Hey there! Before we get down to it I just want to drop a little warning that this is a monster of a post. As I wrote down my feelings about the mode and offering a bunch of tips and suggestions for doing the mode it came out to be quite the piece. With that said, I hope you enjoy the ride.

At the moment of writing this, I’ve been a week off or more from beating Akumu mode and beating all the DLC the game had to offer. The road to beating everything this game had was an off and on two week affair and after the trials and tribulations of Akumu mode I wanted to give myself some time away from it before I put anything down on it since a lot of my writing towards it would be reactionary in nature and maybe not necessarily fair. My immediate feelings after beating this mode was an indignant “fuck this game, I’m glad this mode is over” but after giving myself a week and change I find that my feelings toward this mode occupies something of a schism in my mind, fitting given the games overall themes of messing with your brain. I find myself both absolutely loathing and loving this mode, during the whole thing and after when I stop and think about it. I also plan to divulge some tips at the end of this that might be of useful for anyone who is thinking about taking on this mode. Don’t take my advice as gospel though, I think Akumu mode is done best by whatever works for you, I’ll just tell you some things that worked for me.

What Akumu mode wants and attempts to do to you is very much deliberate. The base game on survival difficulty is by no means a cake walk and you trade blow for blow with the enemy, but patience, keeping a cool head, and trying to use the various systems of the game to your advantage will see you through. It’s a down and out fight and I hope you brought a lunch. Akumu mode is much the same in what it sets out to do, but the things it changes make it a whole different beast. It uses nightmare difficulty in terms of enemy resilience and placement (get used to seeing Ruvik clones early on friend) and adds the much ballyhooed one hit and you’re out rule. If survival mode was thought to be a fight for survival, in Akumu you are fighting for every damn square inch and if you aren’t ready to use absolutely every tool at your disposal the game will absolutely punish you. When playing this mode you might get the feeling that Shinji Mikami might actually hate you and if he hasn’t met you personally then he hates the idea of you.

Playing this mode made me switch up certain aspects of my play style considerably. I stealthed a lot in survival and I tried to do the same here, but it will not be a reliable tool all the time, the awareness of the enemies on this mode (I assume it’s a nightmare modifier) is pretty insane. Use it when you can, but expect early on and often that the enemy will sometimes just seem to sense you and immediately go on the offensive. This combined with an even greater abundance of traps makes Akumu mode a test of dogged determination.

The problem with Akumu, at least in my eyes is that the game does not feel in anyway balanced towards this mode and puts something of a spot light on its flaws. Like I mentioned, stealth in this mode is much, much harder and since you have the constitution of a paper fan, not being seen is very much what you so dearly want. If the game bridged the gap of having the enemy’s awareness level being on survival, but keeping the enemy health levels of nightmare would have gone a long way of making Akumu a still tense mode but way less moments of pure frustration. Frustration that sets in as somebody seems to see you from such a range that feels unreasonable or what seems to be a sixth sense of “hey, an asshole is behind you with a knife.” There is no way around it, sometimes you’ll sneak up on a guy and dig a knife into his skull like an absolute pro, other times you’ll feel like you’re walking around in tin can shoes and that the enemies have eyes in the back of their head.

I also mentioned that the game has added a lot more traps, getting perfectly good runs ruined by stepping on bear traps is more common then I’d like and unless you are absolutely Johnny on the spot, attempting to disarm the wall mine traps will probably end in expletives. Again there is no way around it, other than just memorizing where the traps are and taking it slow. Another offending feature is the letter boxing feature. It didn’t really bother me on survival but since every possible square inch of land in this game could be a potential death or hard won fight, being able to see less in this mode is quite the hindrance. This is where once again taking it slow will pay off, if you go with the assumption that you are going to crouch walk or slowly make your way through every area, the traps shouldn’t pose too much problem.

The other niggle the letter boxing adds, is that it makes using bottles somewhat difficult and if you want to get ahead in this mode, you will make liberal use of bottles. If you successfully throw it at a haunted head, it will stun them, giving you the option to jam a knife in their stupid faces. However, since the regularly haunted is quite a spritely creature, it can quickly close the distance and choke you out. Making it sometimes where I could not see the trajectory of the bottle because of the letter boxing. Hitting them in the head with the bottle is the only way to stun them with one, if you miss or hit them anywhere else, you will most likely die afterwards most of the time.

