It's been a really fun and somewhat retro-feely play so far. I had no trouble during the tutorial, not a single death besides when I tried to stealth kill chainsaw guy (which I felt wouldn't work anyway, but I had to know!) I guess I got lucky since the intro/tutorial didn't fuck me over and over to sour my impressions.

I have to say though, there's absolutely nothing scary about this game. It's cute in the way that Resident Evil used to be cute where it wants to scare you with twisted, fleshy mobs but I'm so desensitized by now that it might as well be Kirby's Epic Yarn with spooky shaders.

I kinda treat it like the actual follow up to Resident Evil 4, since it plays similar to that game only with some more mechanics tacked on and far, far less quick time events - at least I haven't seen any yet besides some bomb-defusing which is a single click thing. It almost looks the same as RE4 only fancier, so that helps. Best of all, no AI player constantly ruining every moment.

The black bars are horrible though, and removing them on the PC just makes the picture zoom in so that your guy takes half the screen and you get like no field of view. Unlocking the frame rate is a joke too since it says it's 60fps but it still feels like 30; I'm not sure what's going on there. Keyboard and mouse controls are actually well-implemented but I tend to go with the 360 controller since it just feels like a console game to me.

4 chapters in and I'm a little disappointed how big of a role stealth plays in the game. I'm still enjoying it, but I guess a part of me expected RE4-2, so that's on my assumption more than anything.

Sad to hear that, I love a good horror story. Not that I expected a masterpiece or something, but the name and everything I've seen from the game kinda suggested that there was a lot of potential for a good, if not great story.

I've only played Chapter 1 so far, which was not good. I'm digging the imagery and I've pretty quickly gotten used to the letterboxing. That stealth section with chainsaw guy was simply not good, though. Expecting it to pick up as it goes on.

Good fucking LORD chapter 1 was absolutely terrible. It's like they forgot what the word build up is. Remember RE4? Remember that game's amazing build up? Approaching an old wooden house with a creepy ominous old man loading his fire place, turning around and speaking a language to you that you don't understand, then having him suddenly swing an axe at you? Then exploring his house and finding skulls with worms swarming around it? Then having more and more of these crazy villagers attacking you? Then once you reach the village, you finally get an insane man wearing a burlap sack swinging a chainsaw at you with insta-kill power resulting in one of the most shocking kill scenes you had ever seen?

and WHAT did we get here? THAT GIANT CHAINSAW GUY IS THE FIRST ENEMY YOU ENCOUNTER! He chases you then presses a magic switch that makes an entire hallway into a giant whimsical death trap with humongous spinning spike things. Then you go down a water slide of blood into a pool of blood. All extremely scripted, linear events. Seriously, that spike hallway is a straightshot. Just press forward on the stick. aaaaaahhh.....frightening....Not to mention even your walking speed is scripted. The game decides how fast you can walk during this entire chapter. What the actual fuck?

Jesus christ, SUBTLETY, Mikami! I understand RE4 and this are more kinda funhouse horror with extreme in your face imagery, but if the first ordeal you encounter is a giant man screaming at you with a chainsaw and big spikes of doom, you've kinda desensitized me from the start, dude.

...Now that my rant is over, I'm liking the game quite a bit since the start of chapter 3. I've warmed up to the black bars, 30 fps, and extremely close aiming. Very cinematic and cool. I'm still warming up to stealth though. If you're gonna do a funhouse, in your face horror theme then put an emphasis on RE4 levels of shooting and not hardcore survival and stealth. Make the theme match the gameplay. Is it survival horror? make the game scary then. Is it not scary? Let me shoot everyone in the face, and often.

So far, I like Alien: Isolation better. More tense, more focused on what it wants to be. Hell, it's much scarier so far too.

I switched to my mouse and keyboard because I kept opening the inventory and toggling the light with my DS3's L3 and R3 by accident. It was bad. I'm aiming better now too.

I keep pausing the game out of disinterest. The scenarios have been rather bland so far and the dialogue is flat. For a while, I was planning to buy Alien: Isolation later in the year, since Evil Within was expensive and looked slightly more promising, but I actually enjoyed Alien a lot more.

