Over three years ago, I wrote a bout a game I was very excited to play that ended up being very difficult and very dumb. I played it to finish, but I did not much enjoy myself. That game was The Evil Within and I consider it to be one of the biggest flops and disappointments of 2014. It came from the mind of Shinji Makami (who gave us Resident Evil 4, btw) who I usually expect much better from. I blamed Bethesda getting their dirty hands on it.
So naturally, as you might imagine, I was not exactly rushing to reserve or pick up the the next installment of this game. I did throw it on my Amazon wishlist though and promptly forgot about it. But occasionally Amazon will occasionally let know when a game is on sale, and it eventually dropped to 20. Ok, I'd bite on 20 bucks. So after sitting through my pile while I worked through games I actually wanted to play, I did eventually make time for....
THE EVIL WITHIN 2 (PS4)
Three years have passed since Sebastian Castellanos narrowly escaped the incident at Beacon Mental Hospital and has left the Krimson City Police force. Times have become hard on him as Sebastian as become an embittered alcoholic. He is haunted by dreams of his past, of a house fire that destroyed his home, the life of his daughter Lily, and the departure of his wife Myra.
After being jarred awake from a drunken stupor by another nightmare, Sebastian awakens to find his former partner and betrayer from the previous title, Juli Kidman seated across from him. He furiously exclaims he's been after her to try to get some answers about the Beacon incident of the prior game but she shuts him down by telling him that his daughter is alive, and that she is currently in the hands of MOBIUS, the shadowy corporation that Kidman is a part of. Lily is in danger, and they want Sebastian's help. After a small scuffle with MOBIUS agents, Sebastian is subdued and taken.
When Sebastian comes to, he learns from Kidman and a MOBIUS administrator that Lily as currently being used as a Core for another STEM device, the machine that allows people to share consciousness. But she has disconnected and has not responded to them. They have sent in teams to fix the problem, but they have gone silent. So despite not trusting MOBIUS or Kidman, Sebastian again plunges into the STEM for a chance to get his daughter back.
Ok, well that is a step in the right direction. Right from the onset of the story we are given a pretty clear and concise storyline, even if a little overused in video games: Broken father's chance at redemption by saving his daughter/wife/girlfriend. That is very easy to follow and gives me a clear and direct goal to achieve. Way better than the previous games "go investigate this murder, and then all this random shit happens."
It's also furthered by slipping in just enough story to remember the last game without dwelling on it. Oh I have to go back into that fucked up machine again that shares consciousness, but it's going to look like a small community of everyday America. Ok, that's a setting that makes more sense, and now the characters can explain the shifts as they happen. We are essentially able to play with settings because we are in a dreamscape. The continuation of the last game's stupid story is indeed still stupid, but we off in the right direction to start.
But what as a nice surprise is that after a brief linear set (basically used to reteach you the game controls) where we meet one of our antagonists, we are then dropped into the town and free to explore. We have a set goal to reach, but we also can find trace memories that open new quests from other people. So as I was wandering towards one of these checkpoints, I saw a woman running and screaming across my path being chased by three Lost (the zombie like standard baddie of this game) and Sebastian narrates "Man she's gonna die if I don't help her, but I really need to save some ammo."
That's when it hit me. Is this actually an open world horror game? I don't think I've actually played an open world horror game before. You could argue that the classic Silent Hill games are open world but there is not really questing to do, just set pieces to find. In the Evil Within 2 I am able to wander the town, and sometimes when I go to investigate a house to find ammo, I might get swept into a survival mission where waves of baddies are coming in, or I get shifted to a new area and have stealth around a very grudge like ghost to get back to the reality I was in.
Giving me the freedom to explore opened the world up and didn't make me feel like the game was linear. I liked that. It felt like the next logical step from how some of Shingi Mikami's previous games like Resident Evil 4 and Shadows of the Damned are designed. We have larger sprawling maps, now we have more options for things to do in them.
So with the previous Evil Within game, I had a lot of complain about with the combat mechanics and stat upgrade systems. It again uses the very familiar 3rd person shooter controls we are all familiar with at this point, and next to useless melee attack, d-pad quick menu options, a stealthy crouch and a loud run with stamina mechanic. If you have played any modern 3rd person shooter I shouldn't need to explain the majority of the buttons. They did add an aim assist feature which I used because I wanted to blow through the game, and to its credit it does help hold your headshots, but you still have to be pretty on point with your aim for it actually lock on. So I don't feel it made the game too easy.
