What I’ve been playing for the past several weeks is The Dark Pictures Anthology! A series of horror games where your choices matter (though some matter a lot more than others). In all of them there are 5 different characters to play as over the course of the story who you try to save (or see how they can die).
If you’ve played Until Dawn, then you know the format of these, though I think the Dark Pictures games are better in many aspects, despite being shorter. One thing I hated in Until Dawn is that no matter what some characters only have one possible death at the very end of the game. While there’s still some characters who don’t have death opportunities until the last act, almost all of them have at least 2 different ways to die, with many having 5 or more.
Each character also gets a larger percentage of screen time, and they give you a Curator’s Cut option where you play as different characters at different points which gives a new perspective and context to several sections. This is cause they made the game to be played multiplayer with people controlling different characters at the same time, but it’s nice that they give an option for a single player to see the alt scenes too.
The biggest strength of the games is their ability to get me really invested in the characters. Whether that’s trying to make them survive the danger or just trying to get two characters in a relationship, I want to see all their endeavors succeed. Even with the weaker characters I still grow to care about them. Each game features 1 semi-famous actor’s voice and likeness, but they generally don’t play favorites in terms of screen time, and often it’s just as easy to get the celeb’s character killed as the others. They reuse the other face models for characters in multiple games, but I like it. It feels as if the people are being reincarnated in different forms due to cosmic forces in the Dark Pictures universe which eventually draw them together again under different circumstances.
Anyway since this is already really long I’ll just be brief with my thoughts on each game:
Man of Medan - A nice start, I love the concept of exploring a WWII era ghost ship. This game also really went crazy with the possibilities for how things can turn out. Something I’m really proud of is managing to keep everyone alive on my very first playthrough.
Little Hope - The monster designs in this look amazing, and I loved how connections were being made between the past witch trials and the present circumstances of the characters. However, the ending really pissed me off to a level a game hasn’t in years and brings down a cliff what was up to that point a pretty good game.
House of Ashes - Something that surprised me was how much faster it was to get into the action compared to the other games, I guess they wanted to set it apart from Little Hope’s slower pace. This game’s definitely got the best characterizations, Jason and Salim forever!
The Devil in Me - I like the expanded gameplay mechanics they added with an inventory system, each character having a unique ability to use, expanded navigation mechanics (reminiscent of Naughty Dog’s games), having coins to find in the locations to unlock character models, and most importantly an actual run button not a walk slightly faster button. The serial killer is also one of the scariest conceptually I’ve seen in media, a cross between Jigsaw’s intelligence and Jason’s physicality.
Something that’s really cool is that each game has little Easter eggs referencing other entries, like in Man of Medan there’s references to Little Hope, House of Ashes, and I think The Devil in Me too though it’s not as explicit. It’ll be fun to look back on these and see all the references to the later entries in the series after they’ve come out. Speaking of, I’m super excited for Directive 8020 this October! Dark Pictures…in space!
The back and forth flipping between helping both the Army and the Rebels wasn’t handled very deftly given that I could and did engage with missions from both sides at much the same time, but even allowing for that the mission where John casually genocides and burns down a civilian village with the barest protest beyond a shrugged “well, guess I just gotta do what I gotta do” reaction was as offensive for being totally unbelievable in the context of the fiction that Rockstar had created in the game as it was for being just generally gross