The Evil Within

I'm a pretty big Mikami fan (Resident Evil 1&4) as well as a diehard survival-horror fan (mainly SH and RE) so I was really looking forward to this one. However, opinions on this game are as polarized as could be. Every review I've read for this game has called it either a frustrating piece of trash or one of the best horror games in years. Given my RE/Mikami fandom, I thought for sure I'd love it but sadly, I ended up leaning more toward the hate-it camp. Well... I didn't hate it and I actually liked many parts of it, but the things I hated ended up ruining a lot of the game for me. What should have been a thrilling survival-horror action-horror game winds up as a hit-and-miss spiritual-successor to RE4. Let me dive right in as to why you shouldn't play this game...

Cheap deaths were easily my main issue with this game. Specifically, the 1-shot kills are out of control in this game and it demands too much from you in many situations. The scripted moments and boss-fights will kill you instantly if you don't do exactly what you're supposed to when you're supposed to. Hell, I died during the very first enemy encounter because of how precise your timing needs to be. Even the requisite "Shoot-final-boss-with-rocket-launcher" moment killed me about 10 times! In total, at least half of my deaths in this game felt unearned.

And the death traps.... I'm sorry but having an absurd amount of death traps in a game where you have limited healing items just doesn't work. This game blind-sided me with so much crap that I often killed myself just to get back the healing items I wasted on cheap or obtuse moments. A game should never incentivize you to play like that! Older survival horror games and even RE4/5 rarely blind-sided you like this and you often had a good idea of what you were up against for the next couple hours. Those games were legitimate tests of survival. This game just tested my patience.

Anyway, those cheap deaths and unfair difficulty spikes will pull you out of the experience and leave you cursing at your TV. And they just keep happening until the very end of the game. Eventually I started rolling my eyes but by the final hours, the game was a chore to play. Cheap deaths might seem like a nit-pick or too specific to devote so much of my review to but they legitimately ruined the game for me. Even the most positive opinions of this game point out how much you'll die. I'm a firm believer that if you're constantly dying in a game, then you're not immersed and this game thoroughly fails that test. Not all games need to be immersive but horror games unquestionably should be. How can you be scared if you're not immersed? If you're constantly reminded that you're playing a video game by dying??? Also, I see many citing this game as a "good challenge." I LOVE challenging games. With Mikami's own Vanquish, for example, I sank a good 40 hours into that 8-hour long game beating all the challenge levels and difficulties and I loved every second of it. This game, however, is not a good challenge. A feeling of accomplishment should come from honing one's skills or strategies, not from memorizing an AI pattern or figuring out a contrived scripted sequence with trial-and-error. And honestly, it's not even that difficult when it isn't insta-killing you. I always had enough ammo and supplies after the 3rd level and had an absurd amount of bolt ammo left over at the end.

This game has several smaller problems too. For one, it has the worst checkpoint system I've seen in several years (I'm looking at you, Mass Effect 1)! You should not have to manually save when you go to the shop -_-; And NO ONE wants to have re-collect items and then re-buy upgrades when they die. And as the GB review mentions, the visibility in this game is awful too. The aspect ratio sucks (2.5:1) but it's more than that... You just can't see what's going on in this game and you'll often find yourself jerking the camera around trying to get a decent view of the area. Trying to look around corners and things like that can be a real headache too. Then there's the awful framerate, the brutal learning-curve (the first two levels are a cakewalk but then the 3rd is the hardest level in the game), the questionable hit-detection (this one might be on purpose actually but that doesn't make it ok), the AI is outright-bad, and the game's a few hours longer than it should be. This is a flawed product for sure.

And here's the thing: even if they somehow fixed all this game's problems, this would still only be an 8 or 8.5. This is not "The return of survival horror" as this game's marketing and many reviews will tell you. Everything in this game has been done before and done better. Even Mikami & Suda's Shadows of the Damned is a better game than this. The gameplay, upgrade system, and bosses rehash RE4 at every turn and the aesthetics, story, and structure are ripped right from Silent Hill. Remember Pyramid-Head? This game has box-head. I'm not kidding and it's exactly what it sounds like. The stealth stuff is the only thing that stands out as unique to me and the game almost entirely abandons those mechanics after the 3rd level. From then on, it's RE4 shoot-n-loot until the end.

On that note, it's been 10 years since RE4. Can we please move on? This is a bit of an aside but I would really argue that the horror genre can do better than the RE4 archetype. I love RE4 and these kinds of games but they aren't immersive or atmospheric, they have no pacing, their stories aren't good or well-told, and they generally aren't that scary! These are empowering action games! They cause jump scares, not legitimate fear. The core gameplay loop is "kill enemies -> get loot -> upgrade gear -> repeat." That sounds more like an MMO than a horror game... Just because they're wearing the skin of horror games and have limited ammo, that doesn't mean they are horror games. RE5 didn't "stop being survival horror." It just changed tone and the world finally noticed that RE4's gameplay was NEVER survival horror! Oh, and this game has zombies-with-guns and plenty of Indiana Jones bs too if you're going to try and tell me how Evil Within is sooo much better than RE5 (which it isn't) </rant>

To be fair, there are some great moments buried in this game. The game's structure is similar to Silent Hill 4 in that it whisks you away to various settings from a central hub area. This enables the game to have a wide variety of settings and tones. A haunted mansion, a mental hospital, a coastal church, etc. It's always tossing you into some crazy new scenario. And, when the RE4 gameplay clicks, it's just as fun, tense, and satisfying as ever. That said, given all its problems and that the underlying experience isn't that unique or compelling, I simply can't recommend this game to anyone. And I'm an RE/Mikami fanboy! If I didn't like this game, I don't know who could!