This next bit might also sound like a bit petty I admit, but it got me killed more times than I could count. The little animation Sebastian does when he has the lantern on drove me absolutely nuts and the moment I got used to playing without it on when I could saved my ass a ton if you don’t know what I mean let me explain. When you holster a weapon and have the lantern on, good ol’ Seabass will raise the lantern up off his belt to further light his way. While he is in the animation of taking it off his belt and raising it up he is very vulnerable, from my experience I could not switch to a weapon and in some cases climb and interact with the environment while he was doing this. A lot of it I will readily admit was my fault and once I beat it into my head that I should have a weapon equipped at all times, and use the light only when needed, this issue when away. It however could rear its head out of my control, sometimes when I would run up to torch enemies on the ground, Seabass would sometimes just straight up not take out a match and light a down enemy. Using a match is the same button as holstering a weapon, so there were quite a few instances of a enemy would get up the very nano second before I pressed the button (or he just straight up would not do it sometimes for no real reason) and instead of torching the enemy, he would holster his gun and do the lantern animation. It might sound like absolutely nothing, but that moment of vulnerability is all it takes to send your ass to the last check point.

One last niggle in my airing of grievances, and it’s not something I blame Evil Within for exclusively. One thing that really yanks my chain in survival horror games in the last eight years or so. Not all of them, but some games that attempt to go for survival horror that at some point they cannot seem to help themselves but add gun enemies later into the game. If you want to get technical with it, I guess you could blame RE4 for this maybe, but only one enemy in that game to my recollection (if you exclude the Krauser boss fight) had a gun of any sort, but it was obvious who it was (big palooka with a minigun is hard to miss) and it took him a moment to wind it up, giving you time to either hit the bricks or try to knock him out of the wind up. RE5 and 6 eventually piled up on enemies with guns and in my eyes was the worse for it, I felt the same for Dead Space 3 and I feel the same with this game. Eventually adding enemies with semi-automatic pistols or MP5’s in this game is just not a fun enemy to go up against, especially since they have absolute laser aim and are incredibly fast with it. I disliked it on survival and it’s a major source of frustration in Akumu, especially on that rail track ride you have to go on in chapter 11 surrounded by gun toting and Molotov toting jerkwads.

The game had a couple of gun toting enemies I was fine with, the sniper rifle haunted gave you an obvious scope glint when he was about to pull the trigger and the guys with sawed off shotguns have to close the distance in order to be effective. It was a happy medium between making some haunted more dangerous than the others but also giving you a tell of when they were about to hurt you and giving you just enough time in my cases to make a snap decision on to either fight or flee. The dudes with semi-auto pistols or MP5’s just charge at you like a bat out hell, firing all the while, or pegging you from suspect distances. In Akumu mode, these guys were how my frustration with Akumu mode started to come to a head. I died tons in Chapter 1-10, make no mistake but I took my lumps and sailed forth. Once these gun guys showed up in chapter 11, I had a few shouting matches with my TV and it started to suck some of the tension and fun out of the mode. It became less about trying to get through sections with patience and consideration of my options and surroundings to just “fuck you, here have a flash bolt for your dumb fucking face” and running to the next section and seeing some of them leash back to their original positions. Ruining a lot of the tension I had before and straight up just attempting to game the AI.

Now, I did quite a bit of yelling and venting of this mode, would you believe me if I told you I’m glad I did it? I didn’t even believe myself at first but I’m glad I did. Akumu mode has problems and definitely needed some balancing to go along with the massive handicap but at the end of all this I relished the opportunity to really challenge myself. Beat the odds and come out ahead. The survival horror genre is one of my personal favorite genres and dates back to playing RE2 on my brothers Playstation years ago when he wasn’t home. I love tank controls, I love the camera angles, I love the resource management, making the tough decisions to remove this enemy from my path or try to get by him with the risk of taking some damage in the process. The hopeless atmosphere these games usually have and in the case of Resident Evil, the crazy ass convoluted story line that is like a train without a conductor, who knows where the fuck it’s going but I’m gonna be there. This genre is more near and dear to my heart then the recent cropping of horror games that remove any means of defending yourself.

Those sorts of horror games have their pro’s, but generally I like having the means to defend myself, removing all vestiges of power from me can be effective at first. But like I described in my experience with chapter 11 in Akumu, dying over and over to certain parts will eventually ruin the tension and instead of trying to play within the games rules, I just say eff it and run to the exit as fast as I can to get past it and then try to play by the games rules again. In survival horror games, you can almost always run, but you can also dig in your heels and stay and fight. Akumu mode, for all its faults for the most part is a successful blend of giving me the means to defend myself and get stronger with upgrades, but no matter how much ammo I have, how powerful my guns are, or how fast I can run. All that power can be taken from me in a single breath because a haunted snuck up behind me and kills me. I’m always on a razers edge with this mode, there is very little respite, and the game is all but intended to tear me limb from limb, I haven’t been this on edge with a survival horror game since playing Silent Hill 2 after renting it from a video store for the first time when I was eleven years old.

