I've been pretty stoked with the upcoming horizon for releases. For years I was starting to wonder if the horror genre was just dying a slow painful death, but in recent months and past conferences, it seems like the horror genre is experiencing some kind of resurgence. With games like Outlast, Amenisa: The Dark Descent, and Dreadout making waves, developers have finally realized there is a itch that needs to be scratched in the horror niche.
Almost a year ago, around the time the new consoles were just getting released, I was seeing snippets from a game by Resident Evil luminary Shinji Mikami which often followed by concepts about him wanting to get back to his true horror roots. Initial impressions were good. Terrifying gore, frightening imagery, difficulty and desperation. All these things sound great. It's been almost a full year coming but I can't wait to sink my barbed teeth into....
THE EVIL WITHIN
The story starts of with detective Sebastian Castellanos and two of his partners Joseph Oda and Julie Kidman are picked up by a squad car after just getting off a case. However, it doesn't appear that they are going home because a gruesome mass murder has taken place at a nearby psychiatric hospital.
The scene inside is brutal as there is blood smeared everywhere and the floor is littered with corpses. They find a doctor who is still alive, and as Joseph tends to him, Sebastian checks the security footage to try to see what happens. He finds a tape of 3 of his fellow officers opening fire on a figure in a white hood, that seems to be able to teleport in a flash, slashing the officers throats. The figure seems to catch the camera on him. When Sebastian turns around the figure is behind him, jamming him with a syringe and sending him into darkness.
Sebastian comes to in a bad situation, he is hung upside down and a monstrous person is just hacking up bodies, and clearly his turn is coming. Sebastian is able to escape and flee the hospital to find a ride from the beat cop, the doctor, one of his patients, and detective Kidman. They try escape in an ambulance but not without the hooded figure seemingly laying waste to the entire city in an attempt to stop them. They manage to escape the city, but the ambulance crashes during the escape.
So as I played this opening sequence with my roomie watching, the constant question that kept popping up while I played was "Do you have any idea what the fuck is going on?" I wouldn't call this in medias res because we clearly start at the beginning here, but 3 chapters in there isn't a lot of exposition to go on. At about 8 hours in and it's sort of explaining what is happening, but even then I'd say it's a jumbled mess of a story. It's not particularly good. If it threw in more penis references and the word fuck a dozen more times, I'd think this was a Suda 51 game.
But Shinji Mikami's influence here is absolute unmistakable. Just the overall feel of how this entire game plays like on of his games. It uses the over the shoulder 3rd person style you might know from a Resident Evil 4, but if I had to compare it to other games, I would say it borrows more influence from say Shadows of the Damned feel and play, with a Resident Evil 5 inventory system (but better).
I do find that this game makes some pretty bad mistakes, specially for one that pushed on next gen consoles. Games like Beyond: Two Souls and Last of Us show some of the incredible things you can do with motion capture for animating games. Yet for some reason, none of the character models in this game looks all that great, especially when talking. Everything looks so hokey and roughly done. It's bad enough that I've noticed it at each cutscene. Things are made worse with the washed over grainy brown grindhouse sort of filter it puts the game through. It doesn't make the game look better, stylized, or more scary. Even worse, the textures don't load before the scene does sometimes. It just looks like crap.
Honestly, for games like these I shouldn't be surprised by this anymore. But as you might have figured, the voice acting is crap. Lines of dialog seem forced, out of place, or not matching the scenario they are in. It's strange because I thought we finally got past that point of bad voice acting in games. It's been a very long time since I can't think of the last game where I thought, "ugh, this voice acting is bad." Even some games where I think they are bad at the onset, I start to warm up to it later. Not so much in this case.
Movement is pretty direct and simple the analog makes you move where you want to go, and the other spins the camera. Not that it will help much, the developers on this one were exceptionally proud about how tight the camera is and how it adds to the horror experience, but from what I've played, it doesn't enhance the experience, it just gives me less visible room. There have been more than one occasion when I am trying to sneak and move the camera to see my attacker just to have the camera zoom in on the back of my head or right into the cover I am trying to see around.
