The Dark Pictures Anthology: The Devil in Me

Sooo let's get this out of the way: The Dark Pictures series' "anthology" status was a neat idea but I'm not sure if I like it as much as I want to. The idea of putting out annual, short, standalone games that use the same core mechanics so that they're easy to pick up and play is cool. And it's a good option for interactive fiction: if a game will benefit from multiple playthroughs, a shorter playtime works in its favour. I'm much more likely to embark on a second or third playthrough if it's only a 4 hour commitment.

In practice...

The Devil In Me's gameplay suffers from being the fourth instalment in an anthology that doesn't seem to realise what anthology it's part of, and this is mainly a failing of the early game.

After a short punchy prologue, we're treated to a LOT of walking around, learning all the different things that the one contextual button push can do, to do what amounts to walking up one big awkward Tutorial Hill... and then walking up another big Tutorial Hill, but as ladies. Characters are being established through dialogue, but not that much of significance is happening, to the point that things of deep insignificance happen - I'm talking about that stupid mannequin jumpscare that literally makes no sense - and even if it isn't wasted time, it definitely *feels* like wasted time.

This criticism requires all that preamble, because if I were to describe it in the context of a 20+ hour triple A game, it wouldn't seem like a problem to spend, say half an hour wandering around a relatively safe environment just taking in the air. The problem here is that The Devil In Me isn't a 20+ hour game, and if you've played the previous three Dark Pictures games, you already know that; so it immediately feels like bloat, an obstacle to your playthrough - and crucially, an obstacle to any subsequent playthrough - and creates a sense of exhaustion before we've even started.

Mild spoiler: The Devil In Me is roughly eight hours long, which puts it in whatever the opposite of a sweet spot is in terms of time and pacing. You could potentially have finished a playthrough of Man of Medan or Little Hope in a sitting or two, but this takes three or four; and backloading it so hard makes very little sense.

The other issue, of course, is that we really don't need tutorialising. Granted, maybe this is your first Dark Pictures game, so maybe you don't know that the game will give you button prompts throughout the game. But if so, you'll play the prologue, hit the first contextual button push in the game proper, and figure that out.

It's also a confusing choice given that the whole point of these games is meant to be a replayable, malleable narrative. I appreciate what seems to be a desire to ensure that our narrative is sculpted by our choices rather than by our clumsy button fumbling - and god knows, these games have gone all out on accessibility options. But this game isn't creating irrevocable narrative forks early on.

To give it its due, there does seem to have been some effort to ensure that a player who's been paying attention will be able to do a lot of the manoeuvring intuitively, without relying on button prompts - there's a small delay in those prompts appearing, which can make the whole thing run a bit more smoothly. But... that smoothness is kind of wasted when so few of these actions are performed when there's any actual urgency. This could've been a great feature in the first couple of games, but here it's just quality of life - an improvement that ultimately makes me more interested to see it implemented in the *next* game, rather than appreciative that it was included in this one.

Is it obvious that I'm not talking about the story?

The Devil In Me's story is... fine, I guess. I'm unsure if it will be more or less enjoyable for someone who *doesn't* know about HH Holmes, this game's historical lynchpin of choice. To me, it seems like the intent is to create dread and anticipation rather than curiosity, because the "mystery" aspect feels quite inconsequential. It's possible that we're meant to be determining the identity of the killer, but if so, it misses a crucial aspect of the whodunnit - that the "who" should be someone we've been introduced to. Red herrings and misdirections just aren't plausible enough to warrant serious consideration, so unless I missed something huge, the killer starts out as Probably Just Some Guy(s), and by the end, they still are. Apparently there's an alternate "worst ending" where one of the killers IS one of the characters we play as, and I'd take that ending any day!

I'm nitpicking a little. For its many faults, the story is entertaining enough on first blush. Whether I'll feel motivated to play through it again... I don't actually know yet. The fact that getting a good ending is relatively easy - especially if you apply my "no bullshit deaths" rule of thumb (i.e. If a death can be avoided by restarting a chapter, I have no qualms about calling it a Mulligan. If that sounds crappy, bear in mind, these games have always promised "butterfly effects", so killing characters off immediately based on single choices always feels cheap; and anyway, the game lets you do this so I'm gonna do it) - does make it a little more tempting to do a throwaway "all bad choices" run, but that's probably not their intention.

