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I'm a big fan of Supermassive Games' decision-making movie-style games. The Devil In Me is the fourth in their Dark Pictures Anthology and I might as well come straight out and say that it's awful. Not just disappointing. This is genuinely one of the worst games I have ever had the misfortune to play. I want the seven hours or so I spent playing it back. Oh, and don't think I got all the way to the end in that time. I did not. It annoyed me so much I gave up in sheer frustration. And I won't be going back to finish it off either. Life's too short to spend any more time on something this bad.

Obviously I need to say more than just that. The trouble is that I really don't know where to start. So, let's start with the good. The Devil In Me has brilliant graphics and sound. It starts with a newlywed couple checking into the World's Fair Hotel in 1920. It's a hotel run by America's first known serial killer and it's rigged with all manner of gas chambers, trapdoors, torture devices and booby traps. You take control of this ill-fated couple, but won't be able to avoid their grisly fate at Mr. Holmes' hands no matter what you do. This short introduction is really good. Unfortunately, from this point on it's all downhill. Fast.

The action then moves forward to the present day, and we meet our five heroes - there are usually five heroes in Supermassive's horror games - who, in The Devil In Me, are a docuseries team. The mindbogglingly stupid premise is that the said docuseries team has been invited to stay at the World's Fair Hotel. Not the original hotel, mind you; we're not quite sure what happened to that. No, at a lovingly reconstructed version of the World's Fair Hotel, built on an isolated, totally remote island in the middle of nowhere by Mr. Du'Met, a madman. Notwithstanding, the team's leader thinks this is a brilliant opportunity to make a hard-hitting documentary 'on location' (although from the scripts you get to read, it seems to be shaping up to be very cheesy indeed). The mysterious owner of this new hotel-dedicated-to-a-dead-1920s-serial-killer calls himself Mr. Du'Met, and insists that the team are collected from the airport in a limousine. The visibly agitated driver of the limousine promptly relieves all five of them of their mobile phones, takes them across a huge lake to the island and then disappears.

The team are collectively so stupid, however, that being stranded in the middle of the sea at a murder hotel doesn't worry them at all. Remarkably, they decide to start filming their documentary anyway (Somehow they've retained all their film equipment). Exploring the hotel, however, they find mysterious mannekins with microphones stuffed in their mouths and, around practically every corner, A4 sheets of paper with e-mail chains printed out in them. And then the stalking starts.

The first disappointment of The Devil In Me is how little interaction there is with the so-called game throughout all of this. In previous games of this genre, there were several quicktime events a few minutes into the game, getting a bit of adrenalin flowing and teaching the player how to react to the threats said game might subsequently throw at you. But instead, you get tasks to complete. The first real interaction you get with the game is an extremely long and tedious trek up one of the island's hills so that the team can film some establishing shots for the documentary. It's no exaggeration to say this is little more than moving the analogue sticks and continually pressing the X button. Want to crouch? X. Want to jump a gap? X. Want to shimmy between two rocks? X. It has all the excitement of going on a nature ramble with your dad. And it takes ages. And it's by no means the only time you'll get to do something so dull.

Where the game really falls down though is in the quality of the storytelling. Can this really be from the same team that brought us House Of Ashes? There are literally thousands of plotholes in this monstrosity of fiction. I mean, if you thought the ski-mask wearing Jason (from Friday The 13th movies) was one-dimensional, then compared to Mr. Du'Met, he's practically a philosopher. Du'Met teleports all over the island. This one man is seemingly able to stalk five characters who have split up from each other independently whilst also taking the 'walking slowly but still catching up with a sprinting victim' to stratospheric levels of absurdity. In one scene, a character falls from a fourth storey building and Du'Met's right there on the ground when she lands, calmly ready to attack her again.

