Games Like The Dark Pictures Anthology

The first Dark Pictures game I finished was Little Hope, and I finished it wrong — meaning I let everyone die. I was up too late, my wife had gone to bed, and I’d been telling myself I’d just play to the next save point for two hours. When the credits rolled and every character was face-down in cold New England mud, I sat in the dark for a minute and laughed.

That’s the thing nobody warns you about Supermassive’s anthology. They aren’t trying to make you save everyone. They’re trying to make you live with the decisions you made when you were tired.

If you’ve finished the series — Man of Medan, Little Hope, House of Ashes, The Devil in Me — and you’re looking for the next thing that hits that same nerve, here’s where I’d go. Some of these are obvious. A couple aren’t. None of them are quite the same, which is the point.

Until Dawn (the original)

The fact that I have to put this on the list at all tells you how many people came to the anthology first. Until Dawn is where Supermassive figured out the formula — eight teenagers at a cabin, branching paths that actually branch, the Butterfly Effect system that makes a choice in chapter two reach forward five hours and bite you. It’s older now, and the camera holds you in fixed cinematic angles that some players find dated. I think those angles are doing real work. You don’t get to control where you look. The director is telling a story, and you’re inside it.

If you only know the anthology, Until Dawn will feel longer, slower, and more confident. The cast has more time to become people before it has to decide which of them survives the night. Worth it.

The Quarry

Until Dawn’s bigger, brighter, more expensive cousin. Supermassive again, and you can feel them swinging for a wider audience — the cast is more attractive, the deaths more cinematic, the radio chatter a little more polished. Some of the early QTEs feel weightless compared to the anthology’s nastier punishments. But the third act is genuinely good. There’s a sequence in the basement of the old lodge that I won’t spoil except to say I had to put the controller down for a minute when it was over.

The Quarry is the game I’d hand to a friend who doesn’t usually play horror. The anthology is what I’d hand to a friend who already does.

The Casting of Frank Stone

The newest entry in this lineage, from Supermassive again — set in the Dead by Daylight universe but standalone, you don’t need to know the lore. It’s tighter than the anthology games (about six hours), with the same QTE-and-choice structure refined. The thing I loved was the time-jump structure — the story moves between 1980 and present day, and the choices in one timeline ripple into the other. It’s the most narratively ambitious thing they’ve made.

If you bounced off The Devil in Me’s pacing issues, Frank Stone is the corrective. Shorter, sharper, mean in the right places.

Heavy Rain (still, after all these years)

Quantic Dream’s 2010 thriller is the grandfather of the genre. It’s not horror exactly — more crime-thriller dread — but the structure is identical. Multiple playable characters, choices that matter, characters who can permanently die and the game keeps going without them. The controls have aged poorly (David Cage’s insistence on motion-control QTEs makes some scenes genuinely frustrating now), but the idea of the game is still ahead of most things being made today.

Play it on PC if you can — the keyboard rebinding helps. And accept that the writing is going to lurch into goofiness at times. That’s part of the experience.

Detroit: Become Human

I almost didn’t include this one because it’s sci-fi, not horror. But the mechanics are pure anthology DNA: three protagonists, branching paths, characters who can die at any point and the game accommodates. Detroit also has the most legitimately impressive flowchart system I’ve seen in this genre — at the end of each chapter, the game shows you every branch you missed and every choice that was on the table. It’s both transparent about its design and respectful of your time.

If the anthology trained you to think “what if I’d done that differently,” Detroit hands you the answer.

As Dusk Falls

Different in style — INTERIOR/NIGHT’s painted-frame visual approach won’t be for everyone — but mechanically, this is the closest thing to the Dark Pictures Anthology that isn’t Supermassive. Two families, decades apart, choices that span generations. Up to eight players can play together on couch or remote — which is the closest anyone has come to capturing what makes Supermassive games great as a social experience.

You watch your friend make a decision. You boo. The decision turns out to matter. That’s the whole genre, distilled.

What I’m trying to build

I’ll be honest — I write about this genre because I’m trying to extend it. I’m a solo developer working on a cinematic horror game called The Bone Game, the first title under the TSWT Presents banner. Six teenagers, a Friday night, a story told from a treehouse. The bones of Until Dawn’s structure with a frame that’s a little more Tales from the Crypt and a lot more dread.

If anything I wrote up there resonated, you can put The Bone Game on your wishlist. Or just keep reading the blog — I write about this stuff because I love it, not because I have something to sell every time. The next post is about why permadeath in narrative horror games is harder to design than people think.

Whatever you play next, play it the right way. Late at night, alone, with the volume too high. That’s the only way these games work.