Visually, The Devil In Me is a pretty polished game, which really wants you to know that it can Do Teeth. One of the potential downsides for Supermassive of releasing similar games with limited replay value so frequently is that they always look good, so players won't notice the improvement between Until Dawn and this game. But it does look great, pretty much all the time. There are a few aspects where I'm not sure if they're intentional or not - the lighting looks great but sometimes the dark is a little too realistic for the gameplay. And sometimes the camera gets stuck too close to the back of a character's head, which was either a bug, or a creative choice that's quite bad. One thing these games are absolutely crying out for is a limited first-person mode - not necessarily for the dramatic scenes, but for the exploration sections. I know fixed camera angles are a horror staple, but not being able to see what my character is seeing doesn't help me inhabit their shoes.

In terms of sound design, it's 90% gorgeous, but suffers from a problem that I think previous Supermassive games had, which is a tendency for dynamic sPoOkY strings to just kind of happen. I know music can be tough to wrangle in this kind of interactive fiction, but the thought occurs that, more often than not, silence would have been better. When it works, it's atmospheric and effective in building in tension; but every now and then, it manages to be completely hilarious instead.

Not that that wouldn't be inline with these games. While they have far higher production value than they have any right to, the Dark Pictures are tropy pulpy pastichy B-movies to their core, and more often than not, they know how to revel in that, taking their innate silliness seriously. With meta-humour in fiction and gaming reaching saturation point lately, there's something to be said for the restraint that it takes not to make half the cast of the game quipping genre-savvy types, even though in this game it would've made a bit more sense if they were.

All of this is very qualified praise, and probably not persuasive. The Dark Pictures seem content to get those "If you like this kind of thing, you'll like this" reviews, which is fair enough really. Fans of interactive fiction aren't going to be horribly offended or upset by The Devil In Me, and likewise, if you have any doubts about whether you like interactive fiction... this isn't going to be the game that changes your mind about it. Still, it does leave me wishing that Supermassive would try working on something a bit less horror focused. One thing this instalment shows is that they can do deeper characterisation. Until Dawn did well partly by presenting its characters as relatively disposable lumps of chum who you could help to survive if you felt like it, but between The Quarry and The Devil In Me, I think I'm getting to a point where I want to know more about the cast than whether or not they'll die. It would be nice to see them make another more sincere detective game, in the vein of their widely forgotten couch co-op Hidden Agenda, and explore what their now-polished system can do with a different kind of narrative.

What's worse: a stone boring slog with an ending that undercuts the entire experience that at least exhibits some creativity, or an almost as stone boring slog with a resolution that's just kind of dry and unfulfilling? It's a matter of perspective which Dark Pictures is worse, but I don't know who would be able to deny The Devil In Me shows the wheels are already coming off the wagon, as evidenced by this being the gamiest one yet with actual puzzles and an inventory system, but their being so slapdash means they shouldn't have even bothered.

And the rest of the experience is just same old with barely any hooks. The beginning is slower than it should be but gives us our most fractured party yet, with an interesting set-up for making stupid horror movie character decisions, and the setting has some layers of paranoia to it both in setting and in mechanical structure; you can never trust what you see...for about an hour. The rest of the game is predictable and boring, with so much retrodden ground that makes it painfully clear this was meant to be played in co-op where the game's runtime is split between perspectives. Solo, I could feel my brain dribbling out of my ears, and the game really runs out of steam by its endgame.

On top of that, I was looking forward to a more straightforward horror story after the wild twists of the series thus far, but if you're going to have a story this simple, plot holes are going to stick out way more, and the mechanics of this simple serial killer story still don't make a lot of sense. It's like they tried to recreate the red herring plot thread of Until Dawn by playing it straight until it was necessary for tension to just jettison it, which leaves the actual red herrings sticking out like a sore thumb. I may not have loved The Quarry for its simplicity, but at least it got its simplicity right.