"If you can't figure out which horror movie to rip off for your game, just do all of them. At the same time."
WARNING: this review will contain massive story and ending spoilers. However, since there's a lot to talk about I will save that for the end and clearly mark where you should quit reading if you have an interest in knowing what happens. Let's start off this review with something really positive: THEY ADDED A RUN BUTTON! Praise the maker, they added a run button! That single decision automatically gives this game a +1 to the score, as it helps speed up so much of the tedium you will experience while playing this game.
The Devil In Me is the fourth entry in Supermassive Games the Dark Picture Anthology, and the conclusion to Season One because they're breaking these games up into "seasons". In the past I've complained about the dull as dishwasher, boring, repetitive gameplay of the previous games as the first three were just barely interactive movies broken up with dialogue options and annoying quick time events.
This game still has all of that and the QTEs are as awful as ever, but Supermassive made the bizarre idea to add ACTUAL GAMEPLAY to break up the experience. You can now run (yay!), vault over things, climb things, push crates, shimmy through cracks, heck you can even balance on logs. We're not done there with the innovations, as they've also added an inventory system for the characters and given each one unique abilities that help them progress in the game.
So awesome, right? All these additions add much needed depth to the game and make for an engaging experience? Well no, because it is all 100% superficial. Like the Uncharted games, all of the "gameplay" is just scripted events and has more in common with a Telltale game than something like Sunset Overdrive. When you press A to jump you're not actually jumping, the game is doing it for you. The balancing events ARE 100% all you, but balancing is the most worthless mechanic in all of gaming so that adds nothing.
The inventory and unique abilities are completely wasted due to the scripted, closed nature of the game. In the PS2 era there was a game called ObsCure where you controlled a group of idiotic teenagers trying to survive their own horror movie scenario. The game was open world and you could explore it, finding various obstacles in your path. Every character had unique abilities and only certain ones could bypass said obstacles, so you could switch out to the right one to progress the game. It made for some fun puzzle solving and three dimensional thinking.
Unfortunately none of that applies here, as you can't change characters so the abilities might as well not even exist. Only Charlie can pick locks, so when you find a locked drawer you do a small sequence to open it. When you're playing as anyone else you never encounter locks, so why even bother having Charlie do this? It adds nothing to the game, especially once you realise the abilities only come into play as the character that can do them.
One more massive missed opportunity is one of the characters has asthma, and has an inhaler with limited uses. When this first comes up you think this will be a very interesting mechanic where you have to risk using the inhaler now versus saving it for later when you really might need it but- oh. Technically you never need to use it ever again outside of that.
Harkening back to how low budget these games are, all these new controls were clearly not polished as everything is awkward and you stick to a lot of the environment. Running is clunky because everything has giant hitboxes so you'll find yourself brought to a screeching halt by thin air. Jumping is really hazardous, I've found if you jump onto a ledge with another character nearby there's a chance you can get frozen in place due to conflicting hitboxes and be forced to reload the checkpoint. This happened several times and I was not a happy camper to say the least.
One last complaint about the controls: among the changes they've added a dedicated button to interacting with items. In the past games you'd press your universal A button to get the option to interact with something, and then do a button sequence to touch it. In this game the X button is now for interacting only, but you still have to do the button sequence! That is so pointless and creates so much extra monotony.
Never thought you'd be reading so much about gameplay in a Supermassive Games review, did you? In short, they tried to spruce things up with some MUCH needed innovation but fell short on every single mark. The run button is awesome but needed a lot more polish, but when you're firing out low budget games annually I guess that's what you get.
Supermassive Games patented casting of getting a "remember me?" Hollywood star to be the face of their game comes to an end with this one, as cover actress Jessie Buckley is an actual star that's pretty hot right now. She's easily one of my favourite actresses working today, and is COMPLETELY AND UTTERLY wasted here. She plays Kate, who, uh, um, err, likes to wear denim?
Sadly our cast of characters here are all blocks of wood. To be fair, they're all decent enough and none of them are hate worthy like the casts of the first two games, but they're all so generic and faceless. Connie the dog is easily the best character here, and he's on screen for maybe two minutes total. Not using Buckley's immense talent is going to be a -1 to the score.
The premise here is Kate is part of a TV show crew that makes shows about serial killers, and they're struggling to find an episode to end their first season on with a bang. Draw your own parallels to the Dark Pictures Anthology Season One here. They get a call from a mysterious rich dude they've never heard of who says he has a bunch of cool swag from famed serial killer H.H. Holmes, and invites them to come see it. On his isolated mansion in the middle of nowhere. Naturally, since our genius heroes are well versed in the modus operandi of serial killers they immediately
see through this charade and tell the rich dude to go kick rocks sign right the heck up and make sure not to tell anyone where they're going!
This is about as far as we can go without talking spoilers, so stop here if you want to experience what happens for yourself. TL,DR the story isn't going to set the world on fire with its endless derivative horror cliches, predictable ending, and lame cast. The gameplay adds a little bit to the inevitable boredom, but it's very little. Hopefully you got this for cheap otherwise it's not worth the asking price.
SPOILER TIME! Final warning. Naturally the rich dude is a serial killer and his mansion is a giant, trap filled murder house. Gee, who could have seen that coming? The rich dude, Du'Met, is easily one of the shadiest guys in fictional history and is INSANELY insistent on getting everyone to his mansion immediately but no one seems to think this is weird and happily go along with it. They even freely give him their cell phones for "privacy reasons" because that's TOTALLY a thing these social media addicted young people would do without a fuss.
As the evening wears on, Du'Met vanishes and the house begins to spring a bunch of lethal traps that with make Jigsaw jealous with rage. And speaking of Saw, the devs of this game were definitely fans of both the movies and the games because they cross the line of homage to ripoff way more than once. You even get the "shimmy through a tight space" sections that add absolutely nothing to the game besides hiding loading.
Like Jigsaw, Du'Met is the most smartest man in existence and can predict every single thing every single character is going to do, so he's always six steps ahead of them making everything they do futile and pointless. Also like Jigsaw he's the greatest engineer that ever lived, as not only do his traps defy all laws of physics but the house itself can also magically change shape at the drop of a hat, so he's able to effortlessly separate our heroes so they can... meander around aimlessly.
That's the bulk of the game, everyone spins their wheels looking for each other and/or a way out. It goes nowhere fast since you never really care about anyone and their various interpersonal dramas. The only thing you're really doing is scouring the environments for collectibles, which mostly are news articles and files that fill us in on the backstory of Du'Met.
It's all terribly uninteresting and generic, but it does lead to an interesting climax at the end of the game where all the characters call out the villain on his past. This part made me wonder what if you hadn't read any of the collectibles, how would this scene play out? Would everyone just kind of awkwardly stand around in silence, only broken by the occasional nervous cough? Sadly I wasn't interested in slogging though another playthrough to find out.
After this the game turns into Halloween or Friday the 13th, where our heroes keep killing the villain but dammit he just won't stay dead despite being VERY MUCH a regular mortal. He was even kind of old, but sure he can just effortlessly shrug off boat motor blades to the face. Our heroes get away after FINALLY killing him despite there being no body (wink), later on his hand dramatically emerges from the water, then later we meet another group of idiots who get a call from Du'Met to come hang out at his cool house. Yawn. The game doesn't even tie into the interesting conspiracy we saw hinted at in the last game.
That's The Devil In Me. The much needed improvements to gameplay needed a lot more development time to test out, the story is a bland mess of cliches and tropes, and they completely waste a very quality actress. Nothing to recommend here unless you can get this dirt cheap or you're just really a fan of "kind of choose your own adventure games" like I seem to be.
2.5