The Dark Pictures Anthology: The Devil in Me

We can again!

The Dark Pictures is back! I have been working on this game series for years and so far Little Hope has fascinated me the most. However, on the GamesCom we had a preview of The Devil in Me. I felt a bit like Saw as I watched the scenes go by. I was therefore very curious about the final result of the game. The time has come and we were able to start with the game on Playstation 5.

In The Devil in Me, players are invited into a beautiful recreation of the World’s Fair hotel built by American serial killer HH Holmes. They control the Lonnit Entertainment crew, low-budget documentary filmmakers lured to the hotel with the promise of something unique, something that could boost the ratings of their true-crime show. Their fate rests in the hands of the players, who are forced to make impossible decisions under pressure, while their murderous host watches their every move. In addition to an all-new story and an all-star cast, the season finale includes a number of new gameplay features. Game characters can now also climb, jump, crawl and run through exploration areas. This is something we don’t know about Supermassive Games when we look at all their games that have been released. Also, there seemed to be more puzzles in Cologne than ever before. Is the series finally ready for a refreshing new ending?

The story revolves around an amateur crew led by a film studio who are invited to a hotel to shoot. It’s still quite unusual for you to accept such a proactive invitation, but that’s okay. Let’s go on the adventure! Soon the road to the hotel proves unusual enough to expect other extremes, and this one is coming. I’ve seen better storylines in the Dark Pictures Anthology, although this is a nice mix that takes away elements from movies like SAW and a bit of 1408 and The Shining. A murderous figure in the hotel tries to embarrass all the characters with necessary traps and psychologically maddening effects. It’s not very deep, but by itself all too effective in its narrowness. They try to set the mood mainly through claustrophobic environments where you will have practically zero freedom. Plus, it suffocates for moments of fear, so you’re constantly on guard for what’s to come. Aside from the interesting beginning, it takes a while for the story to really move forward and become interesting. It’s only after an hour or two that everything starts to work, and as far as I’m concerned it’s a bit late. Thereafter, the game alternates between memorable thrilling moments and less thrilling action moments. In total, a walk-through takes around 6 hours, making this game slightly longer than its predecessors. Furthermore, the game can be played solo or in online multiplayer, but also via couch mode, where you can go on with up to 5 players alternating between characters.



A little more of this and that…

From a technical point of view we can expect the same gameplay as the games in the series we already know, but with the addition of some light elements. You’ll encounter light puzzle elements, including setting up fuse boxes correctly and entering codes into machines. They’re all very simple tasks that you need to complete, but they add something extra to the already standard click events that you need to perform. You can also platform a little more than before. In this way you can jump, bend, run and climb, where you could or could not before to a very limited extent. It just adds a little more dimension to the gameplay. However, it’s not very special. Also, you will notice that the characters have a less deep character. In The Quarry and Little Hope, for example, you really saw some character building that was there, but it’s entirely absent here. In the end you don’t really know who was good and bad. And this while the construction is so long but that is mainly due to the road to the hotel which is too long. As a result, you hardly get a bond with the characters in the game.

Technically, the game has its sloppiness too. Scene and gameplay transitions are a bit shaky at times and frame-rate sometimes drops to a low point, even on PlayStation 5. It didn’t bother me too much. Also, I sometimes got into fights with the physics and the characters were a bit in my way at times, so the controls sometimes don’t do what you want. The game is also graphically a bit hit and miss. For example, the director of the film being shot looks very convincing, but the colorful characters look much less and have skin that looks more like plastic than leather. The “glow” that shines from it is too exaggerated. The same goes for environments. Everything looks more or less the same in the hotel and there is a lot of reuse of elements and spaces that you will pass through time and time again. Even plantings at the beginning of the game sometimes look mediocre, like ivy leaves. On the other hand, there are previously unseen details of character hair and the expressions of various in-game characters. In some moments you can’t believe your eyes, and in a later scene you think they didn’t try too. The reuse of some animations, including the lifting of playmates, makes it feel even less convincing as a film. All in all, they haven’t made much progress over The Quarry, for example, but overall it still looks good. Also, this time they have thought about the DualSenseticket inspector. For example, the rain feedback is very sensitive and detailed.

The Devil in Me is certainly not the best game in the Dark Pictures series, but it certainly isn’t the worst either. The story itself was quite appealing to me and at times the game is more than exciting on its own. Yet it’s not all compelling enough to lack the tension of a really good horror movie like The Shining. This is partly because there is little character building and you will have less bonding with characters. As a result, you don’t care much if someone dies or when you sacrifice someone. Plus, the characters are also dumb enough to even accept the hotel’s invitation, as you see it all coming from miles away. In terms of predictability, this is therefore not the best game, even if the scares are sometimes less predictable. Furthermore, the game has minor technical glitches and shortcomings in terms of quality, which sadly means that the game doesn’t close the series convincingly enough. All in all, if you, like me, have always enjoyed Dark Picture games, you will enjoy this game too. So don’t be put off and buy this game if you can’t get enough of this genre.

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