Maybe Shinji Mikami knew what he was doing with this mode all along, maybe this crazy son of a bitch wanted to exhaust me mentally, emotionally and even physically if you count me shouting obscenities at my TV until my throat went horse. I mean, the achievement/trophy for beating this mode is called “You Asked For It” Shinji gave me no quarter and wanted me to prove I was up to the challenge. Akumu mode has problems, but it’s a mode that seems aimed at people who felt that over time games have gotten easier and that survival horror games don’t have quite the tension that they use too. I conquered this man’s insane circus and I’m glad I did. Every once in a while I like to see if I still “got it” and see if I can take up an insane challenge and Akumu mode was certainly that, a challenge. Despite some issues, it is definitely doable and by no means impossible, but it’s not for the faint of heart and if you have patience, determination or no sense at all like me then you can definitely conquer this games gauntlet. That’s the end of this write-up but I’m by no means finished yet, for anyone who wants to undertake this I will throw down some tips, use my advice or find your own way. There is no right way to conquer this mode, the only thing you can really do is perhaps make some things easier for yourself, but it will by no means be a cake walk. Is it weird I’m considering doing it all over again someday on the Xbox One? It probably means I’m a masochist for sure.

Call the Akumu Mode tip-line today! The number is 1-800-DIIIIIIIE

-Get used to dying. A lot. This may sound blatantly obvious, but unless you become some kind of savant in this game, you will die often.

-Patience, this is probably one of the most key things to have to do this mode in my opinion. This mode will tax you both mentally and maybe even emotionally if the same asshole with an MP5 kills you for the seventh billionth time. Taking breaks from moments giving you hell is also not a bad idea.

-Use stealth till you can’t! But don’t rely on it all the time. Confusing? You betcha. The enemy awareness in Akumu is real crazy so you will get caught a lot unless you just completely commit yourself to getting good at it. The best advice I can offer is that more often than not you will want to hang at the right behind an enemy. They for whatever reason look to their left the most, and if you aren’t hanging at the right this quick look to the left will be enough to see you. Even though his eyes aren’t “really” looking at you, they will sometimes look right however. It’s not fool proof but it did make some of my time with stealth easier and more successful. Mashing the hell out of the stealth kill button as you zone in on them also saved me from getting caught a few times too, something to consider.

-Get good at glassing dudes in the noggin. Bottles will be one of your most useful items in the game that isn’t a gun or axe. Hitting an enemy in the face with one will stun them, giving you the chance to kill them with the knife. The letter boxing will make your efforts tougher then need be but if you use bottles often you will get a feel for it. I should also mention that in order to kill an enemy stunned with the knife you have to be crouching, even if you are facing them. It’s a weird thing, but it is what it is.

-Consider everything you do a risk, use this as an opportunity to experiment. This game will often kill you in weird, bizarre and in some cases instances where it feels like the game is cheating. This ties back into dying a lot, if a strategy doesn’t work, try to change it up! For instance, if you take it slow and try to only get seen by one enemy at a time, you can drag them away from the other haunted and take him on one on one. Or if you can, try to avoid enemies all together. You might miss out on some gel if you killed them, but there is no guarantee they will drop anything. Did you also know that during the first time you fight Laura in chapter 5 you can set the bodies on fire she is emerging from and do damage to her? The timing is a bit strict but you it’s doable.

-Run. Seriously, just do it when it gets to hectic. In most cases you can attempt to run to the next check point, section, or hiding place and save yourself tons of combat time. Sometimes you will get in over your head and it’s better than restarting in some cases, especially if you’ve died a lot to specific sections.

-Abuse checkpoints and save rooms. In certain sections in this game (like the village section early on) if you use up melee weapons or other finite use items; the next checkpoint you get will respawn the melee weapons if you die. If you have an easy access route to a save room that is free of danger, constantly going back to it and making a fresh save could prevent you from having to redo tough moments. You can also use this as a safety net when attempting to disarm those wall mine traps. Speaking of traps.