But my big complaints were lack of ammo with steep difficulty, and relatively useless stat upgrades. Well, Tango Gameworks and Bethesda addressed the first by introducing a new crafting mechanic to the game. It's small and uncluttered basically with 10 items to use, and almost all of them require gunpowder. You can use this at workbenches to make new ammo or healing items if you are running short, or if you are out in the field and need some in a pinch you can craft from you menu and get some at an increased supply cost. Supplies are found and dropped all over, but It never felt like I was getting too much of it. You can also improve your weapons from the work benches to boost their damage, capacity, reload speed, etc.
So now it feels like I have the ammo to get into some gunfights with the baddies, but not enough that I can run in guns blazing. Which forces me to use the game's stealth mechanic more strategically because if I don't I'd be wasting more ammo than intended. The enemies have really twitchy motions, so you really need to make use the environment to slink around and stay hidden and moving slowly so you can get your instant kill stabs off and as many as you can before needing to resort to the gun. This makes for incredibly tense situations where you are desperately trying to take down enemies as quickly and quietly as possible to stretch your ammo a little further.
It works even better in new maps with tight corridors, because you just know something is going to pop out and rattle you. Yes, it manages to actually raise horror tension in a open world game which did way the hell better than the first installment of Evil Within did. Sometimes you are presented with situations where you HAVE to stealth so it makes use of the mechanic well. The one hit kill axes make a return as well, but you really should consider these a last ditch effort to save you from a tough group of baddies, or botched stealth attempt. Thankfully on the normal difficulty the stealth is pretty forgiving even with bosses so if a fight is not going well you can retreat and regroup while baddies lose sight of you.
Holy shit, the game has boss fights! Remember boss fights? Periodic appearing unique enemies that require you to use all your learned skills and abilities to find an effective way to beat them? I keep starting to think that video games in general have moved away from this, but Evil Within 2 boasts a reasonable amount of unique enemies as you play through to test your mettle. Many of them become regular baddies by game end but it was still greatly appreciated. I love a good boss fight and it feels like there are fewer and fewer games putting them in.
Then we have the skill mechanic. Like the last game, beating up enemies makes them drop "green ooze" which can be used at your safe house (or room) where our mysteriously friendly yet stoic nurse returns to strap you to a chair and pump juice into your skull. They overhauled the skills this time so now they make sense and are actually useful. No more of the shitty Fallout accuracy stat that makes you miss even though you have a perfectly lined up reticle. Now the skills affect you stamina, health, recover rates and so on.
But they also added reaction abilities depending on what skill tree you are working. Like if I am increasing my stealth I can do a quick scurry to chase after an enemy for a stealth kill. Or a reaction to where if I get grabbed by an enemy, I will instantly use a bottle that is typically used to distract enemies to knock them off of me to save me from damage. Or a speedy reaction that will allow my character to automatically dodge attacks from lesser enemies. They are useful and actually worth unlocking, so now I'm more willing to hunt enemies because the skills actually help me out.
Graphically the game has made major improvements too. I complained last time that they tried to do the grindhouse film grain look and it just made the graphics look shitty, washed out, and last gen. All the mouth animations were off and it overall looked sloppy. That just doesn't feel like the case in this one. There is no grindhouse washout so now despite the dark settings and tones, there are splashes of color around, and the world generally feels more alive. It makes the shifts to more demonic settings that much more jarring because the Everytown America setting sets a control line to shift from. Animations are synced up nicely and voice acting (while still hokey and goofy) is much improved this time as well.
And perhaps as a nod to Resident Evil 4, they added a shooting gallery mini game. I would spend rather insulting amounts of time trying to complete every level of difficulty on two shooting gallery game types. One bites into the addictive need for color matching puzzlers so shame on you Bethesda, you clever pricks for knowing about my penchant for Bejeweled Blitz.
Honestly as I run through the list of things from the previous game, I find myself with very little to complain about. I'll say that the barrier to entry is still a little bit steep as you learn your controls and nuances to enemy behavior. It's got a pretty generous autosave so there where more than a number of times where I felt it was just better to die and get my ammo and healing back than it was to win the fight and be left shorthanded. That sort of impacts the horror aspect when you aren't afraid of dying and losing progress.
There is a tiny down pointing arrow or v on your screen for a majority of the game, and I had no idea if it was a waypoint marker or what and I found it very confusing. It wasn't till the very late game that at one point it was red and I realized it was indicating that I could use my stealth dash, which I had unlocked before but had no idea how to use. Some of the game's mechanics could be better explained. Like the game tells you that you can drink coffee in safe houses to recover, but doesn't ell you that coffee recharges over time so you can't keep using it.
