The Dark Pictures Anthology: The Devil in Me

My first playthrough of The Devil in Me landed somewhere between impressed and frustrated, which turns out to be the consensus the broader community landed on too. This is the fourth and final chapter of Supermassive Games' Dark Pictures Anthology season one, and it closes things out by swinging harder than any of the previous three entries. The setup is strong: a struggling documentary crew gets lured to a modern replica of H.H. Holmes' infamously lethal "Murder Castle" on an island in Lake Michigan, and the copycat killer waiting for them has rigged the whole place with shifting walls, environmental traps, and locked-off corridors that keep you perpetually off-balance. That setting genuinely works. The hotel has a suffocating, liminal quality, and the audio design in particular is outstanding, building dread in a way the visuals alone cannot match. Gameplay-wise, Supermassive tried to push the formula further here. Gone is the almost-pure reliance on QTEs and document-hunting. In its place you get running, jumping, and climbing, an inventory system, character-specific tools (Mark's camera flash for dark sections, Erin's directional boom mic for audio-tracking puzzles, Jamie's ability to rewire electronics, Charlie's business-card lock-pick), and some light environmental puzzles involving door codes and item scavenging. The ambition is real. The execution is patchier. The puzzle design is simple to the point of hand-holding, the tool mechanics rarely demand creative thinking, and the extra movement options come wrapped in sluggish, stiff animations that make the traversal feel less like a survival horror game and more like a reluctant museum tour. Critics and players alike flagged a meaningful reduction in branching dialogue choices compared to earlier entries, which is a strange regression for a series built on the illusion of authoring your own horror story. The character question splits the room. Some reviewers called this cast the best Supermassive has written, pointing to Jesse Buckley's grounded performance as Kate and the crew's believably fractured professional dynamics. Others found the five leads too irritating to root for, which undercuts the whole point of a game where keeping characters alive requires emotional investment in their survival. For what it is worth, the branching death system still functions as intended: choices made early echo later, certain fates are locked regardless of your QTE success, and the Curator's Cut mode flips perspective to let you replay from alternate character viewpoints. Movie Night mode, which passes the controller between up to five local players per character turn, is where this game genuinely shines over a solo run. The tension of watching a friend fumble a QTE that gets your character killed is a feature, not a bug. On PC specifically, the launch version shipped with a noticeable collection of bugs: broken torches, erratic camera angles, environmental geometry flickering, and co-op multiplayer issues serious enough that some players could not progress. Patches addressed most of them, but the reputation stuck, and the mixed Steam score reflects the gap between what the game promises and what it consistently delivered at launch. The visual fidelity sits a step below The Quarry, Supermassive's same-year higher-budget release, which makes the comparison unavoidable for anyone coming in fresh. For genre fans who have played Man of Medan through House of Ashes and want to see how season one wraps up, The Devil in Me is a worthwhile if uneven conclusion. For newcomers drawn in by the H.H. Holmes premise and the promise of friends-on-the-couch horror, Movie Night mode makes it click in ways a solo run simply does not. Go in expecting a flawed but atmospheric slasher adventure, not a polished evolution of the form.

Alex · Scout Team

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