For the most part, the controls aren't going to throw you a curve ball. If you've played a 3rd person shooter in the past few years most of this will feel familiar. One trigger aims, the other shoots. One bumper sneaks, the other sprints. Square (on playstation) reloads the gun. The only hangup I occasionally have is when I'm trying to melee someone. as it works both with the trigger and the Triangle button. Neither of them really feel all that natural to me, and on more than one occasion I've tried to scramble for a melee strike and stood in place because I was hitting the wrong button.
Not that it would have helped. Melee in this game is about as effective as cutting a log with a feather duster. The first punch might send a baddie reeling, but the 2nd one they will blow through and take a chunk a damage out of you. If you don't have your hands on a weapon like a torch or a hand axe you are going to get your ass handed to you. Sadly, most weapons are only good at killing one enemy.
The reason I mention melee first is because it's going to be a situation you will probably find yourself in often. Ammo in this game is STUPIDLY scarce. Like, worse than Dead Space scarce. at the early goings of the game you can only carry like 6-10 shots for a weapon at any given time, and it sometimes will take a perfectly squared head shot to hit 3 or 4 times before an enemy goes down. In Evil Within it is often smarter to run if you can (especially if you are a magnificently awful shot like I am). I did find out near the end of the game you can shoot them in the leg and then burn them with a match. This would have made a lot of the game much easier.
Or, if the situation allows, you can stealth kill. This is actually pretty hard to do because it's difficult to tell what environments actually provide cover. If you are sneaking you can get behind people and they can't see you, but they provide covers like low walls or tall grass. Sometimes I can get right up on a guy for a kill, other times they notice me immediately. I haven't figured out it's nuances yet, but I hope to soon because every bullet counts, (as again, I am an awful shot). You will often find yourself either scrambling to hide, or strategically burning bodies to try to take enemies out.
Now, something I hadn't noticed when I bought the game was the stamp of one my arch-nemesis' on the cover, Bethesda. Now back in my Skyrim review I used a Love/Hate analogy about my feelings towards western RPGS, but I really can apply to Bethesda as a whole: They love to Suck, and I hate playing their games. So I shouldn't have been surprised when they put their stamp in the game with a skill system. Now, there have been a number of action games that do this very thing and I've never complained about it before. So why do I bring it up now?
Because they tried to crowbar in the "Accuracy" skill again. This isn't Fallout, shit is coming at me and it's coming at me fast, so if I have the natural ability to line up my reticle for a perfect head shot while they are running at me, then I should be rewarded as such and not miss because an arbitrary statistic said I did. Otherwise most of the skills are pretty simplistic and cut and dry. More health, longer sprint, faster reload, more damage, etc etc. You level up your skills by picking up green jars of what I've been calling "Brain Juice". You can find them scattered around the level and sometimes enemies drop it. I suppose it's cool to have customization, but it all feels pretty pointless. Max health and ammo capacity.
In addition to the bullets being scarce, the recovery equipment is equally difficult to come by. You can pick up syringes along the way for a minor and modest health boost (I quickly leveled the number of them I can carry and how much it heals) and there are also large health kits that recover you fully. But even those have draw backs as you get momentarily dazed when you use it, so you can't even use them in the heat of combat or you will be a sitting duck. Since they extend your health bar they are important to use, but I'd be lying if I said I found them particularly effective.
I won't lie, the game is fucking difficult. There is no way to sugar coat it. I don't know if this was an attempt to raise the level of desperation while you played or not. To use an already tired example, Dead Space did this by making ammo relatively scarce, and when that happens you don't have much to protect yourself, and thus raises the tension because every single shot fired matters.
The difference here is despite the difficulty, I could make it out of that situation alive. You will die in Evil Within a lot. This is the problem I had with Outlast: when you are protected by a relatively frequent checkpoint system and you don't lose the equipment you've expired when you die in a confrontation, suddenly the desperation that is supposed to make a fight so tense suddenly isn't there anymore. It's not like say in Dark Souls or Demon Souls where if I've been plodding along for an hour, desperately trying to find my checkpoint and I get killed I've lost all that progress and have to start over. That is desperation.
There is a scene in chapter 3 where you are going toe to toe with a large guy with a chainsaw (you really need a new thing Shiji, you've done this to death). The context of the scenario told me I needed to confront this guy, but I wasn't sure if I had to fight him or not. So after the first few rounds resulted in me getting my ass handed to me, I tried other things. Because the checkpoint would drop me off right before the fight started. So if I have no progress to make up, I wasn't afraid of losing, so I'd try different things and if I got killed no big deal. It's frustrating, but it's not scary.