In a later portion of the game it actually rehashes a gauntlet of enemies of the last game for you to fight again. It felt like a filler segment to raise the tension but I had been playing it for like 12 hours at that point so honestly it doesn't feel like it needed to be there. Not problematic I guess but felt kinda thrown in.
Some Spoiler Warning here, so skip these next three paragraphs if you want: the game still occasionally feels like it is dangling out plot threads from both versions of the game that never end up getting explained or resolved. I still have no idea why Sebastian almost zombied out last game, and they bring up that his partner isn't actually dead but then that plot point is never actually followed up on. Honestly I had forgotten that character even existed, he could have been left out and it wouldn't have impacted the game at all.
Anita Sarkeesian is certainly not going to like this game, so don't be surprised to see it on Feminist Frequency. Like I said above the general theme of the plot line is a pretty tired trope to begin with, with the damsel in the distress variant. But the story goes out of the way to make all these interesting and strong female characters with different skill sets, and you can bet your ass that things to do not go well for a lot of them. But to be fair, for a horror game of this nature, a significant number of them men are going to die too. It's a horror game. How many horror games and movies end with almost everyone surviving?
Really my biggest beef with the game is it does the annoying trope of the constantly changing primary antagonist. For a large portion of the game you pursing a psycho who is clearly after your daughter too. But after a challenging fight with him the story pulls the "oh you've killed me, but now have to go after the REAL villain who you've never met yet!" More annoyingly is it actually pulls this shit twice!
Lastly I made the big complaint that The Evil Within was not scary. I could argue that the Evil Within 2 was not scary either, but in this case I don't think it was really trying to be. You can go to a horror movie and not be scared, but what it did very well was make you tense. Especially in the stealth sections of the game with tight environments. It did actually manage to get me with one jump-scare so that's an improvement over the last game. But honestly, some of my favorite horror movies aren't ones that jump-scare the shit out of you, but the ones that kick up your heart rate and have you leaning out of your chair because the tension just has you rigid. Evil Within 2 nails it there.
I walked into Evil Within 2 with a very lukewarm mindset, even as the story played out I felt that it was a stupid plot line. I didn't care about Sebastian or Kidman in the last game, so I was hard sell going into this one. But I think somewhere around the six hour mark, I realized I was completely fucking riveted by the story. I was genuinely loving my experience in this ride I was on, the development of the characters were logical and making sense. I was interested to see how the story was going to play out for the parties involved. The combat was fun, the stealth was tense. I was having a great time playing this game, and when I was at work I'd constantly be thinking about playing it when I got home.
I'll just say it: The Evil Within 2 was great. Not just ok, not good, great. It's like they took my review, handed it to Shinji Mikami and it personally pissed him off. So he remade the game specifically so I would like it. It addressed almost every complaint I had for it and it provided me an exciting and fun experience that I would rank as one of my betters during the PS4 life cycle. Some reviews said the same but they wouldn't go back to it, but I am already playing new game plus, which says even more that I am not ready to put it down. Easily an 8 or 9 and I would highly recommend The Evil Within 2 to those who like the horror/action genre. Color me genuinely surprised.
Seriously, a few more survivors at the game end couldn't have hurt.
It's also furthered by slipping in just enough story to remember the last game without dwelling on it. Oh I have to go back into that fucked up machine again that shares consciousness, but it's going to look like a small community of everyday America. Ok, that's a setting that makes more sense, and now the characters can explain the shifts as they happen. We are essentially able to play with settings because we are in a dreamscape. The continuation of the last game's stupid story is indeed still stupid, but we off in the right direction to start.
But what as a nice surprise is that after a brief linear set (basically used to reteach you the game controls) where we meet one of our antagonists, we are then dropped into the town and free to explore. We have a set goal to reach, but we also can find trace memories that open new quests from other people. So as I was wandering towards one of these checkpoints, I saw a woman running and screaming across my path being chased by three Lost (the zombie like standard baddie of this game) and Sebastian narrates "Man she's gonna die if I don't help her, but I really need to save some ammo."
That's when it hit me. Is this actually an open world horror game? I don't think I've actually played an open world horror game before. You could argue that the classic Silent Hill games are open world but there is not really questing to do, just set pieces to find. In the Evil Within 2 I am able to wander the town, and sometimes when I go to investigate a house to find ammo, I might get swept into a survival mission where waves of baddies are coming in, or I get shifted to a new area and have stealth around a very grudge like ghost to get back to the reality I was in.
 |
| Some of the behaviors show that the Lost aren't just zombies. This scene is tough to watch. |
Giving me the freedom to explore opened the world up and didn't make me feel like the game was linear. I liked that. It felt like the next logical step from how some of Shingi Mikami's previous games like Resident Evil 4 and Shadows of the Damned are designed. We have larger sprawling maps, now we have more options for things to do in them.
