly starts almost immediately considering this game ends with a trailer for the next game.
The Devil in Me is theoretically the second best game in this series of four. Probably the worst in terms of actually functioning properly without game breaking glitches and bugs, but second in how good it is were it to work properly.

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.