The Dark Pictures Anthology: The Devil in Me explained

The Dark Pictures Anthology: The Devil in Me is a 2022 interactive drama and survival horror video game developed by Supermassive Games and published by Bandai Namco Entertainment. It is the fourth game of the first season, and the season finale of The Dark Pictures Anthology. A game with a multilinear plot, decisions can significantly alter the trajectory of the story and change the relationships between the five playable protagonists; some lead to their permanent deaths. The Devil in Me follows five members of a documentary film crew who are invited to a replica of H. H. Holmes' hotel on an island in Michigan to film an episode of their series. It's not long before they discover their lives are at risk due to traps placed throughout the hotel and they must escape the island before Granthem Du'Met kills them. Jessie Buckley, who plays investigative journalist and the host of the documentary film show, Kate Wilder, was marketed as the game's leading actress. Jason Graves, a long-time collaborator with Supermassive for the series, returned to compose the soundtrack.

Staple mechanics of The Dark Pictures Anthology, such as quick time events (QTEs) and "pictures", collectable items that allow players to see visions of possible future events, appear again in The Devil in Me. The game also introduces new features, including an inventory system for the characters, tool-based puzzles, and new movement capabilities, including running, jumping, and climbing. The Devil in Me takes inspiration from Holmes and his hotel, as well as various slasher films and franchises including Psycho (1960), The Shining (1980), Saw, Halloween, and Friday the 13th.

The Devil in Me was released for PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Windows, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S on 18 November 2022 to mixed reviews. The fifth game in the series, as well as the season two premiere, Directive 8020, was revealed in a teaser trailer at the end of The Devil in Me.

Gameplay

The Devil in Me is an interactive drama and survival horror game with slasher horror elements developed on Unreal Engine 4 that is presented from a third-person perspective, and takes place at a replica of H. H. Holmes' "Murder Castle". Players take control of five protagonists who are members of a documentary film crew who are shooting the season finale of their documentary series that focuses on Holmes, when they receive an invite to a modern-day replica of the "Murder Castle" hotel. The game introduces multiple new gameplay features that are a departure from the previous entries in The Dark Pictures Anthology. There is now an inventory feature for the characters, tool-based puzzles, as well as new movement capabilities including running, jumping, and climbing. The inventory system involves items that can be used for defence as well as to collect things. Returning from previous games are the black and white framed pictures that are spread across the game; black frames depict a protagonist's death, while white frames foresee a dangerous situation that could become a character's death. Each premonition gives the player a chance to change their fate based on the decisions they make, as the premonitions often depict possible moments from the near future.

Players must make several choices that can have long-term consequences on the narrative's progression and the character's perceptions of each other. In these scenarios, there is a limited amount of time in which one can choose an action or a line of dialogue with which to respond. Protagonists may choose to say or do nothing when they are prompted to make a decision. An anatomical drawing of the brain and heart accompanies every choice in The Devil in Me, indicating that the player character may choose actions based on either rationality or emotion.

To track the narrative branches in one's playthrough, the game's menu has a butterfly effect system called "bearings", which lists all consequential courses of action associated with each branch and their eventual outcomes. The story is interspersed with cutscenes featuring an omnipresent observer called the Curator (Pip Torrens), a character who converses with players about the choices they have made and provides clues about what will happen next in the plot. The survival of all five protagonists depends on these critical decisions, and the game continues without the deceased characters.

Synopsis

Setting and prologue

The Devil in Me plot begins in Chicago where H. H. Holmes runs the World's Fair Hotel, which is full of traps for his unsuspecting guests. Construction on the Hotel began in 1887 and was completed in 1892. After Holmes was caught, he confessed to his murders by saying "I was born with the devil in me" and that he couldn't help the fact that he murdered people as a result. The game follows the myth of Holmes, as his crimes and story were likely exaggerated. His victims also weren't strangers that he lured to him, but instead they were people he befriended or romanced. The "Murder Castle" wasn't truly a hotel, as the first two floors (of three total) consisted of shops and long term rentals.

