Just in time for Halloween, The Evil Within is a highly anticipated horror video game from the Shinji Mikami, the man who gave birth to the “survival horror” video game genre.
Mikami is a celebrated game designer, responsible for critically acclaimed games like the original Resident Evil and Resident Evil 4. Both of those titles redefined video games as we know them today.
So when it was announced that Mikami would be going back to his roots with The Evil Within, video game fans were unsurprisingly excited for the grand return of the father of survival horror.
Does the game live up to the hype? I can put it this way: the horrors of The Evil Within are certainly many, but sometimes it’s scary in a less enjoyable way.
The Story
Detective Sebastian Castellanos, along with his partner Joseph Oda and junior detective Julie Kidman, of the Krimson City Police Department, are called to the scene of a multiple homicide at Beacon Mental Hospital. Upon crossing the threshold, they discover the hospital is littered with corpses, the floors and walls spattered with gallons of blood. They find a strange surviving doctor, but before they can properly question him, Sebastian witnesses through a live security camera a hooded figure assaulting a trio of police officers with supernatural speed. The figure turns his menacing face towards the camera, suddenly materializing behind Sebastian before the detective blacks out.
Sebastian awakens alone, hung upside down in the dank, disgusting underbelly of the hospital. The neighboring bodies strung up along side him are not as fortunate, as one by one, their mangled carcasses are taken away by a malevolent disfigured butcher to be hacked to pieces for some unknown sinister purpose. Before it’s Sebastian’s turn up at the chopping block, he’s able to cut his way free his bindings. In his haste to escape the madness unfolding before him, he trips an alarm, alerting the chainsaw-wielding sadist to chase after him, deeper into the bowels of the tortuous mental hospital.
From there, Sebastian’s nightmare is only beginning. You as the player will have to help Sebastian through the insanity that surrounds Beacon Mental Hospital and uncover its dark secrets. You’ll reunite with your cop buddies, meet a strange ghostly nurse, and encounter all sorts of horrific beasts that just can’t wait to tear Sebastian’s head from his body in order to snack on his brain.
The story of The Evil Within is part slasher film, part psychological horror, and all absolute nonsense. It is no The Last of Us. The story genuinely creates intrigue in finding out the logic behind its constant shifts in time and place, but it ends with more questions than answers. Your first time through the game will likely leave you scratching your head as to what actually just happened in 17 or so hours it takes to beat the game. The events of the game seem to take place out of chronological order, so it’s up to players to piece together the proper story through subsequent playthroughs, and hope that future DLC will expound upon its countless mysteries.
The Gameplay
Some people will call Mikami a master of combat and game design, and there are a few glimmers of that hidden within The Evil Within. There is a large emphasis on combat in this game, but despite the focus on action, this game is truly a “survival horror” game, a moniker that represents ideas of perseverance with limited resources at the player’s disposal. Your combat options are not as limited as they were in the original Resident Evil games, but you also won’t be blasting through enemies with large stocks of ammo like you would in a game like Dead Space or Resident Evil 4.
Because ammunition in The Evil Within is very scarce, you’ll have to rely on your creativity to get you through many early combat situations in the game. The early chapters are primarily stealth portions of the game, encouraging you to sneak up on your enemies and silently subdue them with a special one-hit kill attack. However, if an enemy finds you, you’re encouraged to flee instead of wasting your precious bullets to down your foe. You’ll either be trying to find a hiding spot to reset your enemy for a stealth kill, or lure them into one of the many environmental traps in the game. You’ll find switches that will release spike traps on unsuspecting fiends, bales of hay that you can use to set your enemies on fire, and wires trapped with explosives. You have the option of directly using these traps against your foes or disarming them and using the trap parts to create your own weapons, mainly bolts for your crossbow.
The crossbow is probably the most useful tool in the game. You can create various bolts, such as explosive mines to lay as traps for enemies, or flash bolts to stun enemies and set them up for a one-hit stealth kill. The latter strategy probably ends up being the most important tip in the game, since regular ammo is rare and trap parts are basically laying everywhere if you’re able to diffuse them successfully.
Fire is probably your other best friend in The Evil Within and your enemies’ greatest fear. Fire makes sure your enemies stay dead and acts as a one-hit kill on every normal enemy in the game. However, just like ammo for your firearms, matches are a somewhat limited quantity. You’ll often find yourself wanting to get through a scenario as efficiently as possible, which includes grouping enemies together and lighting them all on fire with a single match. When it happens successfully, it’s extremely satisfying, but when you end up getting grabbed because Sebastian takes too long to pull out his matchbook, it’s extremely frustrating.
In addition to the freedom the combat provides, there’s also an upgrade system, similar to older Mikami games like Resident Evil 4. You collect currency in the form of “green gel” that you can find by exploring the environment or looting defeated enemies. You can spend this gel to upgrade Sebastian’s abilities and weapons. You can upgrade things like the power of your guns, the amount of ammo you can hold, how many matches you can hold, Sebastian’s health, and his stamina. Spending your points wisely can make or break the game. For instance, putting more points into stamina will allow Sebastian to run for longer, allowing you to escape to take a breather and rethink your strategy when you end up screwing up an enemy encounter. Increasing your ammo threshold early will allow you to stock up on ammo instead of hoping you run across some bullets later when you desperately need them.
While the normal enemy encounters give you a lot of freedom and experimentation, the boss fights are a different story. There’s usually only one way to defeat a boss, and that’s by shooting it a lot. Attempting to experiment in these encounters will lead to many game over screens.