-Only disarm wall traps if you are prepared to redo sections! The timing on the mini-game for these explosive wall traps is pretty damn brutal. If you do them enough, you will get a knack for the timing (in my experience the needle does not stop the moment you press A, It’s usually a split second afterwards, take that into account.) abusing save rooms like previously mentioned will give you a little bit of breathing room. I would suggest disarming the traps you safely can since trap parts are always useful. But if you are unsure of yourself, with no safe room in sight and the last check point was a while ago, it’s probably better to just pass it by and save yourself some frustration.

-Only build agony cross bolts when absolutely needed. For the most part the game is pretty good at supplying you with bolts, so going crazy and stocking yourself up on bolts when flush on some isn’t always the best idea. You could make three explosive bolts right now, but what if two, three, or four rooms away is a stash of them? It’s not always possible to go back to previous rooms to get left behind ammo or bolts, so my advice to you? Only build bolts when you absolutely need it. If going through Akumu immediately after a survival run, you will generally have a good idea on when those times are coming and can plan accordingly.

-Try to get those keys! Throughout the game you will find keys that you can later use to open morgue doors in the safe room. These morgue doors will have precious green gel to use in upgrades, ammo, syringes, and in some rare instances more keys. Try to be vigilant when scouring the area and collect as many as you can. I would also suggest only opening them until you absolutely need them. Say you have a tough fight coming up like a boss and you could really use some shotgun ammo, explosive bolts etc. Save beforehand and open the morgue doors until you get what you need in the smallest amount of used keys as possible. Is it cheesy? Absolutely, should you give a rats ass? Not in my eyes, the game will dog you at every turn, take every advantage you can.

-One more bit about traps! When you are moving around the environment, do you notice that sometimes you see what looks like floating red orbs floating about? That means a trap is nearby and since a bear trap can end a perfect run, you need to have your head on a swivel at all times.

-Match (un)safety and you! Until you get the right upgrades (more on that in my next section) for guns, head shots will not do you much good. On Akumu, the haunted can take some punishment, capping them in the knees and killing them with your matches is a great way to save ammo. If you can, try to group haunted together and pop them with all at once with a shotgun blast, and burn them all at once. I’ve killed five haunted with one match this way. Careful though, some haunted have VERY quick recovery times or can flail around on the ground and hit you. Using a match like everything else is a risk but can save your ass and eliminates a lot of enemies at once.

-Use melee weapons! For most haunted (the fat ones seem to be exempt from this) a hit with an axe or torch is an instant kill. You can also group haunted together and kill more than just one with an axe or torch swing.

-Ladders! Haunted are very vulnerable when using ladders, they can’t do anything while using them other then go up or down. Before they reach the top you can kick them, making them fall to the ground and give you an opportunity to torch them. Or if it’s just one or two haunted, you can go on an endless gauntlet of baiting them up a ladder, kicking them down and waiting till they climb up again and kick them again. They will eventually die, but it will take forever.

-Only uses Sebastian’s base melee (meaning no axe or torch equipped) as a last resort! Sebastian’s base melee does absolutely jack shit damage wise. It can however save you from getting grabbed or smacked in the face as in most cases the haunted will react to it. Giving you time to run away and formulate a new battle plan, or just keep running.

-Crouching can maybe save your life! I didn’t have a lot of luck with it, but if an enemy is running at you, hands outstretched and ready to choke the life out of you. You can crouch just in time and he will sail right past you. I only got it to work a few times, but maybe you’ll have better luck.

-Find a happy medium between conserving and using ammo! In this mode, ammo will always be at a premium but depending on your play style and a little luck you will sometimes have a max stock. When this happens, considering using some of that ammo because the very next room could hold a cache of ammo. Like I mentioned earlier in regards to agony cross bolt stashes, it is not always a certainty that you will be able to come back to a room and restock.

Find the build that is right for you

Choosing what to upgrade to help through your Akumu mode can be fairly granular. Once again, I think whatever makes an easier time for you is the best way to go so I can’t really give you the “ultimate” upgrade path, what just worked for me. There are some bits I think will be super useful, regardless of how you play. Stamina can be pretty important, being able to run for longer periods before Seabastian’s smoker quality level lungs kick in and wind him, run out of stamina and as you know it leaves you incredibly vulnerable and basically a death sentence on akumu. Getting my stamina up to level three was enough to see me through the game, you can go higher if you wish but it might be better to spend those points elsewhere.