The prologue takes place in the time of the 1893 Chicago World's Fair, where newlywed couple Jeff and Marie Whitman check into the World's Fair Hotel to celebrate their honeymoon. However, soon after the check in, both are murdered by the hotel's proprietor, Henry Howard Holmes.

Characters

The game's five protagonists include Kate Wilder (Jessie Buckley), an investigative journalist and the host of the documentary film show Architects of Murder. Also in the ensemble is Charles Lonnit (Paul Kaye), the director of Architects of Murder and the founder of Lonnit Entertainment. Rounding out the film crew are Kate's ex-boyfriend, and cameraman Mark Nestor (Fehinti Balogun), chief grip Jamie Tiergan (Gloria Obianyo), and intern sound engineer, Erin Keenan (Nikki Patel).

Main plot

The present day is set in October 2022 and focuses on the film crew Lonnit Entertainment, which consists of director Charlie Lonnit (Paul Kaye), reporter Kate Wilder (Jessie Buckley), cameraman Mark Nestor (Fehinti Balogun), lighting technician Jamie Tiergan (Gloria Obianyo), and intern Erin Keenan (Nikki Patel). The crew are desperately searching for ideas to finish their first season of a series about famous murderers, the success of which has begun to wane. They plan for their season finale to cover Holmes, but are disappointed with their current progress. A mysterious benefactor, claiming to be a certain Granthem Du'Met (Abdul Salis), invites the crew to shoot at his estate, a perfect replica of the Murder Castle with several artifacts related to Holmes' series of murders. While the rest of the crew is cautious, Charlie readily agrees, convinced it will save their show.

They are taken to the estate, located on an island in Lake Michigan, via ferry. The crew takes notice of Du'Met's suspiciously hasty behavior; Jamie witnesses him and a little girl hurriedly leave on the ferry, effectively stranding them on the island, and Erin finds herself in a life-threatening situation when a mysterious figure traps her in a dusty room. Conflict arises between the crew, with Charlie refusing to cancel their shooting and Kate insisting they leave the island for their safety. The same figure starts building animatronics that resemble the crew members, as the crew set up their equipment and decide to begin shooting in Du'Met's absence. In a search for him, Charlie and Jamie stumble into a booby trap. They encounter a man dressed as Holmes, surmising that he was behind the trap, he is the real Du'Met, and the man from the call was an impostor.

Shortly after, the estate is locked shut. The crew is separated, forced to avoid Du'Met, and survive his traps, including a set of mannequins arranged to gouge someone's eyes, chambers that can be deprived of air or set ablaze by a mannequin, and a moving glass wall that can crush one of two people. Along the way, characters can uncover clues revealing that Du'Met's original identity was Hector Munday. Munday was an FBI agent tasked to profile a serial killer, Manny Sherman, who convinced him to become a serial killer himself. They can also discover that the impostor and the little girl was the true crime author Joseph Morello and his daughter. Morello, similarly fixated on Holmes, was part of the previous five-person group that became trapped in the estate.

The survivors decide the best way to survive the night is activating the island's lighthouse to signal for help. What happens next is determined by player choice. If Kate and Mark are the only survivors and are captured by Du'Met, he shows them a video of Morello explaining his modus operandi of baiting groups to the island, and instructs Mark to pose as Du'Met and lure the next group to the island in exchange for their freedom, lest they die from their trap. Whether Mark complies or refuses, Du'Met has him and Kate killed. Otherwise, a policeman arrives on the island to search for the survivors, only for Du'Met to promptly kill him. The survivors attempt to escape the island by boat, but Du'Met sneaks onboard for a final showdown. Any surviving crew members are rescued by a truck driver after swimming to shore, and the authorities begin investigating the estate. Some time later, a new group of people are invited to a different house.

