The Dark Pictures: The Devil in Me

2022 | Supermassive Games | Playstation 5

Ah, here we are, at the tail end of the first major milestone of an ambitious undertaking to the most guilty pleasures of anthologies. Supermassive Games’ The Dark Pictures has been an odd entity within the horror genre for the last 5 years, with them releasing an entry into these interactive horror movies on an annual basis. We started the journey with the somewhat polarizing Man of Medan (2019), through the small town of Little Hope (2020), into the depths of the earth with House of Ashes (2021) and now we’ve arrived at the season 1 finale with The Dark Pictures: The Devil in Me. This time we leave the supernatural behind in favor of a more tangible, human threat, namely America’s first serial killer; H.H. Holmes.
A flavor of things to come is presented in a prologue that brings the player immediately into the action, serving as a tutorial that separates consequences from the main group. We’re transported back to 1893 as a newly wed couple checks into the World Fair Hotel. The owner is kind enough to upgrade them to the honeymoon suite (don’t worry, it’s on the house) and the couple get ready for dinner. However, before they can even reach their appetizers they are chased down through the hotel by the receptionist, now brandishing a folding razor. The hotel itself seems to come alive, with corridors shifting, seemingly at the whim of its creator, and soon the lovers find their tragic demise, facing each other as they draw their last breath separated by a pane of glass, unable to touch.

In The Devil In Me we follow a crew of documentary film makers, Lonnit Entertainment, who are down on their luck with their show “Architects of Murder“, seeing little to no success. However, the director and producer, Charlie, gets a phone call from a mysterious man by the name of Du’Met who claims to own a recreation of H.H. Holmes’ Murder Castle off the coast of Lake Michigan, and is willing to let the group use it as a filming location. Naturally, seeing this as a golden goose, Charlie accepts and him and his crew, consisting of Katie, the presenter, Mark the cinematographer, Jamie the lighting technician and the newest hire, Erin the sound engineer, are picked up by a limo to meet Du’Met at the ferry leading to the island. Du’Met is a strange man, who deeply favors his privacy and frequently remarks that he should not be filmed as the group makes their way to the island. Said island is littered with signs that say “KEEP OUT” or “PRIVATE PROPERTY” framed with rusted fences and a whole lot of barbed wire. It’s not the friendliest environment, but the ideal set piece for a murder documentary.
Once the crew have settled into their rooms, they reconvene for dinner with their host to discuss the options for filming. However, the host is nowhere to be seen.
From here the story kicks into gear with the characters separated from one another, as walls seem to come alive, and rooms seem to be inhabited by strange animatronics which range from the barkeep, based on a scene from The Shining, to a deranged and deformed representation of the crew themselves. Things spiral out of control pretty quickly as Erin vanishes. Trapped in a dark room she screams for help, but the only answer comes when a wall slides open to make way for a hulking figure wearing a mask resembling H.H. Holmes. Charlie inadvertently dragged them into, not just a recreation of the Murder Castle, but the house of an actual murderer who takes great pleasure in toying with his victims before mercilessly killing them and using the remains as parts for this sickly funhouse. It is all part of a plan to lure the invited into deadly traps, deadlier choices and mortifying consequences.

The premise for The Devil in Me draws a lot of inspiration from movies like The Shining and the Saw franchise as its design inspiration. The former is evident in the hotel’s design, especially with how the bar room is framed. The latter finds itself in the elaborately designed traps, pitfalls and dilemma’s the gang has to survive. Even the sawblade trap from Until Dawn pops in to say hello at some point in the game. The house itself has a lot of tricks up its sleeve as well, which works great with some of the newer gameplay elements that get introduced with this installment.
The Devil in Me feels much more akin to a combination of the, now familiar, formula from The Dark Pictures, with added elements of PlayStation 2 survival horror design conventions, such as the way you explore the hotel. Characters can freely roam through hallways and solve the various lighthearted puzzles to progress through the game, rather than the whole experience being an interactive movie. It’s something that House of Ashes had played with, but this one drastically expands on that. It gives the game a fresh feel and makes it stand out, especially for those who are familiar with the other works of Supermassive Games.
Each character also has an inventory tied to the d-pad, with each character having unique ways to interact with their environment using the items at their disposal based on their role in the film crew. Erin has a directional microphone to pick up on subtle sounds to guide her through the maze of corridors, Jamie has a toolbelt that allows her to fix electronics, Mark has his camera to gather evidence and his monopod to reach objects that others can’t, and Charlie mostly just really needs a smoke. It’s not always used as effectively, since at no point in the story did I find any use for Mark’s camera outside of the flash bulb to highlight interactable objects.
Traversal is made more interesting by having characters be able to jump over gaps, crouch underneath objects, vault over barricades and shimmy between crevices. It’s all done with the grace of a Playstation 3 game desperately trying to hide its loading zones, but it’s very welcome to see them try out new things to spice the anthology up a bit. Exploration also gives us a runcycle for Charlie that is hilariously similar to how James always looks like he’s trying to run to the bathroom in Silent Hill 2. It’s not the greatest execution on innovation, but hey, you’ve got to start somewhere.
The usual suspects also make a return, like the quick time events during action sequences, aiming your weapon at a specific spot and, unfortunately for me, the stay calm mechanic is heavily used throughout the game as characters scatter about to try their best to hide. I’m not a fan of this mechanic, considering the consequences for failing are often a bit too high for my taste, however this is the most functional iteration and the most forgiving. Naturally every choice you make has some consequence to the story, usually divided between rational, emotional and “say nothing“, which each influence the direction the story takes. This installment does see the shortest payoff for certain choices, with characters being killed off within moments of making the wrong one. Things like splitting up when being chased could, for example, result in a character not being able to force open a door leaving them trapped and at the mercy of the killer chasing them.

