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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