And that ultimately is the biggest problem with The Evil Within: it's not scary. I heard that in reviews and previews going into the game, but I sort of shrugged it off. Yeah, monsters are fucked up looking, and all the enemies are dangerous. It does an excellent job of letting me know almost anything in this game can ruin my day. But the pacing never feels tense enough, I find the tight camera more frustrating than unnerving. Since I don't have limited saves of Resident Evil or the long spaced checkpoints of Demon's Souls, I have pretty limited tension to do well.
Don't get me wrong, I don't feel that ruins the experience as much as you might think. But it is a problem when Mikami says he's going back to his horror roots, but then sort of misses the point on what it is that makes a game scary. I've talked about it on hashtagnerd.com but P.T. is a great example of understanding fear. Scary looking and fucked up monsters help, but it's a truly terrifying atmosphere complimented by an equally horrifying ambiance are really what gets under your skin. A threat you know is there but can't often see or protect yourself again.
What does ruin the experience for me however, is the controller shattering frustration I have felt while playing it. Make no mistake about it, this game is punishing and not in the fun way. I've already mentioned how Dark Souls is incredibly difficult but on the same hand it's fair. The Evil Within is not. There are multiple sections where the game will pull a cheap kill out of nowhere, or pit you against a boss that can instantly kill you while you try to find the contextual things you need to hit to progress. It's frustrating to infuriating levels. It's not challenging, and it's not making the game any more fun for me. Next to the game not being scary, this is the next biggest issue.
At the time of writing, I haven't finished the game yet. I find myself hard pressed to rate this game because I don't feel it's a bad game. But it's certainly not great. Despite it being an entirely new I.P. with new characters, new story, new monsters, and new mechanics, I can't help but feel like I've already played this before. It pushes no boundaries, and brings virtually nothing new to the table. Which is fine I guess, a lot of games do just that and still manage to be pretty good.
But given how amped I was to play it, I gotta say that I'm let down. The game's most remarkable feat is how average it is across the board. I'm a fan of Shinji Mikami's work but it's really about that time he developed a new game engine. Because while it was a blast in Resident Evil 4, every game that plays similarly to this is going to just feel like a watered down rehash of his previous games.
The game is fun at times but aggrivation is more prevalent. I got more than 10+ hours of "entertainment" for it so I can't say it was a wasted purchase, just ended up being more hollow than I expected. I could give it a recommendation as a solid 6 or 7/10, but I couldn't blame you if you wanted to wait for a used one or for the price to come down on it.
Seriously Shinji? Dude with Chainsaw? That's like 4 games now.
Get a new thing.
The scene inside is brutal as there is blood smeared everywhere and the floor is littered with corpses. They find a doctor who is still alive, and as Joseph tends to him, Sebastian checks the security footage to try to see what happens. He finds a tape of 3 of his fellow officers opening fire on a figure in a white hood, that seems to be able to teleport in a flash, slashing the officers throats. The figure seems to catch the camera on him. When Sebastian turns around the figure is behind him, jamming him with a syringe and sending him into darkness.
 |
| Initial appearance was rough. At game onset, nobody was really "likable". |
Sebastian comes to in a bad situation, he is hung upside down and a monstrous person is just hacking up bodies, and clearly his turn is coming. Sebastian is able to escape and flee the hospital to find a ride from the beat cop, the doctor, one of his patients, and detective Kidman. They try escape in an ambulance but not without the hooded figure seemingly laying waste to the entire city in an attempt to stop them. They manage to escape the city, but the ambulance crashes during the escape.
So as I played this opening sequence with my roomie watching, the constant question that kept popping up while I played was "Do you have any idea what the fuck is going on?" I wouldn't call this in medias res because we clearly start at the beginning here, but 3 chapters in there isn't a lot of exposition to go on. At about 8 hours in and it's sort of explaining what is happening, but even then I'd say it's a jumbled mess of a story. It's not particularly good. If it threw in more penis references and the word fuck a dozen more times, I'd think this was a Suda 51 game.