So with the previous Evil Within game, I had a lot of complain about with the combat mechanics and stat upgrade systems. It again uses the very familiar 3rd person shooter controls we are all familiar with at this point, and next to useless melee attack, d-pad quick menu options, a stealthy crouch and a loud run with stamina mechanic. If you have played any modern 3rd person shooter I shouldn't need to explain the majority of the buttons. They did add an aim assist feature which I used because I wanted to blow through the game, and to its credit it does help hold your headshots, but you still have to be pretty on point with your aim for it actually lock on. So I don't feel it made the game too easy.
I foolishly ignored my bow gun, but its different arrow types will be super useful later because of the various effects.
But my big complaints were lack of ammo with steep difficulty, and relatively useless stat upgrades. Well, Tango Gameworks and Bethesda addressed the first by introducing a new crafting mechanic to the game. It's small and uncluttered basically with 10 items to use, and almost all of them require gunpowder. You can use this at workbenches to make new ammo or healing items if you are running short, or if you are out in the field and need some in a pinch you can craft from you menu and get some at an increased supply cost. Supplies are found and dropped all over, but It never felt like I was getting too much of it. You can also improve your weapons from the work benches to boost their damage, capacity, reload speed, etc.
So now it feels like I have the ammo to get into some gunfights with the baddies, but not enough that I can run in guns blazing. Which forces me to use the game's stealth mechanic more strategically because if I don't I'd be wasting more ammo than intended. The enemies have really twitchy motions, so you really need to make use the environment to slink around and stay hidden and moving slowly so you can get your instant kill stabs off and as many as you can before needing to resort to the gun. This makes for incredibly tense situations where you are desperately trying to take down enemies as quickly and quietly as possible to stretch your ammo a little further.
It works even better in new maps with tight corridors, because you just know something is going to pop out and rattle you. Yes, it manages to actually raise horror tension in a open world game which did way the hell better than the first installment of Evil Within did. Sometimes you are presented with situations where you HAVE to stealth so it makes use of the mechanic well. The one hit kill axes make a return as well, but you really should consider these a last ditch effort to save you from a tough group of baddies, or botched stealth attempt. Thankfully on the normal difficulty the stealth is pretty forgiving even with bosses so if a fight is not going well you can retreat and regroup while baddies lose sight of you.
Holy shit, the game has boss fights! Remember boss fights? Periodic appearing unique enemies that require you to use all your learned skills and abilities to find an effective way to beat them? I keep starting to think that video games in general have moved away from this, but Evil Within 2 boasts a reasonable amount of unique enemies as you play through to test your mettle. Many of them become regular baddies by game end but it was still greatly appreciated. I love a good boss fight and it feels like there are fewer and fewer games putting them in.
Then we have the skill mechanic. Like the last game, beating up enemies makes them drop "green ooze" which can be used at your safe house (or room) where our mysteriously friendly yet stoic nurse returns to strap you to a chair and pump juice into your skull. They overhauled the skills this time so now they make sense and are actually useful. No more of the shitty Fallout accuracy stat that makes you miss even though you have a perfectly lined up reticle. Now the skills affect you stamina, health, recover rates and so on.
But they also added reaction abilities depending on what skill tree you are working. Like if I am increasing my stealth I can do a quick scurry to chase after an enemy for a stealth kill. Or a reaction to where if I get grabbed by an enemy, I will instantly use a bottle that is typically used to distract enemies to knock them off of me to save me from damage. Or a speedy reaction that will allow my character to automatically dodge attacks from lesser enemies. They are useful and actually worth unlocking, so now I'm more willing to hunt enemies because the skills actually help me out.
 |
| Who the nurse is, is still never really explained, but I find her to be less abrasive this time around. She manages to squeeze in a pop culture joke or two if you are listening. |
Graphically the game has made major improvements too. I complained last time that they tried to do the grindhouse film grain look and it just made the graphics look shitty, washed out, and last gen. All the mouth animations were off and it overall looked sloppy. That just doesn't feel like the case in this one. There is no grindhouse washout so now despite the dark settings and tones, there are splashes of color around, and the world generally feels more alive. It makes the shifts to more demonic settings that much more jarring because the Everytown America setting sets a control line to shift from. Animations are synced up nicely and voice acting (while still hokey and goofy) is much improved this time as well.
