Video Game / The Devil in Me

"I was born with the devil in me. I could not help the fact that I was a murderer anymore than a poet could help the inspiration to sing."

— H. H. Holmes

The Devil in Me is a horror video game developed by Supermassive Games, published by Bandai Namco Entertainment, and released on November 18, 2022. It serves as the season one finale of The Dark Pictures Anthology.

A documentary film crew receives an invitation to a replica of the "Murder Castle", hotel of the infamous Serial Killer H. H. Holmes. Desperate for ratings, the crew heads off to the hotel, only to discover that they are being watched, and that ratings are far from the only thing at stake.

The first trailer dropped on October 29, 2021, only a week after House of Ashes came out. The Steam page went live on June 29, 2022. On October 24, 2022, an hour-long demo was released to a select few content creators and reviewers, covering the first few chapters of the game (from the main characters' arrival at the Murder Castle up to the point where they encounter the man in the scythe trap).

It is set to be followed by the Season Two premiere of The Dark Pictures Anthology, titled Directive 8020.

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The Devil in Me contains examples of the following tropes:

• Eleventh Hour Super Power: Late in the game, Kate or Jamie have a chance to replace their compact mirror with a light or pen flashlight respectively with a carry handle flashlight that significantly improves how much you can see in the dark.
• Actually a Doombot: In the teaser trailer, the killer appears to be in an interview explaining his motives to a detective, with a cigarette in his hand. Near the end of the trailer, it's shown that the "killer" is actually a corpse, re-animated by machinery, and the killer's voice is coming from a tape recording.
• Animals Lack Attributes: Connie is confirmed to be a male, yet you wouldn't be able to tell from his lack of genitals.
• Artistic License – History:
  • According to modern research, the vast majority of Holmes' crimes were almost certainly fabrication by a combination of unscrupulous sensationalistic media, crooked cops seeking to blame a lot of Chicago's myriad of unexplained crimes on Holmes, and Holmes himself, a pathological liar who reveled in the attention. The secret passages in the "Murder Castle" were more likely not a Death Trap house of horrors but a means to hide building materials and other items Holmes stole or bought on credit with no intention of paying them back. While Holmes is suspected of killing 10 people including three children (and would eventually only be convicted for the murder of Benjamin Pietzel), all of those murders had specific motives in mind (financial, covering up botched abortions, Insurance Fraud, etc) which makes him a sociopathic murderer but not a Serial Killer in the strictest definition of the phrase. However, the game deliberately goes with the highly sensationalized legend of Holmes, including the claim that he killed 200 people (the single most ludicrous estimate ever thrown).
  • Holmes is shown requesting that he be buried deep and have his casket and grave filled with cement because "being dead will not stop me from killing again". While Holmes did make and was granted that request, he wasn't concerned about rising from the grave but rather people digging up his corpse, something he himself did quite a lot of in order to sell the corpses to medical schools or use them in insurance scams.
• Ask a Stupid Question...: Charlie's reaction to Erin giving him a book on managing anxiety (a gift from Kate) is to hurl said book down the hall and continue flipping out about his cigarettes being missing. Erin tells him she thought it would help with his stress, which Charlie asks if he looks stressed. Erin stammers trying to find a polite way to say yes, which Charlie picks up on and backtracks, claiming that he was being rhetorical.
• Axe Before Entering: Du'Met, being the ax-wielding Serial Killer he is, will naturally chop down a door or two while chasing the film crew around. He also does it once with a butcher's knife.
• Bad People Abuse Animals:
  • One of the first signs that something isn't right is the cabin Charlie and Mark sneak into, where they discover a makeshift taxidermy workshop. One of the walls is "decorated" with the bodies of local wildlife, and there's an incomplete animatronic made from the body of a dead crow.
  • In a twist on the trope, the only way for Connie the dog to die is if the player chooses to kill him. Du'met shows absolutely no interest in killing the dog, not even when Connie bites him to protect the character(s). Even the Curator will be shocked by the action.
