Izzy and I were a bit disappointed that The Devil In Me didn’t come out in time for Halloween – luckily we had an alternative and we only had to wait two weeks for the game before we could finally play it in co-op. The year before we had had a lot of fun with “House of Ashes”. You can read here whether the additional waiting time was worth it.

The answer to the above clickbait question is quite simple: no. At least not for co-op, but I’ll go into more detail on that later. First things first, I’m only speaking for myself and the co-op experience I’ve had with this game. Of course, individual players and Izzy herself may have different opinions on all or specific points.

The technical description of the game is similar to all the other parts of the “Dark Pictures” series: a rather slow-paced horror game, you walk around a lot and explore the dark secret and history of the place you are in. In our case, a replica of an old hotel where a murderer used to be up to mischief. He was later caught and testified at his sentencing that he was possessed by the devil – hence the name of the game. The whole thing is very loosely based on the story by H.H. Holmes. But I can’t say too much about it at this point – the story doesn’t come across really well in co-op.

I don’t want to go into too much detail about the story. Arriving at this house as a group, you stumble into various traps and along the way discover the story of the killer as well as that of the original Holmes, on whose work this new horror is based. But this is where the first weakness of this part shows up: you are separated far too often. Izzy and I played alongside each other most of the time and discovered different parts of the story. These often didn’t make any sense to us because we didn’t know each other’s parts – we talked to each other a lot via voice chat, but we couldn’t always get everything across because the game was still running.

Keep going is a very good keyword at this point. Because you enter closed areas again and again when playing in parallel, which can then be exited again via a door or the like. As soon as you cross these doors, the story inevitably continues – regardless of whether the other person has already finished his area or not. Due to a bug, we were often not shown which door triggers such an action. As a result, we unfortunately dragged ourselves along a few times before we could discover everything in our areas.

And this wasn’t the only bug – the co-op was full of them. Incorrect voice output and subtitles, actions that were triggered twice or sometimes not at all; the controls acted up in various places, the camera didn’t keep up and the like. We had to quit and restart the game several times to progress. Very annoying.

And at this point I was very surprised – why was the whole thing such a bad experience? The game was basically the same as its predecessor, just different people and a different environment. How is it possible that so many bugs were built into the same concept in one year?

All in all it was a disappointing experience for us. We were barely able to follow the story, had to deal with various bugs and ended up losing almost all of the characters in a single event – it was frustrating. Especially since the ending is very unrealistic from my point of view, considering the part that we got from the story.

But here I would like to go back to the beginning: in my opinion, the game is currently not worth it for co-op. Especially since it only took us just under four and a half hours for a full-price title. I’ve seen several streams with the single player mode though, which works a lot better and made a lot more sense. Apparently, this one has hardly any bugs at all and the story comes across much better – partly because of cutscenes that didn’t appear in multiplayer (or could never be triggered). While I still don’t feel the story I saw there was good, it does give me hope that the game isn’t a disaster overall.

I don’t know if I’ll ever touch the single player mode; For me, the game is a flop and next time we’ll probably think twice about taking the risk of playing at release again. But there is still time until then.

How did you like the game? Have you played it yourself and can you agree or maybe disagree with me? Feel free to discuss it with me and the community on Discord!