I decided to pick this up since it was like $45 on greenmangaming. I just made it through the prologue so that plus all the other footage that GB put out of the game led me to these quick judgments.

• The game's art and lightning help set a incredibly eerie and disturbing tone but holy shit does it almost all look like...shit on the technical side, these are some disgusting looking textures (not the good horror kind of disgusting either)
• Fuck this game's performance, there's zero reason for it to run uneven. The game is so unoptimized that it demands ridiculous system reqs, no wonder it also runs poorly on consoles
• Character movement feels stiff along with some of the animations, some parts of the game just feel hella dated. Here's hoping the gunplay won't hamper my experience further
• At least this game has some fucked up looking enemies though and it doesn't hold back the gore for a second, I can appreciate that
• As for the story, somebody in here beat me to it with the FEAR comparison. I'm definitely getting failed experiment vibes from this so far but the more disappointing part is how plain ole boring the protagonist is, not a fan
• YO FUCK THIS LETTERBOX BULLSHIT!

Though I wouldnt discount stealth in some cases since ammunition is a pretty rare resource to come by. If you can kill enemies by using stealth then you should almost always take that route. Granted that further on stealth becomes a much more less viable option in most cases. Finding those keys in statues to open the lockers will help a lot.

Gathering ammo, health and ability points is vital. I would recommend searching every area as thoroughly as you can before moving on. One has to be pretty economic with the ammo since the game has a tendency to throw you into boss encounters where you will need that ammo. Otherwise you might have a somewhat frustrating experience in some encounters since you might lack ammo for a specific weapon that might make the encounter easier on you.

Am myself in chapter 11 atm. The game has had some very frustrating moments. It is fun but sometimes the controls make the gameplay bit frustrating. I do love the ability upgrade system though. There is enough variety that players probably will have different ways of distributing those ability points. Personally I invested heavily into critical shots for different weapons (especially the handgun since there seems to be a lot of handgun ammo).

Btw playing this on PS4 so I dont have a lot of issues performance wise that some pc players are experiencing.

I'm enjoying it more than Alien by a long way so far (chapter 4 - PC)

You feel completely at a disadvantage but if you use your brain (or shoot them in the knees and burn them) you can survive by the skin of your teeth.

Pros:

- I like the stealth aspect and the combat in general, though I'm only a little way in.

- Balance of empowerment with fragility, prefer it to the nonsense of Alien.

- Story is interesting, though I reckon the explanation is telegraphed within the opening section pretty heavily...or it could try to be Shutter Island, which would be blergh.

- Some great set design and sound design (though that chainsaw dude in 3 is..repetitive)

- Crossbow is great, as is the match mechanic.

Cons

- Though a stylistic choice (cough) the black bars and fov can make a very poor first impression.

- Very VERY reminiscent of RE4, both a good and bad thing I guess.

- I can run it at 1080p with a GTX 750ti just fine at 30fps but graphically it's..meh. Texture pop in and god awful shadow flicker are the most prominent.

- It leans too heavily on body horror rather than psychological horror, not surprising given the shooting mechanics.

Personal Preference?

- It's more survival horror than people were probably expecting - resources are scarce and you die fast. You can't just suplex everything after knee capping them. Trial and error is necessary but I don't count that as a bad thing really. Each time I died (bar the first when cleaver guy killed me as soon as I touched the keys) was my own fault. I'm playing on normal and I don't find it difficult. It may ramp up later but it should be okay.

Definitely file under a YMMV.

@jazz: It gets to be pretty difficult as it goes on. Chapters 11 and 12 (out of 15) in particular are possibly the hardest segments of the whole game. My end game death count was 73 for what it's worth.

Here's a video of me... well, the title says it all :P

I think it's a borderline AMAZING game that totally drops the ball with its characters and story. Nothing develops, stuff just happens.

And although I love the art direction, it feels too much like a mishmash of tropes and references. It doesn't have the restraint of something like Silent Hill 2 or The Last of Us, instead always going bigger and grosser.

I know that's a harsh standard to hold it to, and that it isn't trying to be those games, but I feel like they squander so much potential when it comes to the story. They did a ton right with the art direction and general premise and didn't follow through with the narrative.