The Devil in Me, unfortunately, is a major step down in performance and graphics when compared to the previous entries. This is immediately noticeable once the opening cinematic starts playing and the compression on the video feels like someone left it sitting at a comfortable 240p. It’s not as unplayable feeling like Man of Medan, which had some performance issues causing certain prompts to not work, but it is riddled with pop-ins, inaccurate subtitles, missing sound effects, glaring continuity errors and characters zipping in and out of frame between shots. It’s incredibly distracting when you have a discussion about your own survival when Mark needs to be loaded into the frame from default pose whenever the camera decides to cut to any shot involving him. With The Dark Pictures it’s somewhat normal for characters to be overly animated as they wave their arms around and bob their heads in exaggerated ways to indicate emotions, but I can count on one hand the moments I felt like someone actually looked at the character they were speaking to. Most of the time characters default to a sort of downward diagonal angle as they violently shake around as if the floorboards just made a very offensive joke. The animation feels somewhat jarring and it detracts from what are supposed to be big death scenes. Sadly, I’m not the only one as multiple people report experiencing problems across all versions, with the co-op causing even more problems. Thankfully I mostly experienced some harmless things like the aforementioned pop-ins and Mark A-posing into position during serious relationship talk, and one moment when Charlie was hiding in a cooling box with his lighter on, clearly visible from the killer’s perspective.

Another unfortunate victim in this downward spiral is the writing. The characters in this game feel very inconsistent, as if we’re witnessing a draft version of their interactions. It might be the result of my rational only run, but even then you’d often experience interactions that directly contradict themselves in the same conversation, or characters getting mad at others over things they themselves did. It makes the cast come across as more than a bit antagonizing and left me more curious to see how far this ship could sink before the credits rolled. There are some wild moments in which you have to suspend your disbelief to stay within the scenes themselves. The killer shows up in places that are plot convenient without taking any sense of transitioning time into account and this makes it feel like the game only had cool scenes in mind and not how to get there. There is a moderately acceptable explanation for when you’re in the hotel, but it becomes very noticeable once you’re outside. Fortunately though, the game redeems itself completely, because you can pet and save the dog!

Ultimately The Dark Pictures: The Devil in Me shows a pattern of wanting to expand on the games with each installment and introduce new mechanics, but possibly not the means or know-how to successfully and satisfyingly implement them within the given deadlines.
I speculated a bit on whether this was due to complications during development with the pandemic, but couldn’t find any sources to substantiate that theory. My hope is that they keep innovating and learning with each branch they trip over to create something truly wonderful, and not get discouraged by the things that don’t work. If House of Ashes is an example to take from, they’ve grown comfortable enough with the genre that they can make most stories interesting. And as a result of their trial and error on this season, I can see Supermassive Games develop one hell of a second season to The Dark Pictures. As for The Devil in Me, it’s kind of a take it or leave it. It shows a lot of promise and the willpower to try out new ideas, but it comes at the cost of performance, believability and immersion when they fail to execute on these ideas properly. It leaves the overall experience feeling somewhat lackluster. Maybe they’ll do a similar overhaul as Man of Medan got a year or so back to fix some of the performance issues, but until then it remains hard to recommend, except for the folks out there that really enjoy this anthology or simply want to get ready for the next leg of this journey. Regardless of my opinions on The Devil in Me, I am very hopeful and excited for a thrilling second season!

Instant Transmission/10