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.

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.

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.

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.

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.