@yummylee: Man, thats some pretty sloppy play right there. You coulda thrown the bottle at the bomb. It's weird how you only have access to like half the bolt types I do.

yay last of us dlc. pfft

I'm really enjoying this game . It has flaws for sure , but I'm just glad it's better than the previews made it sound ..

FYI I hated Alien , so I'm glad there's a good new horror game in the month of OCT.

Looks much better on the PC and runs at a stable 30 FPS (tried unlocking the framerate but it jumped from ~60 to 40, so I locked it instead), despite my older system.

The voice-acting and characters have been pretty bad, and the story hasn't grabbed me. I'm just hoping that it won't turn out that you've been in robed-dude's head all along.

I'm enjoying the atmosphere and the environments, and the gameplay has been serviceable.

I've also disabled the letterboxing and set the FOV to 90, which so far hasn't caused me any problems and made for a much less aggravating experience.

@cosi83: not in the slightest bit.

its fun but the borders are so freaking annoying

So, man, does this game have a bad first 90 minutes or so. Took me a while but I'm starting to slowly get into it. I still despise the camera though and I still think the black bars are way way to aggressive. There is fun to be had here though and some moments of good tension. Been throwing each of my play sessions up on Youtube as I go. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LDuUq6iBAMg&list=PLDO1puxAArZf1NOid-N19Vg3Av2A_H-lj&index=1

I don't have a whole lot to add, but I'm midway through Chapter 3 and I agree completely. I'm so glad that it is starting to provide some open stealth/combat arenas versus linear stealth sections.

I also agree with @patrickklepek that the information dissemination here is just weird. The game presents new concepts out-of-order and at odd levels of specificity. It's like they couldn't decide whether to lean on trial-and-error systems discovery or tutorial handholding (either of which would have been preferable.)

It did help quite a bit to check the Tutorials section in the pause menu at the start of each level (all of that level's popup tutorials are actually added to that list when the level starts.)

I am liking The Evil Within a surprising amount, way more than Alien Isolation. My main gripe with Isolation is that survival horror is meant to be smartly using resources as the game throws new scenarios at you. When the main foe is invulnerable, runs three times faster than you, and is always a one-shot kill, your health and ammo kind of mean absolutely nothing. The game just turns into Pac-Man with a single ghost.

The Evil Within is kind of what I expected it to be, having played and loved RE4 (only just recently too. My first real exposure to it was with the HD version on Steam, immediately decided I also wanted to go through Pro with it upon finishing). I did change it to 60fps though, found that made things way better. It's full of neat, well thought-out scenarios. In Chapter 4 for instance, you have to kill a whole bunch of those invisible guys. You are doing it in an environment that is full of physics props, including stuff like gurneys and glass on the ground. It's actually tense looking for the tiniest hint of something moving as the creature lumbers around and trying to draw a bead on them. Not necessarily a 'scary' game, but definitely tense and offers some creepiness and screwing around with your mind. The 'hub' area, I think is particularly well-handled, as you quickly learn that that place is also not always necessarily a guaranteed place of respite from everything. Marking it's location with a rendition of "Clair de Lune" is also pretty neat. Environments are cool as hell to, and suit the game well. Very, very few (if any) repeating rooms or outdoor environments.

Edit: Screw it, I'll boost my review of this. I love this game. It's been quite a while since a brand new release has engaged me so much and made keen to find out what's next.

Gotta say its one of my favorite games of all time so far.

Resident Evil was my 3rd favorite series/game, and Evil Within is better than it.

This game is just beating the fuck out of my expectations. It's amazing.

My Game of the Year no contest.

I'm enjoying it a lot more than I expected to based on the opening chapters, I'm at chapter 9 and I feel like the atmosphere is really starting to make an impression. Very few actual scares, mostly just tense and gross segments. One negative is a boss fight in chapter 7 which seemed like it went on way too long and had maybe the lamest ending possible. Love the way you're guy goes from section to section all Inception like.

I havent played it yet, waiting for patches and mods to fix the letterbox, but how did that piece of information (letterbox) remain hidden all this time? I watched previous demos and it never was shown in that way, nor when anyone was discussing. It had to be done for performance at the last minute, would love to know that story.

