The Devil in Me

The Devil in Me is a step back from the previous title in the Dark Pictures Anthology, House of Ashes. This time focusing on a more grounded story than an ancient underground temple with vampires, the game follows a by-the-books horror structure that, despite the nature of its fascinating setting, holds no surprises.

The game opens with a happy couple – their only remarkable trait is that they’re in love – going into an empty hotel. There’s no one at the reception desk besides a skeleton just a bit out of view: the camera pans to it like an ominous reveal, but since the skeleton is just standing there as if in a haunted house attraction of an amusement park, we’re more likely to laugh than be afraid. This is when their host arrives, Henry Howard Holmes, America’s first serial killer. Of course, it doesn’t end well for the couple, but the fascinating thing is the hotel itself, with its shifting architecture: there are doors leading to brick walls, walls that move around to block paths, secret chambers in the hallways, and even hidden pitfalls. And the scariest thing about it? It was real. Murder Castle, it was called.

Then the narrative jumps to the present. We’re now following a group struggling to make a documentary on H. H. Holmes until one day their leader, Charlie, gets a call from an eccentric millionaire, whose uncle built a replica of Murder Castle on a private island, inviting them to shoot their movie there. They go, of course, even though the call came out of nowhere, the house is admittedly built to kill people, and their host, Mr. Du’Met, refused to give more details. The flags here are redder than Mr. Holmes’ résumé, in other words, but much like Matthew Murdock, they remain blind to them: “I’m… a very private person,” Du’Met says, after telling them they are in no way, shape, or form to capture images of him. Things are not going to end well for these filmmakers, as you can imagine.

When they arrive on the island, we take a little detour with Jessie Buckley’s character, Kate, who is sent by Charlie to investigate the area. Here, we’ve got the usual suspects, both in terms of narrative and level design: we have a shot of someone watching her from behind some bushes and trees, we have locked doors that push us to find a nearby ledge to climb and get to the place from behind or up top. The Devil in Me is that type of game where you slowly push crates and boxes to the right place to use them as platforms.

The cast doesn’t do the game any favors. Kate, despite Buckley’s best efforts, has almost no personality, let alone a narrative arc. Jamie is that unbearable friend who belittles and makes fun of everything, including her friends’ fears: when the camera guy, Mark, is having trouble crossing a feeble wooden bridge – being terribly afraid of heights – Jamie laughs and jumps on the bridge fiercely. As you can once again imagine, that doesn’t instill him with confidence and only makes matters worse. So, it’s up to Kate to go to Mark to calm him down and lead him through the bridge.

Later on, however, Mark will be crawling along the side of a lighthouse, right at the top, without breaking a sweat. “Don’t look down,” he’ll repeat, like a funny Nathan Drake, without displaying a hint of the paralyzing fear that made him stand his ground on the bridge. The title is The Devil in Me because it’s certainly not in the details. Consistency is for losers.

In the game’s first hours, we keep seeing this mysterious man with white gloves stalking everyone from a distance, or from behind fake mirrors, or closely from the corner of the screen. But this is not only repetitive, it also kills the suspense that naturally arises from the setting: these characters are trapped in a place designed to mirror the killing floor of a serial killer. Even though it’s newly built, the hotel/museum seems old and abandoned – they can even smell the rot and decay. This is a place where you get near the display of H. H. Holmes’ hat, and an animatronic with a knife pops up from the ground to scare you. In other words, now it’s truly a haunted house from an amusement park, and it’s great. These first hours were the moment to let this setting shine, then, to let its bizarre rooms and contraptions do their job of instilling us with fear and unease (the game’s most unnerving moment, for example, is when we figure out the meaning of the number right at the entrance stairs). Unfortunately, The Devil in Me insists that we still need constant shots of an evil man doing creepy stuff to get tense and, in the process, robs this amazing setting of its power. For now, it’s less about this imaginative hotel and more about this boring guy who is going around killing people.

Mr. Du’met is much less fascinating than the place he built. The elaborate contraptions can remind anyone of Saw movies, but Du’met is Jigsaw with no moral code, just a guy with the simple wish of killing people horribly. This removes all the complexity from the character, then, but at least also adds a bit of tension in return: we know there’s no talking with this guy, no way to win his games, because they’re not games, they’re elaborate executions.

“He can’t reconcile a human doing this stuff,” Kate says of Charlie, who defends that psychopaths are simply inhuman, evil, that they’re built differently from us, that they’re built wrong. Is Du’met like that? The game doesn’t seem to know, as it wants to have it both ways: it tries to build its silent killer as this menacing, omnipresent force that can be anywhere and survive anything, much like Jason. And, at the same time, present this whole backstory about a violent guy with a troubled past that may or may not be Mr. Du’met. The Devil in Me never commits to an answer and, as you can imagine yet again, that doesn’t really work: if we take the backstory seriously, it makes the scenes where the guy teleports around and survive the most lethal shit just absurd and funny; but if we take his supernatural powers seriously, it make the scenes that attempt to explain his teleportations and his whole backstory feel out of place. The Devil in Me, of course, does that on purpose; the point is to make this villain inscrutable, ambiguous, but the rub is that this ambiguity only makes the guy nonsensical: the two approaches are at total odds with each other, failing to coexist here.

So, how does The Devil in Me play out? Its structure is much like you can, right as ever, imagine. Du’Met runs after the film crew, who run in turn around desperately until they find themselves right where Du’Met wants them: in a room where an elaborate contraption, such as a moving wall of glass, is activated to kill them. They may die if we fail at quick time events or make poor choices – which sometimes are just bizarre, like the one where we’re asked to kill a dog or die, with no option to let the poor animal go and hide – and the process repeats again.

The characters we follow are not that particularly smart and savvy, either, being the type to say, “We gotta stay together or he’s gonna pick us off one by one,” and then immediately run off alone at the first strange occurrence and get separated by a moving wall. They’re funny like that. Or infuriating. Your mileage will vary.

Which is a pity, because there are some good sequences spread throughout the game, like an early on with Erin, Charlie’s assistant, who is the first to get lost in the hotel’s corridors and be led by moving walls to the place where the killer is waiting for us: once again, it’s the setting that shines, making us feel like a rat in a maze, with no choice but move toward what we know is our doom. It was already scary even before the lights went out, and we started to hear the recorded screams of his last victims.

The Devil in Me doesn’t hit the highs of House of Ashes, nor the lows of Little Hope. It stands in the middle, much like Man of Medan, content in being just one more predictable horror story with nothing to say.

September 22, 2025.