And perhaps as a nod to Resident Evil 4, they added a shooting gallery mini game. I would spend rather insulting amounts of time trying to complete every level of difficulty on two shooting gallery game types. One bites into the addictive need for color matching puzzlers so shame on you Bethesda, you clever pricks for knowing about my penchant for Bejeweled Blitz.
Honestly as I run through the list of things from the previous game, I find myself with very little to complain about. I'll say that the barrier to entry is still a little bit steep as you learn your controls and nuances to enemy behavior. It's got a pretty generous autosave so there where more than a number of times where I felt it was just better to die and get my ammo and healing back than it was to win the fight and be left shorthanded. That sort of impacts the horror aspect when you aren't afraid of dying and losing progress.
 |
| Bethesda hid little nicknacks all over the game from the other games they worked on. They don't do anything, but they are fun little nods to other games. |
There is a tiny down pointing arrow or v on your screen for a majority of the game, and I had no idea if it was a waypoint marker or what and I found it very confusing. It wasn't till the very late game that at one point it was red and I realized it was indicating that I could use my stealth dash, which I had unlocked before but had no idea how to use. Some of the game's mechanics could be better explained. Like the game tells you that you can drink coffee in safe houses to recover, but doesn't ell you that coffee recharges over time so you can't keep using it.
In a later portion of the game it actually rehashes a gauntlet of enemies of the last game for you to fight again. It felt like a filler segment to raise the tension but I had been playing it for like 12 hours at that point so honestly it doesn't feel like it needed to be there. Not problematic I guess but felt kinda thrown in.
Some Spoiler Warning here, so skip these next three paragraphs if you want: the game still occasionally feels like it is dangling out plot threads from both versions of the game that never end up getting explained or resolved. I still have no idea why Sebastian almost zombied out last game, and they bring up that his partner isn't actually dead but then that plot point is never actually followed up on. Honestly I had forgotten that character even existed, he could have been left out and it wouldn't have impacted the game at all.
Anita Sarkeesian is certainly not going to like this game, so don't be surprised to see it on Feminist Frequency. Like I said above the general theme of the plot line is a pretty tired trope to begin with, with the damsel in the distress variant. But the story goes out of the way to make all these interesting and strong female characters with different skill sets, and you can bet your ass that things to do not go well for a lot of them. But to be fair, for a horror game of this nature, a significant number of them men are going to die too. It's a horror game. How many horror games and movies end with almost everyone surviving?
 |
| Esmeralda Torres is confident, strong, deep, and a hell of a fighter. So I bet you'll never guess how her story unfolds. |
Really my biggest beef with the game is it does the annoying trope of the constantly changing primary antagonist. For a large portion of the game you pursing a psycho who is clearly after your daughter too. But after a challenging fight with him the story pulls the "oh you've killed me, but now have to go after the REAL villain who you've never met yet!" More annoyingly is it actually pulls this shit twice!
Lastly I made the big complaint that The Evil Within was not scary. I could argue that the Evil Within 2 was not scary either, but in this case I don't think it was really trying to be. You can go to a horror movie and not be scared, but what it did very well was make you tense. Especially in the stealth sections of the game with tight environments. It did actually manage to get me with one jump-scare so that's an improvement over the last game. But honestly, some of my favorite horror movies aren't ones that jump-scare the shit out of you, but the ones that kick up your heart rate and have you leaning out of your chair because the tension just has you rigid. Evil Within 2 nails it there.
 |
| Anima is not technically a boss. You can't fight her and you have to stealth to get away. She appears at scripted points, but can also just appear at random to send you hiding. |
I walked into Evil Within 2 with a very lukewarm mindset, even as the story played out I felt that it was a stupid plot line. I didn't care about Sebastian or Kidman in the last game, so I was hard sell going into this one. But I think somewhere around the six hour mark, I realized I was completely fucking riveted by the story. I was genuinely loving my experience in this ride I was on, the development of the characters were logical and making sense. I was interested to see how the story was going to play out for the parties involved. The combat was fun, the stealth was tense. I was having a great time playing this game, and when I was at work I'd constantly be thinking about playing it when I got home.
I'll just say it: The Evil Within 2 was great. Not just ok, not good, great. It's like they took my review, handed it to Shinji Mikami and it personally pissed him off. So he remade the game specifically so I would like it. It addressed almost every complaint I had for it and it provided me an exciting and fun experience that I would rank as one of my betters during the PS4 life cycle. Some reviews said the same but they wouldn't go back to it, but I am already playing new game plus, which says even more that I am not ready to put it down. Easily an 8 or 9 and I would highly recommend The Evil Within 2 to those who like the horror/action genre. Color me genuinely surprised.
Seriously, a few more survivors at the game end couldn't have hurt.
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