@gaminghooligan: You didn't like the Keeper Fight? In all honesty I'd say he was one of my favourites, for how the fight itself was almost more of a puzzle than a regular boss fight. Took me a few attempts to beat him, but still I really enjoyed it. Really liked the musical theme that plays during it too, and I think it was at the very least an improvement from the Laura fight before him.

I wonder if it's technically possible to kill him enough times that he runs out of safe heads to materialise out of... Also, yes, Sebastian is seemingly always falling through floors in this game.

Playing on the PC with the black bars removed and FOV set to 90, 1440p at 30fps with no zero fluctuation. I can't even imagine playing this with the default FOV and the black bars that cover, literally, 46% of the screen. It is insane how bad most of the textures look, you don't even have to stare at them to notice how fuckin' awful they look. Luckily the lighting hides most of this, and the atmosphere is on point, so it's not too noticeable. Combat is pretty manageable, maybe even a little on the easy side if you abuse matches. You can kill a shitload of dudes if you knock one down and chuck a match on em'.

Pro tip: A great way to deal with a mob of enemies is to shoot the closest dude running at you in the foot with the revolver, then run up and throw a match on him. Assuming his buddies are following him, they will all get lit up when they get near him.

Just played 5 hours of it (most of the way through chapter 6, I believe)...

Man, this game is so much better than I expected. It has major issues, but the core gameplay is really solid. The Not-Ganados are a ton of fun to fight (Mercenaries mode/Horde mode DLC, please), and the surreal environments are a blast to explore. It's basically RE4 X Silent Hill, and that makes me so happy.

I hope this gets a sequel, assuming the story leaves it open for one, because if they can iron out the kinks, it would make for one hell of a game. As it is now, it's still a great spiritual successor to RE4. Even if they do lay on the homages to RE4 a little thick at times.

@shagge: There's no Mercs mode unfortunately, but there is to be DLC that has you play as the Keeper (safehead guy)... Which, er, could be interesting. And yes, it'll most likely get a sequel. The story itself leaves a lot of gaps that are likely to be filled with a sequel, if not the DLC that's to follow Juli Kidman. It's at the very least setting some sort of foundation to weave its own convoluted lore like the Resident Evil series anywhoo.

@yummylee: That's good to hear. Still being so early in the game, I wasn't sure if they'd wrap it all up by the end or not.

I'm intrigued by the Keeper DLC, too. I haven't met him in-game yet, but if my (half-formed) guess as to what these creatures are is correct, that could be fascinating.

Man, that is some Mikami goodness right there.

So I've gone from liking this game to loving it. I do have a few issues with the game, specifically the mobility of it. Man this game just screams for a dodge/roll button but simply doesn't have it. But other than that and the kinda bland stories in enjoying the hell out of it (chapter 7 now I believe.)

I feel like the balance is somewhere between say RE4 and Dead Space. It's not hardcore enough in survival to be compared to say the original resident evil but the tension is always cranked to 11 just like the first dead space. You never have enough ammo. Never have enough health and never have enough green gel. You are constantly fighting to survive which is the definition of survival horror. I guess the difficulty could crank up but right now I would say it's a bit easy and would have liked to have started on a harder mode.

Man the artisitc prowess in this game is utterly phenomenal, I just wish the game looked and ran better technically because that would toss this game up easily into one of the best looking games so far this gen. Same goes for sound design, voice actors range from decent to bleh but the creature sounds and weapons all sound excellent. It's a weird game, it's not for everyone but boy Im having a hell of a time.

The atmosphere is so great, the black bars are worse than I imagined. The letterboxing is the evil within this game.

This game is amazing , I can't believe I'm saying that !

Once I stopped being so shy about using my ammo this game became super-fun. I thought for a while that I was kicking butt and finding all of the keys because I had a whole row of corpse lockers open, but then it became apparent that the top and bottom rows of lockers are accessible too. I guess I'll keep scouring for more of Charlie's heroin statues after all.

