The Devil in Me / YMMV

Complete Monster:
- Henry Howard "H.H." Holmes himself, real name Herman Mudgett, was America's first known serial killer, and its deadliest. Having ran the World Fair Hotel as a front to kill his guests in painful ways, Holmes kept the skulls and rings of his many victims for his own amusement. Killing an innocent couple in the prologue before moving on to murder a mother and son, Holmes is found to have amassed a body count of over 200 victims, his influence inspiring the likes of fellow killers Manny Sherman and Granthem Du'Met.
- Manny Sherman was a small-time Serial Killer who left behind a sinister legacy. Known as the "Beast of Arkansas" who sought to leave his mark on the world after being inspired by H.H. Holmes, Sherman would lure female realtors to abandoned houses near airports so that he could murder them as planes flew over them, happily knowing that nobody would hear their screams no matter how hard they yelled. With thirteen murders under his belt, after being arrested and put on Death Row by FBI Agent Hector Munday, Sherman manipulated the mentally deteriorating Munday into becoming a serial killer like himself, allowing him to become the dreaded Granthem Du'Met and kill hundreds of people, just as Sherman hoped would happen.
Ending Fatigue:
- One would think Kate and/or Jamie's frantic, climactic rooftop escape from Du'Met in "Chase" could be the finale, considering it features the characters escaping the hotel, tons of decisions, and multiple possible deaths. Not so. There are in fact at least SEVEN more chapters of the characters trying to escape the island as Du'Met seemingly teleports around the island to wreak havoc on the survivors.
- Happens once again in the Lighthouse chapter. Mark successfully signals for help! They are saved! Not even close. Depending on how many survivors you have left, you're either facing off against an Invincible Villain, or dealing with a drawn out total Downer Ending. Even then, there's still an epilogue with many scenes.
Narm: A scene where the heroes are trying to escape from Big Bad Du'met has been widely agreed to be unintentionally hilarious. In the scene, Mark is running behind Kate and Erin, only for Du'met to activate a trap door out of nowhere, causing him to drop down through the floor. It's meant to be a serious scene of Du'met endangering Mark, but is undercut by how underwhelming Mark's yelp of surprise/terror is, and the fact that Mark doesn't actually move at all as he is falling, like the animators just took a 2D still of him and moved it down to simulate him falling.
Scrappy Mechanic: Mark is the only character not to get a proper flashlight. He instead can use his camera flash to briefly light what's in front of him, an action which you end up repeating every few seconds in some places just to see where to go, which isn't helped by the camera sometimes being far too close to Mark and further obscuring the path. The light from his flash is also red, meaning at times it's almost invisible to the naked eye.
Spoiled by the Format: The games are very much marketed around "anyone can live, anyone can die." So the traps where you must pick one playable character to live and one to die have some tension taken out of them, as any seasoned player of these games knows that there MUST be some sort of way to outsmart the trap entirely.
- The vacuum chamber trap is defeated by choosing Kate to die, since there is a flaw in her chamber that Mark can exploit to break it open and rescue her before she dies. However, in an example of Guide Dang It!, this is not even hinted at. One would think that the better option would be for Mark to say something along the lines of "I think I can break one of these open, but it will take some time." This would clue in players who were paying attention that they need to save the asthmatic Erin, as Kate would be able to survive longer without oxygen.
- Likewise, the wall trap doesn't actually have the somewhat obvious solution of just constantly sending the wall back and forth until Erin is able to free either Jamie or Kate. Instead, both can survive this trap if the wall is sent towards whomever has the screwdriver.
- It's obvious there must be some way for Charlie to survive the fire trap, because it comes fairly early in the game, and there must of course be a way for him to survive to the end.
Tear Jerker: The secret ending where the only survivor is Connie the dog. Because everyone else kicked the bucket, Connie is all alone, whining because he has nobody to look after him...
They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
- Given that The Devil In Me introduces tool-based puzzles and an inventory system and takes heavy inspiration from Saw (amongst other horror films), it's surprising that the whole Death Trap aspect of the game doesn't get a lot of focus. Most of the traps amount to "character is trapped in a room, here's two choices, one where they live and one where they die, make the right one"^note or "decide which of these two characters lives, except not really because both of them can just as easily survive"^note. The majority of the kills by Du'Met are executed with sharp tools (i.e., knives, hooks, and axes), when death traps where the victims are placed in a Robotic Torture Device (or something similar) and have to use their wits and the tools they have on them to survive would have been much more interesting.
- A great many players familiar with the legend of H.H. Holmes were excited to have a Dark Pictures villain based on a real-life killer, even if the story took liberties with the facts; the idea of a game taking place in the infamous Murder Castle during the World's Fair was equally appealing, and thus the prologue to the game was well received for having those elements. Despite that, the rest of the game takes place in the modern day, and the Holmes connection is made unnecessarily more tenuous by the killer being a faceless former FBI agent who was inspired by a separate killer who was inspired by Holmes.

YMMV / The Devil in Me

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