Development

Inspirations and design

The Devil in Me is the fourth game in a series of eight planned for The Dark Pictures Anthology. The main inspiration for the game is H. H. Holmes' "Murder Castle", as well as a variety of slasher films and franchises, including Psycho (1960), The Shining (1980), Saw, Halloween, and Friday the 13th. Game director Tom Heaton said the general idea of The Devil in Me was around since the start of the anthology. The team wanted to do a game about serial killers as they felt that it was a key horror genre. Heaton added that it's a genre that he is very passionate about due to his love for serial killer and slasher films. After looking around for inspiration, the team decided on H. H. Holmes, with Heaton calling him "interesting on lots of different levels" because he qualified as a doctor and moved to Chicago as the city was in the middle of rapidly expanding. He built his hotel to make money off of the people visiting from around the world for the World's Fair, but at the same time he was a killer. Holmes had a trial and confessed to 27 murders, but he has become a mythological figure. This was a result of him "bigging up his own legend" according to Heaton. Once he knew he was going to be hanged, he started to talk about the number of people he killed, wrote an "elaborate confession", did a speech from the stand in his trial, and another right before he was hanged. "So, he creates a mythology, and the press at the time sensationalise this." Heaton there were some discussions about creating a game inspired by Holmes, but it helped that everything occurred quite awhile in the past and that the names of the real victims were not used. Although the game also takes inspiration from the Saw franchise with the deathtraps, as well as the isolation and claustrophobia from The Shining, Heaton said they were not required viewing for the team because it was so big. However, those who worked on the early-stage concepts and narrative breakdown were expected to have some familiarity with those films.

Creating the hotel setting

Despite the inspiration of The Shining, that hotel did not influence the look of the one in the game, although there were Easter eggs. Instead, the team looked at period North American hotel designs because the look of the inside of Holmes' hotel is not known, but the exterior is. As a result, they tried to imagine what the interior could have looked like using the other hotel designs and tried to match it with the exterior of the hotel.

Casting

The Devil in Me continued the trend of the anthology by casting a recognizable face as the lead character. Heaton said the team was fortunate to get Jessie Buckley before she received her Academy Award nomination because they could tell she was a star based on her prior roles. It took Buckley time to acclimate as she had never really watched a horror film and had never played a video game. Heaton said it was a "steep learning curve" for her because working on a game is a much faster pace compared to a film or TV show, plus she was presented with a branching-narrative script, which is complicated by itself.

Music

The soundtrack was composed by Supermassive Games' long-time collaborator Jason Graves, who previously worked on music for the previous games in The Dark Pictures Anthology. Despite the game being billed as the season finale, Graves said that did not change how he scored the game. Lots of harp, piano, and synthesizers were used for the soundtrack. He focused on three main aspects of the game; for the outside of the hotel, Graves used a film noir style for a throwback sound, while for the high tech of the inner parts of the hotel, he used "synthesizers and kind of all the modern distortion and skipping". The third aspect he identified were the animatronics and mannequins throughout the hotel, which he threw in a record needle drop and a "ticking like mechanical kind of sound" in the game's first track as a "tongue in cheek wink" of what is to come later with classical music on records, along with the animatronics.

Release

The Devil in Me was first revealed in a post-credits teaser trailer at the end of , which was released on 22 October 2021. The game was released on 18 November 2022 for PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, and Windows. A trailer for the next game in the anthology, as well as the season two premiere, Directive 8020, was featured at the end of The Devil in Me.

Reception

The Devil in Me received "mixed or average" reviews from critics for the PC and PlayStation 5 versions, while the Xbox Series X version received "generally favorable" reviews, according to review aggregator website Metacritic.

Accolades

Year! scope="col"

Award	Category	Result
2022	Gamescom Awards	Best Multiplayer Game
		Most Wanted Microsoft Xbox Game
		Most Wanted Sony PlayStation Game
2023	NAVGTR Awards	Outstanding Direction in a Game Cinema
	TIGA Awards	Best Action and Adventure Game