The Dark Pictures Anthology: The Devil in Me

The Dark Pictures Anthology: The Devil in Me’s tour through a maniac’s mansion is disappointingly lacking in any real menace or surprise.

Supermassive calls its latest Dark Pictures entry the end of its first season, and it goes out with a bang.

Sluggish pacing and stripped-back character interactions dull the charm, but there are still scares to be found

The Devil in Me doesn’t rank particularly high on my personal Dark Pictures ranking — it comes in just under House of Ashes and Man of Medan, which are great for different reasons. But what the game does do very right is take a famous true-crime case and explore it in a manner that comes across as more interesting than exploitative, even while fitting in jump scares and relationship drama. Supermassive could probably have carved a good two or three hours out of this game and ended up with a much stronger product — just as long as it left all of the Holmes-related stuff untouched, please, because that’s where it shines.

These issues are not unique to “The Devil in Me.” “The Quarry” often felt uneasily patched together, struggling to reconcile all of its plot threads. All of this raises a question that haunts the experience of Supermassive’s games: Amid players’ expectations of visual fidelity and complex narrative, how sustainable is a format where, at any point, any fully voice-acted, motion-captured character can die and be cut from the game in an instant?

Two final girl sprints forward and one terrified limp back, The Devil in Me is the strongest Dark Pictures to date, but still feels like Supermassive are yet to find the right balance between fun and frights, camp and terror, and interactivity and storytelling.

I still would recommend The Dark Pictures Anthology: The Devil in Me on release if you can handle the technical issues at present. If Supermassive Games manages to implement some updates and fix the performance issues, then I’d perhaps even recommend it – highly! – to seasoned horror fans. In spite of its flaws, The Devil in Me tells a riveting tale of a horrific killer in a thoughtful manner, opens up important discussions about human obsession with sanctifying spectacles, and it shows great potential for the future of the series. It’s just a shame about… everything else.

The Devil in Me is another competent and enjoyable enough entry in The Dark Pictures Anthology, but it fails to reach the heights of House of Ashes or even Little Hope. With a lot of potential squandered, it's left to the familiar gameplay loop of past instalments to deliver a robust title. With some new features, the season one finale offers just enough to make the deadly trip worthwhile for fans.

You may still get some enjoyment out of The Devil in Me if you've liked the other Dark Pictures games, but it's probably the weakest entry to date.

The Devil in Me often subverts your expectations in such a way that diminishes player agency and makes your own choices feel arbitrary. Although its added gameplay features make for a more interactive experience, they hardly break the mold and were poorly executed. Technical issues tarnished the experience overall. The game still relies heavily on QTE-based survival mechanics and does little to set itself apart from its predecessors. What had the potential to be a truly horrific conclusion to The Dark Pictures Anthology amounts to little more than a lackluster thriller with a predictable narrative that opts for shock value and jumpscares over quality.