• Bittersweet Ending: The Golden Ending. The five protagonists escape the Murder Castle and each undergo a bit of Character Development, with Charlie learning to treat his team as equals instead of lackeys (as well as finally giving up smoking), Mark learning to take charge and make his own choices, Jamie learning to be less cynical and trust others, Erin learning to face her fears, and Kate finally overcoming her trauma from college. Jamie and Erin also become an Official Couple after having grown closer during their ordeal. However, Du'Met also survives and manages to evade capture, and the final scene shows that he's now lured a new group of five unsuspecting people to another island resort he owns.
• Bloodier and Gorier: The Devil in Me is advertised as such. This interview outright confirms it.
  • The opening line of the official website is "The most gruesome challenges await..."
  • The antagonist is not a supernatural threat (hallucination or otherwise), but a Serial Killer following in the footsteps of the most infamous killer in American history. His speech in the teaser trailer about how "watching the life bleed out of someone is true art" is terrifying.
  • The horror category the game is going for is torture horror, mentioned by the wiki.
  • The teaser trailer shows death traps that would make Jigsaw proud, along with accompanying gruesome visuals, such as a splatter of blood on the wall, a bloodied hand holding some kind of surgical tool, a woman choking on Deadly Gas, and an exposed heart with what appears to have pipes coming out of it. The July 7 trailer features a trap where a man is bound to a chair with a bag over his head as a Sinister Scythe is positioned to eviscerate him when the trap activates.
  • Even the cover art◊ has splatters of blood on it.
• Breaking Old Trends:
  • This is the first installment of the anthology where there are more female playable characters than male ones. Previous entries either had Two Girls to a Team, or (as was the case in House of Ashes) only one, while The Devil in Me has three women and two men.
  • Unlike the previous three entries, The Devil in Me was released after Halloween, not before it.
  • This is the first Dark Pictures Anthology game that features no real or implied supernatural elements. Other than the classic slasher trope of Du'Met being Made of Iron and engaging in copious Offscreen Teleportation, he is never implied to be anything other than an ordinary human Serial Killer.
• Cat Scare: Two of them: In the first lighthouse, when Charlie and Mark first break in, a door rattling off it's hinges greets them, and the game's first "hide" segment appears. Eventually, a bobcat will burst through the door. The second time in the lighthouse at the end of the game, as Mark makes his way through it, a dresser has a rattling come from inside of it. Should you have Mark investigate, a house cat will jump out at him, scaring the dickens out of the poor guy.
• Censored Child Death: Du'Met's previous victims can be discovered throughout the chapters, some in horrific detail. In the finale, the bodies of Morello and his daughter are discovered at the docks, but only the adult is uncovered. The little girl's body remains covered, with only her small feet visible to confirm that the body is a child.
• Chekhov's Gun: Charlie's phone call tape and Kate's PTSD.
  • If Erin finds a tape of Charlie apparently conspiring with Du'Met and survives until at least the vacuum chamber, she can alert the other crew members. This can lead to Charlie being tied up near the end of the game, leading to his death. Mark can also find tapes that exonerate Charlie by proving Du'Met remixed the audio.
  • Kate's anxiety stemming from her PTSD comes into play in two major ways. First, she gifts Charlie a book on managing anxiety, which he tosses down the hallway in annoyance. Later, this book prevents a wall from closing and trapping Kate. Additionally, Kate can find the healing crystal in her room, which she uses instead of medication to deal with her anxiety. Kate can equip this during Don't Move segments to make them significantly easier. She can also throw it as a distraction to escape from Du'Met.
• Cigarette of Anxiety: How Charlie handles his nerves, an entire chapter is dedicated to him looking for a pack.
• Curb Stomp Cushion: Regardless of your choices in the prologue, Marie and Jeff will die. But if you take the bottle of rose water instead of the bar of soap and investigate who's in the bathroom with you, Marie will at least hit Holmes in the head with the bottle after he attacks her.
• Dead Guy on Display: Du'Met recovered the corpse of his mentor (who was also a serial killer and executed for his crimes) and created an animatronic out of it. Several other corpses are also made into animatronics. He will also do the same to Erin if she is killed before the group decides to leave the hotel.
