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.
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.