 |
| Yep, sure nothing evil is happening here. Looks totally like a hospital. |
I do find that this game makes some pretty bad mistakes, specially for one that pushed on next gen consoles. Games like Beyond: Two Souls and Last of Us show some of the incredible things you can do with motion capture for animating games. Yet for some reason, none of the character models in this game looks all that great, especially when talking. Everything looks so hokey and roughly done. It's bad enough that I've noticed it at each cutscene. Things are made worse with the washed over grainy brown grindhouse sort of filter it puts the game through. It doesn't make the game look better, stylized, or more scary. Even worse, the textures don't load before the scene does sometimes. It just looks like crap.
 |
| The presentation will feel familiar to you if you've played a Mikami game in the past 10 years. |
Movement is pretty direct and simple the analog makes you move where you want to go, and the other spins the camera. Not that it will help much, the developers on this one were exceptionally proud about how tight the camera is and how it adds to the horror experience, but from what I've played, it doesn't enhance the experience, it just gives me less visible room. There have been more than one occasion when I am trying to sneak and move the camera to see my attacker just to have the camera zoom in on the back of my head or right into the cover I am trying to see around.
 |
| Ruvik is a massive asshole. He can basically teleport and can one hit kill you. Sections he is in will usually result in some trial and error. |
For the most part, the controls aren't going to throw you a curve ball. If you've played a 3rd person shooter in the past few years most of this will feel familiar. One trigger aims, the other shoots. One bumper sneaks, the other sprints. Square (on playstation) reloads the gun. The only hangup I occasionally have is when I'm trying to melee someone. as it works both with the trigger and the Triangle button. Neither of them really feel all that natural to me, and on more than one occasion I've tried to scramble for a melee strike and stood in place because I was hitting the wrong button.
Not that it would have helped. Melee in this game is about as effective as cutting a log with a feather duster. The first punch might send a baddie reeling, but the 2nd one they will blow through and take a chunk a damage out of you. If you don't have your hands on a weapon like a torch or a hand axe you are going to get your ass handed to you. Sadly, most weapons are only good at killing one enemy.
 |
| Sometimes one well placed match will save you a significant number of bullets. |
The reason I mention melee first is because it's going to be a situation you will probably find yourself in often. Ammo in this game is STUPIDLY scarce. Like, worse than Dead Space scarce. at the early goings of the game you can only carry like 6-10 shots for a weapon at any given time, and it sometimes will take a perfectly squared head shot to hit 3 or 4 times before an enemy goes down. In Evil Within it is often smarter to run if you can (especially if you are a magnificently awful shot like I am). I did find out near the end of the game you can shoot them in the leg and then burn them with a match. This would have made a lot of the game much easier.
Or, if the situation allows, you can stealth kill. This is actually pretty hard to do because it's difficult to tell what environments actually provide cover. If you are sneaking you can get behind people and they can't see you, but they provide covers like low walls or tall grass. Sometimes I can get right up on a guy for a kill, other times they notice me immediately. I haven't figured out it's nuances yet, but I hope to soon because every bullet counts, (as again, I am an awful shot). You will often find yourself either scrambling to hide, or strategically burning bodies to try to take enemies out.
 |
| While the inventory doesn't pause the game, it slows it down for you to pick what you need. The crossbow you can build bolts for, but even that is pretty quick. |
Now, something I hadn't noticed when I bought the game was the stamp of one my arch-nemesis' on the cover, Bethesda. Now back in my Skyrim review I used a Love/Hate analogy about my feelings towards western RPGS, but I really can apply to Bethesda as a whole: They love to Suck, and I hate playing their games. So I shouldn't have been surprised when they put their stamp in the game with a skill system. Now, there have been a number of action games that do this very thing and I've never complained about it before. So why do I bring it up now?
Because they tried to crowbar in the "Accuracy" skill again. This isn't Fallout, shit is coming at me and it's coming at me fast, so if I have the natural ability to line up my reticle for a perfect head shot while they are running at me, then I should be rewarded as such and not miss because an arbitrary statistic said I did. Otherwise most of the skills are pretty simplistic and cut and dry. More health, longer sprint, faster reload, more damage, etc etc. You level up your skills by picking up green jars of what I've been calling "Brain Juice". You can find them scattered around the level and sometimes enemies drop it. I suppose it's cool to have customization, but it all feels pretty pointless. Max health and ammo capacity.