The trolling of the player in The Devil In Me is absolutely ridiculous. Before I gave up playing it, I found myself screaming "Bullshit!" pretty regularly, but I have to single out one particular scene for bullshit-praise. In one 'frantic chase scene', you have to hide in a locker (Ooh, how original) and then rhythmically tap the X (of course) button to regulate your breathing. The killer bashes the door with an axe - four or five times - and each time you must breathe steadily for five pulses. The killer really does think you're in there, but he doesn't open the locker door (for some reason) and, if you complete this task successfully, he seemingly accepts that he's wasting his time pounding on the locker door and goes away. At which point, the game gives you two options: Run, or continue to Hide. Well, not unsurprisingly, I chose continue to Hide. Why fling open the locker door and run away when I'd successfully stayed so quiet that I'd seemingly convinced the killer he was wasting his time? In a spectacular act of trolling, the killer immediately came back, wrenched open the locker door and attacked, rendering all my so-called progress null and void. Fuck you, game.

And, really, if you do play this game (and you must not, ever) you will find yourself wondering (regularly) what the point of it all is anyway. There's so much that you do that is 100% pointless. The puzzles included wouldn't test the brain of a six year old. To give a flavour of these delights, you'll find yourself having to jump into a room to push a bookcase from one position to another so you can then climb a ladder and jump on top of the bookcase, and off it again, to make progress. You'll have to wire up a few fuseboxes. You'll have to turn torches on and off. Oh, and there are locked doors. But don't worry, the key will always be found by searching in a ten metre squared surrounding area! This is not problem-solving. It's tedious.

And speaking of tedium, this is what finally did the game in for me. Having found out that a character which I definitely thought was dead had somehow miraculously come back to life (with no injuries whatsoever), I found he was tasked with the all-important mission to walk to a lighthouse in the dark. Well, I tried, but either I had the contrast on my TV turned down too low, Supermassive's suggested brightness controls for 'effective lighting' are not correct, or there's just some huge game-breaking bug in there, but my character just got stuck in a small area near a collapsed bridge in almost complete darkness... and no amount of hammering X seemed to be able to free him (and his surviving teammates) from their doom.

As I noted, there's a lot about this game that is never explained. There are a bunch of journals and logs to be discovered, all documenting how Du'Met constructed his Murder Hotel. Whole construction teams spent years on it at his behest, all seemingly convinced all the instruments of torture they were constructing were just going to be part of a "tourist attraction". Even more incredibly, the journals indicate that Du'Met was knocking a few of them off too. No-one of course raised the alarm about this. And what of that guy - the limo driver? You know, the guy who collects our team from the airport in order to deliver them to Du'Met's hotel of horrors? Well, there seems to be yet another completely ludicrous sub-plot within the main plot about that guy. Apparently, that guy, and his young daughter, are from a previous group of visitors. It's suggested that Du'Met has kidnapped the daughter, and promised the guy he will release her if he goes to the airport and fulfils his role of ferrying the new team to his lair. Um, right. If you say so. Whatever.

Another elephant in the room - well, actually several of the rooms - is that the mannekins are able to talk. And they don't just talk in pre-recorded, tape recorded fashion either. They actually react to your character's presence. So Mr. Du'Met is simultaneously stalking the documentary team in complete silence, whilst somehow projecting his voice at will to the mannikins they encounter? And what were all those early scenes with the guy in a yellow cagool about? Supermassive aren't bothered. You shouldn't be either.

There is a word which adequately summarises The Devil In Me. That word is ridiculous. The relationships between the characters are flat and uninteresting. There is relentless trolling of the player. There are overlong cut-scenes and an almost paralysing lack of action. Even the familiar elements of the previous three entries in The Dark Pictures trilogy seem to have been diluted. The curator, for example, only popped up twice in my entire playthrough, and he seemed to have very little to say when he did. In fact, everything about the game is so ludicrous that it could almost be a parody.

Decisions matter, say Supermassive games, when The Devil In Me is loading in. I agree. I suggest you make a good decision and stay the hell away from this.