Before
The Evil Within came out, I knew that I had to steel myself to be scared by it. But Iâd also been nagged by the idea that I should be scared for it, too. As in, fearful on its behalf. Itâs one of those games thatâs so heavily freighted by genre and pedigree that expectations were massive.
The Evil Within tries its best to deliver in proportion to those anticipations. And thatâs probably where its problems started. Evil Within producer Shinji Mikami made his name on the Resident Evil games. The series he once spearheaded has devolved into an action-heavy popcorn movie shootfest, a parody of itself thatâs barely capable of terrifying a second-grader. So, the arrival of an all-new Mikami title was anticipated as just the kind of reinvigoration that the survival horror genre needed.
You can feel the load of all those hopes and dreams in
The Evil Within. Itâs a burly example of horror game maximalism, one that tries to take all the ways you can make a game scary and boil them over into a blood-red gumbo. Hallucinations on top of hallucinations, weird phenomena, tucked-away hamlets filled with homicidal residents, helpless, child-like weirdos⊠if itâs something that scared someone in a movie, TV or video game once, The Evil Within tries to cram it in there.
Itâs not enough to have once-dead people get up and attack you, for example. Theyâre also wrapped in barbed wire, stabbed dozens of times over with knives, spikes and other sharp implements left sticking out of them. And some of them will get back up yet again, even after youâve unloaded a clip into them. These particular flesh-eaters need to be burnt after youâve beaten them or they might try to take you down once more. So, theyâre not twice-dead but thrice-dead. Thatâs just lower-rung foot-soldiers, too. Some of the boss characters will need to be snuffed four and five times before they finally stop bothering the gameâs lead character, police detective Sebastian âSebâ Castellanos.
Thatâs just a small example of how the gameâs creators try to blow out the scale of the proceedings in
The Evil Within. Itâs a game that feels like itâs trying to hit its marks in as many ways as possible. The storytelling starts with Sebastian arriving at the scene of a mass killing at an ominous psychological treatment facility. Then, scenes shift to present-day Castellanos, now one of Beacon Mental Hospitalâs patients in a fuzzy dreamworld where players can save the game and upgrade his skills and weapons. Then heâs there again in a malevolent, shared mindscape, slowly uncovering the mad experiments where unhinged scientists connect hapless residents to some sort of animalistic hive mind. And the gruff, alcoholic cop walks Beaconâs halls on yet another interlocking plane of existence. It might or might not be the real world but the freakish monsters still dog his steps.
Sebastian and his police partners are pulled into a series of nightmarish events being orchestrated by a renegade scientist named Ruvik. The story is presented as a set of slowly revealed puzzle pieces but it becomes clear that the gameâs big bad has been scarred by a horrific family trauma. That tortured backstory mirrors Sebastianâs own troubled past, revealed through journal entries that you find throughout the game.
While the ever-shifting, untrustworthy presentation adds to the general creepiness of the horror-trope skeleton, the entire narrative is so under-explained and flatly acted that none of it feels memorable. Moreover, the game never makes you connect to the people barely surviving its story. Itâs not that
Evil Within needs to aim to be another Last of Us. But more time spent on crafting the characters would have given the game-makers another way to make players uneasy. Sebastianâs personality is so blasĂ© it doesnât feel like heâor, more importantly, the playerâhas anything at stake. Thereâs no charm or idiosyncrasy to these heroes or villains. They exist to be embittered or endangered and thatâs it. This lack of connection makes The Evil Within feel more like the work of an old master who hasnât quite absorbed the changes that his medium has gone through.
That persistent taste of reconstituted past gloriesâintertwined with those maximalist ambitionsârun throughout
The Evil Within in various ways. Thereâs the most damnable tease at the gameâs beginning, where the setting of Krimson City falls apart as the main characters are speeding away from a cursed location. Ah, I thought, hereâs where Mikami will blow up a larger, more open-ended version of his survival horror vision. But that implementation never comes to pass. Even though the spaces in the Krimson City levels are bigger, they still fit into the same âskulk + gather resources + fightâ loop that you do for most of the game. Overall, youâre mainly left to pick through smaller, more cramped buildings and spaces. Theyâre exquisitely designed and serviceable enough but nothing about them feels like a great leap forward.
