Having to physically find cover or run away without always defaulting to a cutscene would be more tense and active. There are moments during gameplay where players need to hide from a stalker in real-time, and these brief yet promising snippets hint at what could be possible. As overused as quick-time events can be, they at least attempt to emulate the tension of being chased and require that players pay attention. Nothing was placed in their wake, though, leading to many inactive scenarios where players passively watch what is unfolding. The puzzles dissipate almost as quickly as they appear for some peculiar reason and The Devil in Me is still overly dependent on cutscenes.Īs was the case most recently in The Quarry, these action scenes often lack quick-time events, too. Yet, despite these improvements, the game doesn’t commit to having more involved gameplay for long and slowly settles back into its old and less exciting ways. The new mantling, shimmying, and climbing controls are also signs of that shift since they add more direct control to the experience. Most of them are superfluous and are only needed for certain short sections to do one specific thing.Įarly environmental puzzles and the small inventory hint at a game that is trying to move deeper into the interactive space. It’s awfully underwhelming, especially when considering each character’s special trinket. There’s also no inventory management, so players don’t even have to make tough choices regarding what to keep. There are a handful of opportunities to grab useful tools, but many are mandatory items like keys that don’t require any critical thinking the key goes into the keyhole and that’s it. Theoretically, this is a solid system since it rewards players for exploring and adds more traditional interactivity to a series that sorely needs it.
RELATED: How Supermassive Games Is Repeating Telltale’s Mistakes While not nearly as extensive as a more traditional adventure game, players can find items around the environment and use them when the opportunities present themselves. The Devil in Me has much in common with the season opener, Man of Medan, yet does innovate with the aforementioned inventory system.
However, slightly expanded inventory and movement systems can’t mask the same old freakish animation and frustrating choices that have plagued this anemic anthology since its debut. Painfully limited gameplay, unnerving animation, and sloppy writing have damned them all to varying degrees, but The Devil in Me seemed to be constructed with the goal of spicing up this increasingly tired formula so it could send off the first Dark Pictures season on a high note. The Dark Pictures games have been trickling out every year since 2019 and have been unsatisfying - or outright bad - each time.
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