• Death Trap: Several scenes in the trailer show these, as the killer's method of murdering his victims. The Steam page elaborates further by mentioning "killing rooms" tailor-made by the killer, where "[your] own death is by the killer's design".
• Dull Surprise: Anytime Mark is meant to be screaming in terror, expect to be laughing instead over how comically unterrified he sounds.
• The Faceless: Du'Met. Any picture of him without his mask on is either covered up or censored in some way, with his mask staying on for all but a brief shot near the end and that is viewed from his back.
• Failure Is the Only Option: Early on in the game, Charlie will trigger a Pressure Plate trap that will threaten to kill the groundskeeper if he steps off, while the killer menaces him with a knife. You're given the choice to have Charlie step off the plate to save himself, or remain to spare the groundskeeper. If you do the latter, the killer will poke the inside of Charlie's nose with his knife, causing Charlie to instinctively recoil and kill the groundskeeper anyway. It's revealed much later on it was a setup anyway, the "groundskeeper" actually an animatronic Du'Met set up beforehand.
• Fingore: Charlie can get his hand crushed in one of the moving walls if you fail a quick time event.
• Fire-Forged Friends: It is necessary for Kate and Jamie to become this to achieve the Golden Ending. They consistently snipe at each other, and Jamie can nearly condemn Kate to die in the Sadistic Choice-themed traps, but Kate can still choose to rescue her from Du'Met.
• Foregone Conclusion: At the end of the July 7 trailer, the man inviting the film crew to the hotel says (after making it clear that he's on the clock and they need to come the same day) "I've told you what I have. Please don't waste my time. Am I sending the car, or not?" Given that earlier scenes in the same trailer show the film crew at the hotel, it's pretty obvious that their answer was "yes".
• Guide Dang It!: Some of the critical choices in the game have unintuitive outcomes, and getting all the characters out alive essentially boils down to either guessing and relying on blind luck, or consulting a guide to figure out the correct course of action. For example:
  • When Erin encounters Du'met for the first time, you're given the choice between lashing out at the shadowed figure, or accepting the inhaler he's offering you. While attacking may seem logical, as he obviously is the villain of this piece, all this accomplishes is getting Erin killed. He'll leave Erin be if she accepts the inhaler, as he has plans for her.
  • Later on, in the Silver Ash clinic, Erin will suddenly be contacted by Jamie through the speaker in the room, telling her to hide. This seems like an obvious trap, as Jamie shouldn't be able to send such a message, much less know that danger is approaching. Yet again, hiding is actually the correct option, as choosing to run leads to an incredibly dumb death for Erin.
  • Played With during the vacuum trap sequence, as while there's no way to know that the window to Kate's chamber is faulty (and thus the right answer), an astute player may be conscious of the fact that as one of the potential victims in the air-based trap has asthma (Erin), the best hope to save them both would be to first rescue the person who would be able to survive for the least amount of time in the trap.
  • During the moving wall trap sequence, the correct course of action is to send the wall towards the person holding the screwdriver, since the screwdriver happens to be the key item to surviving that trap. Since you decide who that is in an earlier scene, your altruism may thus either save or doom you, depending on how you choose to resolve that moral dilemma.
• He Knows Too Much: If the player chooses to go along with Du'Met's demand to lure in more victims in exchange for sparing the other victim, the survivors will seemingly be allowed to leave on the barge, only for Du'Met to reel is back in and pick them off with a rifle on approach.
• Hell Hotel: The original World's Fair Hotel, nicknamed "Murder Castle", had numerous secret passages for Holmes to sneak around in, as well numerous death traps to kill the guests. The modern day replica built by Du'Met is even more sophisticated, incorporating modern technology like surveillance cameras and electronics.
• Heroic Dog: Provided the player does not have Kate/Jamie kill Connie the dog, he can potentially bite Du'Met twice to defend the survivors.
• Irony: Erin, the resident audio technician, can be fooled by a shoddily edited recording that makes it sound like Charlie sold out his crew to the killer.
• Leaning on the Fourth Wall: The final words the Curator tells the player that they'll see each other in the future, both in the metaphorical sense that they'll see each other again, and literally in that the next game will be set in the distant future.
