With The Devil In Me, Supermassive Games rounds out season one of its Dark Pictures Anthology. While we’ve enjoyed the previous entries a lot, there’s still been a little room for improvement with each; have Supermassive managed to end on a high note?
The short answer is, well, kind of. If you’ve enjoyed the series up until now then you’ll be right at home here. There are changes and additions to gameplay but generally things are as you expect: choices, more choices, QTE’s, and (potentially) lots of death, with a good side of misdirection and frights thrown in. However, based on my time with the game there’s still that extra bit of polish that needs to be put in to elevate it to the next level.
We’ll start on the positive side though, and the tale and character work here are some of the best in the series to date. After a brief (and violent) introduction set in the late 1800’s introduces us to America’s First (real world) Serial Killer H.H. Holmes and his murder hotel, whereby he traps and kills innocents in all manner of gruesome ways, we then set about following the Lonnit Production crew – a team of true crime documentary makers who receive a mysterious phone call to visit a faithful recreation of the famous hotel for their upcoming shoot.
Lead by Charlie Lonnit, we alternate between him, sound engineer Erin, front lady Kate, and production crew Mark and Jamie as they investigate the hotel. The interplay between the five characters is entertaining and well written, coming off believable and full of hinted backstory. When things inevitably shit the bed, they are – for the most part – believable enough to get sucked into their plight and horror with. As tricky as it must be to make games of this sort, there are still a few moments where a character will have a complete change of personality at the whim of a camera cut, though this is admittedly rare enough to not properly interrupt the flow.
The scenarios the characters find themselves in are horrifying and brutal, yet we found ourselves eager to carry on down that dark corridor to see what would happen next. From moments of suspense to a more rote but still well shot chase sequence, the horror in Devil is well paced and presented.
It also carries on the series high visual and audio quality. Characters look stunning and each environment is rendered with lots of detail and plenty to interact with. As gruesome as some of it can be, there is a fine art to presenting this sort of horror without just slapping red everywhere and Supermassive have made excellent use of the tech at hand to craft a believably horrible place to fight for your life.
Gameplay is expanded somewhat in Devil; where in previous titles there was usually extra trinkets of story to be found for those willing to explore, here we’re given a bit more agency to roam about the linear areas. As well as plentiful story extras to find we are also on the hunt for Obols, a currency that can be used to purchase Dioramas in the main menu. Thankfully these are purely for looking at, and there’s no real need to hunt them down to give us an advantage in the actual game.
Movement is expanded to allow us to mantle or shimmy through environments, though as great an effort that Devil makes in the opening chapter to let us know that pressing A will let us do an action, these are still mostly limited to scripted moments that we have no choice but to do to continue. There are a few sneaky Obols to find but it’s still a case of ‘press A to action’ rather than giving us real control of the characters. If anything, we’d rather have had this part removed for all it adds, simply serving as a way to give the impression of a more direct hands on gameplay experience. We’re quite happy with limited movement around small area before the QTE’s and dialogue choices come back to the fore.
We played through the entire story in co-op online and a few chapters solo and found that while the co-op is definitely still the way to play it if you can, it was very buggy indeed. Characters flickering in and out of existence or having their torso’s twisted to impossible shapes, laggy connections showing different outcomes for each player before re-syncing, and just a general lack of polish made for a much less enjoyable time. One scene saw Mark hold his camera up as pre-scripted only to keep it up for the following cutscene and playable section. Considering how well the last three titles have held up online, this has been our biggest bugbear with Devil, and something we hope can be patched soon so we can play again.
Of course, depending on who survives the tale, the full picture of the story may not be revealed. But even with only two of the five surviving our co-op run we still felt the story wrapped up nicely, albeit somewhat muted thanks to all the death. For our money, this could very well end up being second only to Man of Medan in terms of story enjoyment and characters. One thing we’ve enjoyed about the Dark Pictures games so far have been the short runtime allowing us to play it through multiple times easily. Devil clocks in a little longer – around 6 hours – though it’s just on the upper limit for us in terms of length to replayability.
Conclusion
The Devil In Me is a solid round-off to Season One of The Dark Pictures Anthology. It has some of the best character and story work so far, with gruesome, inventive horror that kept us on our toes. Once the online woes are sorted we’ll be jumping back in for another go, and can recommend fans alike do the same.
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This game was reviewed based on Xbox S|X review code, using an Xbox S|X console. All of the opinions and insights here are subject to that version. Game provided by publisher.