Choosing what to upgrade weapon wise will once again vary based on what guns you prefer to use and how exactly you plan to use them. Since Akumu mode is based on the nightmare difficulty, enemies are super hardy and naturally upgrading damage might be a way to go, except with upping the damage on my sniper rifle and magnum I didn’t really go this way. With my pistol and shotgun, I upped critical chance as much as I could. With a fully maxed critical stat on a pistol, you have a 50 percent chance to make a haunteds head explode when you aim for the face. I never touched the damage on my pistol and only upped the damage on the shotgun twice when I found myself wanting to spend points after covering what I felt were my basics. I mostly used my shotgun as crowd control and getting as many people as possible outta my face. So upping clip size, fire rate, and reload speed is what I did instead of maxing damage, my pistol was about the same. I imagine max damage is super viable, but always aiming for the head with my pistol to get instant kill critical kills, or grouping people together with a shotgun and shooting them all down at once into a clump and then finishing them off with a match saved myself tons of ammo. Doing this, I found myself fairly stocked with ammo on most occasions. With my maxed out damage sniper rifle (a high damaging rifle seems to get instant kill headshots regardless of critical stat in my experience), and a nearly maxed out magnum got me through the tough spots or boss fights. The pistol, shotgun, and matches were for the normal enemies.

How you want to go about upgrading the agony crossbow, another useful weapon is once again up to you. The way I went about it was upgrading my flash bolt to 3 and maxing out my shock bolts, with a couple of points in explosive and harpoons when I could spare it. Level 3 flashbolts gave me about ten seconds of stun time and depending on how many haunted I was being pressured by, gave me enough time to shove a knife in everyone’s jaw, go for headshots, or simply to regroup and find myself a better position. These become very useful in the later city chapters when you run into a lot of haunted with protective masks, turns out those stupid things can’t stop a knife to the chin. With maxed out stun bolts, it increased the radius of its affective area and gave me ten seconds of stun time. You can’t use instant kill knife attacks but you can clump people together and damaging them all at once while you lay into them with more damage from your guns or to once again simply try to get out of there. These two bolts were really all I needed to get me through and I would use explosive, harpoons and freeze bolts when I acquired a surplus.

The other useful thing to upgrade is stock; I would say make whatever weapons you use the most a priority first. Since I was using my pistol, shotgun, and crossbow to deal with most enemies I went with that first. Once I got three levels into each, I then put a couple into sniper rifle and magnum since I would only use those against bosses or a sudden surprising “problem” enemy that needed to be removed stat. Such as ruvik clones, snipers, or an enemy who got way too close for comfort with a gun and I panicked. I would say upgrade match stock as well, I got to level 4 on that, when you used them as much as I did being able to have 15 of those at any time allowed me to save a ton of ammo. Grenade stock is once again up to you, I got by with only a couple of levels into it. Since this is Akumu mode, upgrading syringe stock, max health, or syringe recovery will of course be absolutely useless so that will free up a lot of points for you to spend elsewhere. You could also upgrade melee if you wanted, but I never did I only used it as a means to push someone away from me who got to close since I made it a general rule to never want to be in breathing distance of anyone, unless I was sneaking up behind them. Alright, I just have one more helpful bit and we’re done here!

Akumu mode is tough enough as it is, don't be afraid to seek out resources to help you

By this I mean don’t be shy about using a video or written guide. The game will have no qualms about making everything difficult for you and even with help you will still die a bunch. You can find plenty of Akumu guides out there and the one I used to help me out of some tough spots and was done by a guy called Theseraphim17. His guide was done and put up a little over a week after the game was out and he even did Akumu without upgrades. His guide has commentary and he has no qualms about telling you if the strategy he employed in the video wasn’t the best and sometimes offers alternatives. His guide felt more accessible to me than others since it was not about getting through the game in a crazy perfect like manner that you would see from people who have played a game a bajillion times. His guide helped me tons and made me consider things I didn’t before (such as setting the bodies on fire just as Laura emerges from them in chapter 5 tip I mentioned, I got that from his play-through) and if you find his video isn’t for you, you can always find others.

Using a guide to locate all the keys is something else I would also recommend. Having a surplus of keys to use to stock up on ammo or get more upgrade points can really make some sections of the game easier if you find yourself pushed up against the ropes and struggling.

That my friends is a monster of a post and I award anyone who read through all of it a golden star. I hope with this write up that anyone who was considering Akumu before feels like maybe they could tackle it or help anyone who is currently playing through it. If all else fails maybe you can be amused by my death count that I will put below and just picture me yelling at my television and cursing Shinji’s existence.