• Mad Artist: Manny Sherman (based on H. H. Holmes, America's first Serial Killer) is shown to be this. His idea of "true art" is to watch the life bleed out of someone as they plead and beg for the sweet release of death, and he believes that this is "the mark he's left on the world".
• Masculine–Feminine Gay Couple: The player has the option to advance a budding romance between Butch Lesbian Jamie and Lipstick Lesbian Erin.
• Mobile Maze: The house has been outfitted with hidden walls that can slide out, barring access to certain passages and forcing guests to take specific routes.
• Noodle Incident: The crew will occasionally mention a shoot gone bad in Topeka, which somehow resulted in Kate being stuck in the city with no money or a working phone.
• Offscreen Teleportation: At times justified, others not. Du'Met can move around the house far quicker than should seemingly be possible, but the player will catch on pretty quick that it's a Mobile Maze he's controlling, plus the house has hidden passageways and a central hub that allows him to move between floors quite easily. Less excusable is his ability to just appear wherever he needs to on the island to menace the protagonists, when there is seemingly no way he could have covered so much ground so quickly, even with the aid of motion sensors telling him where to look.
• Ooh, Me Accent's Slipping: Kate is meant to be American, but her actress, Jessie Buckley, is Irish. There's a few slip ups, and not just in her accent, but how she phonetically pronounces words too, most notably the letter H, which she pronounces the British English way (sounding like "hatch"), instead of the American English way (which sounds like "eight").
• Pet the Dog: Mark, if Charlie is dead by the Cliffside chapter, when confronted by Connie, has the opportunity to scare off the dog by throwing a rock at him. Hold off on it, and he'll pet him instead. There's even a trophy for it!
• Player Inventory: For the first time in a Supermassive game, character inventories are an element of gameplay. Each character has items unique to them, and can add keys and other plot-relevant items to their inventory at various points.
• Police Are Useless:
  • Naturally for this sort of story, especially since the characters are on an isolated island. When the survivors do encounter a police officer, he's shaken from just having discovered two bodies and is initially antagonistic toward them. Du'Met takes advantage of the confusion to blow up the cop's boat and kill him.
  • The FBI when they fail to stop Hector Munday from becoming a serial killer himself. Recovered documents of psychological evaluations reveal that the FBI should have had plenty of warning Munday's sanity was eroding, and it seems he was never punished for assaulting Manny Sherman during interrogation. They also declare Munday dead after a fire by using dental records, despite the fact that Munday had the position and knowledge to falsify his records. Finally, the FBI doesn't find it suspicious that all of Munday's personal belongings in their own evidence storage were stolen after his death and just write it off as the work of a souvenir hunter.
• Red Herring: Mark's fear of heights and Erin and Charlie's breathing problems.
  • Erin can die in the vacuum chamber. However, this is not directly related to her breathing problems. Kate is only able to survive because her chamber had a flaw allowing Mark to break it open. Furthermore, when confronted by Du'Met early on, going for the inhaler instead of attacking is actually the correct, non-lethal option.
  • Charlie is lured into a trap using cigarettes. However, his purported breathing problems that the crew taunts him about at the beginning of the game play no factor. Notably, Charlie can survive smoke inhalation in the incinerator trap if he hides under the grate instead of forcing the door.
  • Mark is confronted by heights at multiple times throughout the story. Unlike Charlie and Jamie, however, he can never die by falling, with Charlie's possible falling death coming immediately after Mark crosses a crumbling beam that he will never have a problem with.
• Sadistic Choice: The game puts forth "terrifying tests of loyalty", and that you may choose whether to risk your life for somebody else. In fact, many of the deathtraps in the game are centered around this.
  • When Charlie steps on a pressure plate that will kill the Groundskeeper if he steps off of it, but is in reach of Du'Met who threatens him with a knife, forcing him to either step off to save his own skin and kill the Groundskeeper, or leave himself at the mercy of Du'Met.
  • When Kate and Erin are trapped in a pair of vacuum chambers, with Jamie forced to choose which chamber gets air and which one does not.
