I was born with the Devil in me.
The fourth game in the Dark Pictures anthology series from Supermassive Games is the end of the “First Season” of the series and it follows the template of the first three games in the series. It’s a mostly choice based narrative horror game in which you play as five different characters; based on your choices and ability to pass the occasional QTE (don’t worry; there are difficulty settings), any of the characters can die or all 5 of them can survive.
In this game, a film crew making a documentary about H.H. Holmes are lured to a replica of his infamous Murder Hotel only to find that it’s, you know, an actual Murder Hotel and their host is going to murder them. You know how it is.
There’s honestly not a whole lot to say about this game. It is genuinely more of the same and that is why I play the Dark Pictures games. None of them have yet come anywhere close to the original Until Dawn, but I loved that game so much that these games, which borrow a lot from Until Dawn, are pleasurable enough facsimiles. As the Dark Pictures franchise has gone along, they’ve been pretty responsive to fan feedback, I think, because the second game in the series fixed some technical issues from the first game and then the third game in the series fixed some mechanical gameplay issues in a way that made the game feel much more organic and fairly balanced. I didn’t really pick up on a lot of changes of that kind with The Devil in Me, but neither are there any particularly glaring technical or mechanical flaws still remaining. The hotel has a lot of nice creepy atmosphere and I think they did as good a job as they’ve done so far at truly differentiating all five characters and making them feel pretty well-rounded. Each of these games has a non-video game actor in the lead role and this time out it’s Jessie Buckley. There are some dumb moments of course, particularly one in the final quarter of the game involving a stray dog; that one really had me slapping my forehead at how the game backed me into a choice that had no good outcome. But it also had some of those great moments where you find yourself making choices purely based on emotion and character and then they really pay off; a sequence in a crushing room was the most satisfying of those scenes.
I would probably rank them:
1. Little Hope
2. House of Ashes
3. The Devil in Me
4. Man of Medan
I do recommend all of them EXCEPT for Man of Medan which I think is downright awful. Other than that one, they all have their strengths and weaknesses. But even though I have this one third ranked out of four, it isn’t at all a bad game, especially not if these kind of narrative/character-based choice games are up your alley. Looking forward to season two, which will be apparently kicking off with Directive 8020, a sci-fi horror. These games don’t blow my mind or anything, but as long as they keep making them, I’ll keep playing them I guess. They’re just enjoyable horror experiences, not too long and pretty polished and The Devil in Me is no exception.