The mechanics stay the identical as “Until Dawn,” inserting us in management of a number of characters who can all die throughout the story attributable to a missed button press or a dangerous alternative, at which level the narrative modifications and continues with out them. Even the framing is comparable, with a host character to deal with the viewers and mark breaks in the story — for The Dark Pictures Anthology, we return time and time once more to a man identified solely because the Curator, the collection’s Rod Serling-type narrator.
The Dark Pictures Anthology has all the time been a lot smaller, in phrases of pure scope and ambition, than Supermassive’s different video games. The video games are consciously extra modest efforts, with fewer story branches and recognizable actors. “The Devil in Me” serves as a finale for the primary season of the collection in addition to a extra centered, cohesive and experimental various to Supermassive’s greater efforts.
It follows a true-crime movie crew, headlined by Jessie Buckley as its useless, dissatisfied presenter, Kate, and Paul Kaye as its temperamental director/producer, Charlie. Initially, we discover them agonizing over methods to spruce up the crummy early reduce of an episode on H.H. Holmes, the real-world Nineteenth-century serial killer whose booby-trapped lodge has lengthy since enshrined him as a determine of American fable. Luckily, a mysterious benefactor has the right alternative for them: He’s constructed a painstaking re-creation of Holmes’s well-known “murder castle” on a distant island, and all they need to do to movie it’s come go to and depart their telephones behind.
It’s a setup that’s all however begging for hassle, and thus a terrific thought for a horror recreation whose generic title belies influences that vary from “House on Haunted Hill” and “Psycho” to “Saw” and “Halloween.” Navigating a maze of loss of life traps, entice doorways and secret chambers, the crew finds themselves dealing with down the purest expression of our tradition’s fascination with serial killers: a masked stalker who has taken Holmes’s mustachioed, bowler-hatted picture for his personal silent, fearsome persona in a type of H. H. homage.
The recreation’s opening flashback of the “real” model of Holmes all however twirls his mustache, greeting company with double entendres that may make Hannibal Lecter roll his eyes. It’s goofy, however Supermassive’s work requires us to simply accept a sure stage of goofiness. Character fashions that look nice one second will look unspeakably picket in one other. But right here, as in Supermassive’s different video games, they serve their goal effectively sufficient as avatars whose deaths we’d desire to keep away from whereas we nostril round a recreation laden with low-cost shocks meant to make us soar after which giggle at the truth that we jumped.
Not for nothing has Supermassive’s work emerged as a multiplayer fixture, good for sofa commentary. It’s the “fun” model of horror somewhat than the genuinely harrowing variety, and the studio consciously performs round inside these parameters. For occasion, the spooky animatronics that populate the re-created Holmes lodge are simpler to confuse for actual folks when the characters themselves are computer-generated mannequins somewhat than human actors.
The yearly output of The Dark Pictures Anthology collection makes such self-reflexive touches extra seen, alongside slight tweaks and modifications to every new installment. The final recreation, “House of Ashes,” featured a extra adjustable digicam than earlier entries, for instance. “The Devil in Me” furthers the inclusion of extra “traditional” recreation components, like giving particular person characters inventories for gear. For instance, one of many characters, Mark, can use his extendible digicam mount to nudge objects in excessive locations, and he can mild up the world in entrance of him with a transient, brilliant flash. Charlie depends on his cigarette lighter and might jam his enterprise card into drawers to get them open.
In follow, although, the stock mechanics really feel bolted-on at greatest, meshing awkwardly with Supermassive’s long-established system. Because we’re always shifting characters, the sport doesn’t wish to disorient us by having to trace too many particulars throughout too many inventories. Pickups in the surroundings are primarily keys for use in the instant neighborhood via an additional button press, which is functionally simply one other method to visualize actions which have historically occurred mechanically in these video games. If these new concepts accomplish something, they counsel one thing doubtlessly extra experimental and fleshed out down the road for Supermassive. As is, they definitely don’t ask us to think about which character we’re enjoying or which instruments they’ve for greater than a few seconds.
Also new is the presence of extra traversal choices, much like the interactive busywork of environmental puzzles in a Naughty Dog recreation the place we climb round and push objects that each one conveniently have wheels and handles. Rather than deepening our identification with the characters, these mechanics really name extra consideration to the on-the-rails nature of the sport. Before, we’d have accepted that the “interactive movie” method requires gamers to give up a number of the management we’re accustomed to in different video games. Now, the interactivity solely clarifies the onerous boundary between walking-around segments and the precise, pivotal scenes that contain quick-time occasion button-pressing and choice-making.
From a narrative standpoint, it’s powerful to tie up all of a story’s threads when any one in every of them can end at any time, and “The Devil in Me” displays the standard flaws of that method. Characters are usually awkwardly sidelined, and motivations don’t fairly coalesce. Even the hulking assassin who can kill each character begins to really feel a little inept once we spend a lot time dodging his killing blows.
These points usually are not distinctive to “The Devil in Me.” “The Quarry” typically felt uneasily patched collectively, struggling to reconcile all of its plot threads. All of this raises a query that haunts the expertise of Supermassive’s video games: Amid gamers’ expectations of visible constancy and sophisticated narrative, how sustainable is a format the place, at any level, any absolutely voice-acted, motion-captured character can die and be reduce from the sport in an prompt?
Steven Nguyen Scaife is a Midwest-based freelance author whose work has appeared at Slant Magazine, Polygon, Fanbyte, Vice and BuzzFeed News. For nonetheless lengthy it lasts, his Twitter account can be @midfalutin.