The Dark Pictures Anthology’s Director Explains The Importance Of H.H. Holmes To The Devil In Me

The Dark Pictures Anthology: The Devil In Me, is the fourth entry in SuperMassive Games and Bandai-Namco’s growing horror anthology. The narrative of the IP has always been the central focus, with the games’ leaning into the supernatural somewhat to explain or further scare the player. With The Dark Pictures Anthology: 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 the influence of H.H. Holmes’ acts was the primary influence over the narrative that SuperMassive Games have built for The Devil In Me.

H.H. Holmes’ “Murder Castle” serves as the primary influence for The Devil In Me, with the plot of the new game taking a number of documentary filmmakers, representing the brand, Lonnit Entertainment into a replica of the Murder Castle, having received an invite from the replica castles owner. Unsurprisingly to any fan or horror, let alone SuperMassive Games’ work on The Dark Pictures Anthology, things turn sour pretty quickly, serving as the thrust of the game. Speaking about the influence of H.H. Holmes, Doyle said,

H.H. Holmes is just brilliant. We wanted to tell a game about a human serial killer, and when you look at who’s the most infamous serial killer, H.H. Holmes is top of the pile. It’s also really interesting that there’s so much mystery around him. His story has become mythology, and so it’s very, very difficult to look at it and go, ‘these are the names of his victims,’ for example. It’s a really good subject for us to play around with because we do have to be kind of careful, this is a real person, these were real people that he killed. It’s so long ago, and it’s surrounded in so much mystery that it’s just got that special thing to it.

That’s something we do with all of our games, we try and find a fun story that, although it’s got that feeling of truth, it’s always a mystery. There’s something that you can go away yourself, after playing one of our games, and you can go and do your own internet sleuthing, trying to find out more about this, and there’s stuff you can learn and discover.

Doyle also expanded upon his answer to explain how SuperMassive Games determines what stories they’re going to tell through their games, saying

All of our games are based on some sort of real-world legend or piece of history, mythology, or whatever. We spent a lot of time trawling for that and we’re always going, ‘oh this is an interesting bit of history’. We earmark it for later and we think about what stories we can make out of it. For every new anthology game that we pick, it’s come out of a pile of 10-15 others. 

The idea of so many potential options flowing through the studio is certainly going to excite fans of the studio, the franchise, and the genre. History is littered with so many horrifying mysteries that are begging to be explored, and SuperMassive seem like the perfect team to continue unpacking them.

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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