Frustration is a feeling you’ll likely have to endure for the majority of your first playthrough of The Evil Within. Learning how to play the game is a process of trial and error. The game encourages experimentation with its mechanics, as not everything is spelled out to the player. The aforementioned flammable hay bales don’t have an obvious purpose as a combat tool unless you happen to burn it near a body. The game doesn’t normally tell you can throw a bottle at an enemy’s face to set up a stealth kill or that you can lay certain cross bow bolts down as traps. A lot of these strategies are hidden in the loading screen tips rather than in the actual game itself, but I guess if you end up failing a lot, you’ll eventually be able to read every loading screen tip the game has to offer.
I reckon most players will end up in failing a lot. A lot of game overs can be perceived as “cheap” and “unfair.” There are points in the game that I’ve been hit by enemies through walls, been grabbed by enemies that should have been dead, and spotted by enemies that shouldn’t have seen me. The mobility you’re given in the game can be more dangerous than useful. More often than not, I would attempt to flee a combat scenario, only to find myself stuck in the environment thanks to my character running into a corner or pillar that I couldn’t see, ending with a killing blow from an enemy thanks to my inability to escape. Every time your character dies, you are forced to restart from the game last checkpoint, and the checkpointing is often questionable. You’ll get a checkpoint right before an extended unskippable cutscene, meaning you’ll have to watch it every single time you fail a scenario. It gets to the point that any attempt that the game makes to be “scary” is undermined by the frustration at having to redo a section of the game again.
The game isn’t all about combat, however. Almost every chapter will have something different to experience. While the early game plays out more stealthily, some parts are more focused on action, and some are more focused on puzzles. In one chapter you’ll be hoping to stab a few enemies in the head without getting caught, in another you’ll be forced to take out a horde of enemies in an arena-style zone, and in the next chapter you’ll be escaping and evading traps in a booby-trapped kitchen. The gameplay variety is much appreciated, but it can be saddening when you end up learning a new strategy that you’ll only get to revisit in a second play-through.
The second playthrough, if you’re into replaying games, is where the game really comes together. In addition to trying to understand its fragmented story, you’ll get a chance to apply everything you learned about the game the first time through, and it’s a much more enjoyable experience. You even get the option of carrying over your character upgrades in a “New Game Plus” scenario, which carries over all your equipment and abilities from your previous run through the game.
The Presentation
The Evil Within is both beautiful and ugly, in every sense of those two words. There are a lot of technical issues with the game. The game runs in a forced letterbox display, meaning you will get thick black bars at the top and bottom of the screen, with the actual gameplay only displaying in the middle. The bars didn’t bother me that much, but the narrow field of view that the game forces on you can be a detriment. That tended to be the reason I found myself trapping myself by running into off-screen objects, since the camera wasn’t zoomed out far enough for me to see them before it was too late.
Some will say that the letterbox format is there for artistic reasons, but it seems it’s mainly there for technical ones. The game has a lot of performance issues, and the framerate isn’t exactly stable or consistent. It’s a puzzling irony because the game was developed on Id Tech 5, a game engine specifically made for games to run at 60 frames per second. One can only guess that the Japanese development team had trouble using foreign development tools, which is a shame, because the art direction is superb.
A horror game needs atmosphere, and The Evil Within really delivers on that point. The lighting is incredible at affecting the mood of a scene, as you traverse dark spooky environments with only your lantern to lead the way. You’ll explore extremely detailed, eerie locales, from a haunting village in the forest, to a decadent mansion hiding some disturbingly violent secrets. Then the next level will take an extreme shift into grotesque dungeon filled with torture devices and traps that still have their victims in close vicinity and a disgusting amount of red bodily fluids painted across the floor. It’s stuff ripped straight out of any horror movie imaginable, and it looks great and gross in every way you want it to. Some of the levels make me glad that “smell-o-vision” isn’t a real thing, as I can almost feel the stench of these rotting environments.
As beautiful and atmospheric as the game is, you probably won’t find yourself immersed to the extremity of mistaking the video game to be something other than that. I reiterate, The Last of Us this game is not. It’s an extremely “video gamey” video game, to the point that your character can just break open metal locks with his fist and no one thinks anything of it. When disarming traps, the game plays a canned animation that might result in Sebastian’s hands being nowhere near the trap he’s dealing with, and, despite there being numerous sources of fire in the game, only Sebastian’s matches are capable of lighting anything on fire. It’s these little quirks mixed with the technical issues that can mar and otherwise great-looking game.
Of course, for a horror game, the ultimate question is “Is it scary?” It’s certainly unpleasant, in an enjoyable way. The enemy and monster designs are quite horrific. The normal enemies consists of creatures that resemble human beings that have been victims of egregious torture, with barbed wire and glass protruding through their flesh and various gaping wounds on their bodies. Monster designs run from a Japanese-horror inspired long-black-haired spider woman that constantly screams in agony as she emerges from bloodied corpses to attack you, to a lumbering stalker that wears a safe to obscure his face and carries a bloodied bag of decapitated heads with which he wants to smash you with. I come to horror games for creepy gross monsters, and The Evil Within successfully aces on that point with flying colors of crimson-covered entrails.
The Conclusion
Despite all the hype for Shinji Mikami, you shouldn’t be going into The Evil Within expecting a technical marvel that will set the world on fire with any outstanding innovation in gameplay or story. The technical issues are hard to look past, especially so early in this generation of game consoles.
If you’re the type of player who is “one and done,” and will never look back on a game after beating it once, The Evil Within can be a long, frustrating journey. But if you’re willing to endure the game long enough to find out the tricks and inner workings of its mechanics, there’s a highly enjoyable game hidden in there through subsequent playthroughs.
If you missed the days of “survival-horror,” The Evil Within just might whet that appetite. If you’re expecting another Resident Evil 4, you’ll probably be disappointed.
I give The Evil Within a 3 out of 5.
By Alfredo Dizon, eParisExtra 