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'.

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.

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 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.

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.

Все что касается плюсов игры я могу выделить лишь:
1) Неплохую, нагнетающую моментами атмосферу;
2) Геймплейная составляющая (добавили разнообразные фичи, при этом забивая на некоторые из них же сразу после первой демонстрации);
3) Если Вы играете в компании (а я нег представляю как в проекты серии Dark Pictures можно проходить в соло), то можно от души посмеятся с некоторых кринжовых моментов.
Все остальное в игре ужасно:
1) Маньяк. Максимально тупой болванчик, который просто ходит и делает максимально все, чтобы ваши персонажи не были убиты. У Вас больше шансов умереть от действий сокамандника, чем от убийцы.
2) Отвратительный, унылый и каррикатурный сюжет, который не преподносит ничего интересного и не даёт никакого игрового опыта нового. Твистов просто нет, хотя в предыдущих трех играх серии авторы как-то пытались под конец немного перевернуть восприятие игры.
3) Сами главные герои также максимально глупые, в их действиях, иногда, полностью отсутствует логика, да и харизмой и какой-то интересной историей они не обладают.
4) Большие проблемы с технической составляющей. В первую очередь, хочется выделить отвратительные лицевые анимации и анимации передвижения. Все это выглядит дёшево для 2022 года.
5) Огромное количество ненужной информации в виде листовок, которую вываливают на игроков. Увы, все читать это максимально скучно уже к середине игры, потому что там нет абсолютно ничего интересного. Да и без толку, потому что мы в своём прохождении не нашли только штук 5 из 50 примерно и все равно не имели нормального и внятного представления о происходящем.
По итогу хочется сказать, что в это играть надо исключительно в компании, а лучше вообще не играть, потратив 8 часов на что-то более полезное.
4/10.