  • When Kate and Jamie are trapped in a chamber with a moving wall that risks crushing Jamie, she has the choice of pushing a button that will reverse the direction of the wall but crush Kate instead.
• Schmuck Bait: Charlie is dropped through the floor and into a series of rooms which will eventually lead him to a large room with a single exit, preceded by a burned doll. The player no doubt knows what's coming, as a premonition of Charlie's death can be found, but Charlie has no choice but to stumble into the trap for the promise of finally getting a chance to smoke.
• Season Finale: The Devil in Me serves as the finale of "Season One" of the Anthology, introducing several new gameplay mechanics and even more violence than previous titles. The Curator, the series' Horror Host, reveals some new insights about himself and teases hints of a larger story going on beyond the walls of his repository.
• Sequel Escalation: As the Season Finale of the Dark Pictures Anthology, The Devil in Me has several features and expansions not seen in previous games, such as an inventory system, tool-based puzzles, and the ability to run, jump, climb, hide, and squeeze through narrow passages and balance across beams. It's also been mentioned that the game should take at least seven hours to complete (compared to four or five hours for previous games in the anthology), and is Bloodier and Gorier than anything seen previously.
• Serial Killer: The main antagonist is a serial killer based on H. H. Holmes and his infamous "Murder Castle". Additional information from the Steam page mentions that the killer is not just any killer, he's hellbent on becoming the deadliest killer in American history.
• Shoot the Dog: Almost literally too, as Connie's only death comes at the player's hands, as either Jamie or Kate will kill him to keep him from giving away their hiding spot when they are hiding from Du'Met in the farmhouse.
• Title Drop: A flashback to H. H. Holmes's trial has him claim "I was born with the devil in me. I could not help the fact that I was a murderer anymore than a poet could help the inspiration to sing." This is an actual quote from the real H. H. Holmes.
• Too Dumb to Live:
  • Du'Met's invitation to Charlie and his crew practically throws red flags into their faces, such as the fact that Du'Met somehow knew the crew was working on an HH Holmes episode, invites them to his isolated estate on a remote island, and immediately confiscates their phones upon arrival. However, Charlie ignores all the signs because he's too desperate to save his show and pressures his crew to follow.
  • Erin, an audio engineer, gets completely fooled by a single "recording" of Charlie selling out his team to Du'Met that clearly sounds edited together complete with pauses. She admits as much if she hears the original recording it was stitched together from, though Mark points out that she was in shock at the time.
• Total Party Kill: As always, there's an achievement for getting everyone killed. It's pretty easy to pull off, too, as it plays off the previous entries having achievements for only picking "Head" choices, an option not present in this game that the player might miss. For added cruelty, you can also kill Connie the dog, a fact that will even shock the Curator.
• The Unreveal: In the ending, Mark can briefly knock Du'Met's mask off. He gets a clear view of the killer's face, but the player does not.
• Video Game Caring Potential: While the game expects you to have Charlie bitch out his crew when he toasts them (several characters mention Charlie will match anger with anger), you can have him be the bigger man and instead compliment them. Not only are they all touched by the gesture (with all of them being much softer on him in the ensuing cutscene), but you will even get a trophy for it.
• Violation of Common Sense: Arguably one of the easiest ways to get Erin killed is the first time she encounters Du'Met, when he corners her inside a dark room and offers to hand over her inhaler. Most players will obviously choose to fight back against Du'Met because it's blatantly obvious he means harm to Erin, but the correct choice is to accept the inhaler, in which Du'Met inexplicably just leaves Erin alone so he can toy with her more later, drawing out the horror rather than giving her a quick death (and also so he can herd her into the room to discover his edited phonecall of Charlie saying he wants the team dead so that he can sow dissent among the group).
• What the Hell, Player?: If the player manages to achieve the ending where all of the protagonists die, including the dog they find, the Curator will express shock that the player went so far as to even get the dog killed, which he didn't even think was possible.

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