Ohhhhh no you wouldn't. The next one up, Nightmare, is a pretty huge rise in difficulty, especially during the early chapters where it's trying to be a quasi-stealth game. Only in Nightmare mode where the supplies are even more limited it only further proves how practically broken the stealth elements are in this.

Having a blast with it so far, the visual design is definetly the best part of the whole game. Poor performance, instant deaths out-of-nowhere, lack of checkpoints at times and bad/poorly delivered voiceacting definetly isn't. But I've sank about ten hours into it so far, so those haven't been that big of a problem, really!

I'm at chapter 11 and....I have no idea why but I am extremely liking this game... It definitely has above average jankyness but damn, everything that is right about this game just makes me not give a shit about that......And I am actually surprised by how good this game looks! Japanese developed titles usually don't have cutting edge graphics but this game sometimes just looks fucking amazing, especially the lighting, I'm pretty impressed with what they have managed to do with the idtech5 engine, they did some really weird un-idtech5 kinda things with it but most of it looks great!

I want to get this, but I think I'm leaning towards alien isolation right now. Just in the mood for the alien universe.

I'm bummed upgrading the capacity of the guns doesn't give free ammo. :(

Finished it. The story was okay but I really liked the gameplay a lot. Most of the boss encounters are great. Aside from a couple sections in the game (the water part and the gauntlet of enemies near the end) I never felt frustrated about restarting despite having 122 deaths. And the letterboxing only bothered me in one boss battle close to the end. I was able to get used to it.

I just finished chapter 5 and played up to the first save portal in chapter 6. Chapter 5 was far better than everything that had come before it (though chapters 2-4 were fine).

I finished it a while ago on Survival and really enjoyed it. I'm on Chapter 11 of my Akumu mode play through and it really changes the way the game is played. I couldn't imagine doing it on anything other than PC. Without fast load times, I couldn't handle Akumu mode.

I'm in the minority on this, but this game is terrible. I don't like a single thing about it. Turned it off and uninstalled it after 30 minutes. Not for me.

expected the first few chapters to be tedious and dull according to the reviews but it's just a bit random is all. It gets awesome with chapter 3, something I just finished( Yeah I know, took me some time).

So far it's what I expected it to be. It's a great survival horror. It doesn't hold your hand and it makes you work for even the simplest of things. The Haunted(or zombies, if you wanna call them that) are pretty unpredictable and tough for a standard enemy, in fact, if you don't conserve your ammo and supplies they can kill you pretty easily. The trailers did not mislead us on that. Every enemy is a deadly one.

And the boss? The chainsaw guy( Sadist) killed me at least 30 times, I kept throwing everything at it, it chased me for 30 minutes and the cut my head of again and again. But that's good, the game made me work up a new strategy, and allowed me to look for more supplies and construct ammo of my own.

The game isn't scary in the traditional sense though, it's less "I can't sleep because I keep imagining the sadist cutting my head off" and more "Damn, that was fucking intense", which may be fine for some but a complete turn off for some.

Furthermore, I'm not sure why people complain about the main character sebastian castianos. Almost every single horror character, or better yet every single Shinji Mikami character has worn some shade of cliche, and Sebastian is no exception to that rule. But instead of being SUPER charming and cheesy like Leon from RE4, he's more serious and cool. I could bring you an example that made me kind of laugh. I like him, he's cool. I just hope we get to know more about him as the game passes on, so far all I know is that Castianos was checking out his partners ass when she wasn't looking...yeah....

so far so good.

You've only played 30 minutes? You should probably play a little more, it gets better, those first 30 minutes are awful.

Yeah, this game is pretty darn great so far. I'm having a blast with the combat, it's really deep and you have to think on your toes. I'm even wrapped up in the story.

I'm confused, why is "clunky survival horror combat" a good thing? Games like Dead Space prove you don't need a crap controlling game to be tense and fun.

@sammo21: I don't think it is clunky. I've gotten pretty agile with it.

The shooting can be difficult at times. Like, even though you can move and shoot it's not advised that you do so, as it drastically hamstrings your accuracy. The movement itself feels perfectly fine, though.

Nope. I'm good. I watched the quick look and I already know its not going to get any better for me. Probably should have done that before hand. I thought this game was something completely different.