The Dark Pictures Anthology: The Devil In Me, is the fourth entry in SuperMassive Games and Bandai-Namco’s growing horror anthology. With each passing entry, a host of changes and improvements have been made to the formula, much of it, as it turns out has been informed by player feedback. With The Devil In Me coming out on November 18, 2022, and it marking the end of the series’ first season, Will Doyle, SuperMassive Games’ Creative Director of The Dark Pictures Anthology sat down with our friends over at The Gamer to discuss how exploration has become an increasingly important element of the franchise going forward.

Doyle addressed how community feedback had recently resulted in additions like difficulty modes, and an increased focus on exploration and discovery within the franchise’s more recent entries and into the future. Doyle spoke of how the new features that the team has been adding, in particular with the beginning of The Dark Pictures Anthology: House Of Ashes, were designed to enhance the gameplay experience, without simultaneously detracting from the survival horror mechanics, nor resulting in the game becoming a product of a different genre overall. In the interview, Doyle said,

People weren’t specifically saying, ‘we want to be able to do this, that, and the other’, but they were saying, ‘we want to be able to do more within exploration’. We have a set of pillars for The Dark Pictures games and exploration has always been primarily about discovery. We have these hidden storylines and layers of story that you find in those moments. So it’s about looking for old books, papers, and learning more about the story.

It’s always been about tension as well, building up to scary moments. But we’ve received lots of people saying that they want more danger in those moments. So that’s what we’ve done. It’s taking feedback on a number of different things, as people say they want more danger, some people say they want more engagement from the game, so we’re trying to push that aspect, trying to put more threat into exploration. We have our new hiding mechanic in this game, you actually have to run to a hiding spot, and so it’s still framing it in quite a simple way, but it’s putting more control in the player’s hands.

For fans, it’s likely music to the ears that the team has recognised some opportunities that they had not previously explored in their early designs of The Dark Pictures Anthology: Man Of Medan, and The Dark Pictures Anthology: Little Hope, which were identified internally and with the aid of fan feedback post-launch. The first major sign of change was in how players could explore the environments of the third title, The Dark Pictures Anthology: House Of Ashes, and these same changes will presumably transfer across to The Dark Pictures Anthology: The Devil In Me along with a few more additions as well.

The Dark Pictures Anthology: The Devil In Me is scheduled to arrive on November 18, 2022, and will be available on PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, and PC via Steam.

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