 |
| The longer I play the less it seems I'm going to be able to max my abilities. |
I won't lie, the game is fucking difficult. There is no way to sugar coat it. I don't know if this was an attempt to raise the level of desperation while you played or not. To use an already tired example, Dead Space did this by making ammo relatively scarce, and when that happens you don't have much to protect yourself, and thus raises the tension because every single shot fired matters.
 |
| Laura will mess you up. If she gets a hold of you, chances are it's going to be a one hit kill. Until you HAVE to fight her, you don't. Period. |
The difference here is despite the difficulty, I could make it out of that situation alive. You will die in Evil Within a lot. This is the problem I had with Outlast: when you are protected by a relatively frequent checkpoint system and you don't lose the equipment you've expired when you die in a confrontation, suddenly the desperation that is supposed to make a fight so tense suddenly isn't there anymore. It's not like say in Dark Souls or Demon Souls where if I've been plodding along for an hour, desperately trying to find my checkpoint and I get killed I've lost all that progress and have to start over. That is desperation.
There is a scene in chapter 3 where you are going toe to toe with a large guy with a chainsaw (you really need a new thing Shiji, you've done this to death). The context of the scenario told me I needed to confront this guy, but I wasn't sure if I had to fight him or not. So after the first few rounds resulted in me getting my ass handed to me, I tried other things. Because the checkpoint would drop me off right before the fight started. So if I have no progress to make up, I wasn't afraid of losing, so I'd try different things and if I got killed no big deal. It's frustrating, but it's not scary.
 |
| Later, the baddies get shotguns, machine guns, riot armor, and bullet proof masks. And it's fucking bullshit. |
And that ultimately is the biggest problem with The Evil Within: it's not scary. I heard that in reviews and previews going into the game, but I sort of shrugged it off. Yeah, monsters are fucked up looking, and all the enemies are dangerous. It does an excellent job of letting me know almost anything in this game can ruin my day. But the pacing never feels tense enough, I find the tight camera more frustrating than unnerving. Since I don't have limited saves of Resident Evil or the long spaced checkpoints of Demon's Souls, I have pretty limited tension to do well.
Don't get me wrong, I don't feel that ruins the experience as much as you might think. But it is a problem when Mikami says he's going back to his horror roots, but then sort of misses the point on what it is that makes a game scary. I've talked about it on hashtagnerd.com but P.T. is a great example of understanding fear. Scary looking and fucked up monsters help, but it's a truly terrifying atmosphere complimented by an equally horrifying ambiance are really what gets under your skin. A threat you know is there but can't often see or protect yourself again.
 |
| I've found "Nurse Joy" to be a cryptic snot, and I have no idea what connection she even has to the story aside from passive aggressively mocking me for saving often. |
What does ruin the experience for me however, is the controller shattering frustration I have felt while playing it. Make no mistake about it, this game is punishing and not in the fun way. I've already mentioned how Dark Souls is incredibly difficult but on the same hand it's fair. The Evil Within is not. There are multiple sections where the game will pull a cheap kill out of nowhere, or pit you against a boss that can instantly kill you while you try to find the contextual things you need to hit to progress. It's frustrating to infuriating levels. It's not challenging, and it's not making the game any more fun for me. Next to the game not being scary, this is the next biggest issue.
At the time of writing, I haven't finished the game yet. I find myself hard pressed to rate this game because I don't feel it's a bad game. But it's certainly not great. Despite it being an entirely new I.P. with new characters, new story, new monsters, and new mechanics, I can't help but feel like I've already played this before. It pushes no boundaries, and brings virtually nothing new to the table. Which is fine I guess, a lot of games do just that and still manage to be pretty good.
But given how amped I was to play it, I gotta say that I'm let down. The game's most remarkable feat is how average it is across the board. I'm a fan of Shinji Mikami's work but it's really about that time he developed a new game engine. Because while it was a blast in Resident Evil 4, every game that plays similarly to this is going to just feel like a watered down rehash of his previous games.
The game is fun at times but aggrivation is more prevalent. I got more than 10+ hours of "entertainment" for it so I can't say it was a wasted purchase, just ended up being more hollow than I expected. I could give it a recommendation as a solid 6 or 7/10, but I couldn't blame you if you wanted to wait for a used one or for the price to come down on it.
Seriously Shinji? Dude with Chainsaw? That's like 4 games now.
Get a new thing.
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