Thatâs true of the gameplay overall. The tension of the gameâs early levels centers around the idea that one wrong move will get you insta-killed, which happens fairly often. I spent a whole lot of time crouch-walking everywhere and hiding in closets in the first three chapters, feeling underpowered and lost. But by the middle of the game, the need to be cautious melts away and The Evil Within becomes more about prosaic considerations like reflex response and resource management. This is a game trying to be at least two very different kinds of things. A moody atmosphere designed to elicit scares and design mechanics which alternately direct players to be stealthy sneaks or fast-moving precision marksmen. While itâs certainly possible to deliver on both of those aims,
The Evil Within doesnât have the chops to make good on its multilayered promise.
I felt frustrated when playing
Evil Within and I felt afraid, too. The latter was okay, a result of the game doing what it was supposed to do. The former, though, was a problem.
The thing I constantly had to decide is if
The Evil Within was the kind of sprawl that was worth continuing through. Letâs consider the weapons Sebastian wields. There are old stand-bys like a handgun, shotgun and sniper rifle. Ammo for these is scarce but never so low that you wonât be able to proceed. The frustration I talked about comes into focus with the Agony Crossbow, the gameâs best weapon. Its bolts have a few different special abilities, like freezing an enemy in place, exploding when they get close or stunning them with strobe flashes. While youâll find bolts for the crossbow scattered throughout the world, the player is really meant to craft his own arsenal by finding scrap parts in the environment or dismantling the various traps Seb encounters. My desire to constantly have ammunition for the crossbow meant that Iâd have to wander same-looking halls in search of bolts or traps. Tying the continued usefulness of the gameâs best weapon to an activity loop that quickly becomes boring is a telling example of Evil Withinâs shortcomings.
A lot of the game is a tedious slog of door-opening and object-grabbing. Even the act of picking objects feels consistently buggy. If the cameraâs not pointed in just the right way, the prompt to pick up a bottle of green upgrade gel wonât show up. And when itâs not being monotonous, the big action set-pieces are hamstrung by problems that make them annoying. Youâre often faced with instances where youâll somehow need to intuit something that you havenât been prepped for, like looking at the ceiling to find a switch to shoot. That kind of opaque design is certainly a creative choice but when itâs stapled to imprecise mechanical execution, the best possible consequences of that choice gets stifled. In other words, donât-know-what-to-do is fine, as long as able-to-do-what-you-need still reliably happens.
Aiming dead center at a dead body that you need to shoot and seeing your subsequent shots have no effect⊠did you miss or is something else wrong? Trying to frantically mount a ledge so mutated sea creatures donât chomp on you but the command to climb up takes a painfully slow time to execute. Too often, I felt myself stymied because enemies magically detected me despite being hidden or too-same environmental design that led to me getting lost. I replayed way too many sections over and over because of moments where, seemingly, enough technical tightening didnât take place.
This state of affairs wouldnât be so regrettable if there werenât other, unabashedly excellent aspects of
The Evil Within. Tango Gameworks has poured terrifying creature designs, replete with Cronenberg-style body horror, into the game. Itâs also bursting with great artistic details in the environment, made more effective by a slew of atmospheric effects. Excellent ambient sound design and music surrounds all of that, with sonic cues that will stay in your head long after youâre done playing.
Speaking of creatures,
The Evil Withinâs fiendishly architected boss fights are some of the best Iâve ground through in years. One level has you haunted by a ghost-like enemy who only needs to brush his fingertips on you to execute a one-hit kill. Nothing you do will harm him; you can only run. Another features a tough-to-decipher boss fights where youâre too harried to tell if youâre actually damaging the trap-laying monstrosity that youâre battling. Other pivotal battles have you facing down big, lumbering enemies in tight, cramped spaces that donât let you take advantage of your speedier movement. Each juke and pivot is as precious as ammo and health syringes youâll hoard. These are the moments when the game feels its most assured, doling out diverse challenges that youâll need to frantically figure out as you go.
Again, thrills like those lose their edge when theyâre mired in inconsistent response or a story thatâs essentially a stack of clichĂ©s. In a game where every bullet is precious and a playerâs patience and mental energy areis continually taxed, these things wind up being more than minor annoyances. They become reasons to give up.
I wanted to like
The Evil Within a lot. It is a game that delivers on much of its survival-horror-revival promise, making me jump in terror and feel sick at the sight of an enemyâs guts twitching after itâs dead. But itâs also a game where I felt like my time wasnât respected throughout, where my most skillful attempts at stealth and combat got tripped up by messy execution. The world-making is strong here, creepy, confined conception that constantly makes you feel like youâll never feel truly free. Ultimately, though, the problems of Evil Within make it feel like a halfway-evolved collection of design ideas from its chief creatorâs glory days. Were The Evil Within more tightly focused, that fact might be forgivable. But itâs too big and diluted for its best aspects to support it.
