The Evil Within

It’s rather difficult to talk about The Evil Within without mentioning Resident Evil 4. After all, the games share a director along with a selection of other similarities despite a tonal shift and a less stationary-while-shooting protagonist. Though where Resident Evil 4 was very much an action game masquerading as horror, I couldn’t shake the feeling that The Evil Within was attempting to adhere more closely to tropes of the survival horror genre while desperately longing to be an action game. Often to its detriment. While there are certainly things to appreciate about The Evil Within, I found myself growing weary of its tricks rather early on in its somewhat lengthy campaign to the point where I was no longer experiencing any tension during enemy encounters, and was instead trying to game the system to force my way through to the next recycled boss fight or sliver of story.

The Evil Within follows detective Sebastian Castellanos as he and his partners are called to investigate a disturbance from a mental hospital in Krimson City. Upon arrival at the scene it becomes apparent that (surprise) something has gone horribly awry as the world begins to crumble around them. Sebastian is faced with the reality-bending antagonist and world-class creep, Ruvik and from there is sent hurtling through a series twisted and unsettling locations.

As I mentioned, there are things to enjoy about The Evil Within. While the game is not always the most technically astonishing example of visuals, some excellent lighting and settings work to create some creepy, foreboding locations. Hospitals are still scary…So are the woods. These are the types of locations that you’ll visit in The Evil Within and they offer up some good b-movie level chills. However I get the feeling that someone on staff thought that more is obviously scarier. “Oh, you think an abandoned wheelchair is spooky? How about fourteen abandoned wheelchairs?!” you’ll imagine them saying as you walk down the dimly lit hallway of a mental asylum littered with said wheelchairs and a smattering of gurneys. In a game that seems more about pitting you against a group of enemies with the odds stacked against you than about trying to instil genuine terror, this type of “horror for horror’s sake” adherence to traditional horror locations can stand out as being a touch silly and a little obvious.

And that is the crux of this games it turns out. Much like Resident Evil 4, You will often find yourself surrounded by a group of enemies you’ll have to shoot, punch and as it turns out, burn your way through. Being that The Evil Within fancies itself something of a survival horror game, ammo is very sparse, and resource management is vital. All too often I found myself dumped into an enemy arena with all of one shotgun shell and two handgun bullets. Luckily Sebastian is quite handy when it comes to booby traps, and is able to repurpose trip wires and wall bombs into makeshift bolts for his crossbow. You’ll be able to craft a whole host of bolts from explosive, to freeze-bolts, to poisonous. If you consider yourself a tactician, these bolts can be used as traps, though being the half-wit that I am, I found it more useful to pump explosive bolts into my assailants and watch them blow up real nice.

The crossbow is easily the most useful weapon in the game, but its also the most problematic for me. I found that it took away from the mood that the game seemed to be going for. After all, its difficult to be frightened by a hoard of enemies when I can pause the action, craft up a few explosive bolts and be done with it. The use of the crossbow is where the game started to show its aspirations to be something other than what it would have you believe. Up to the point of discovery of making bolts, enemy encounters were fairly tense. There was a lot of frantic running and retreating. I found myself struggling to line up shots and feeling outraged when I would miss in all the excitement. I was motivated to spend my upgrade juice to increase my accuracy and critical hit rate so I would use less ammo in the next enemy encounter. I found I was experiencing similar feelings to the first time I played Resident Evil 4. Much of this is rendered trivial, I found, when I could pause the action to stock up on the right selection of bolts to handle any situation, using a resource I never found to be in any short supply.

The game would also have you believe that stealth is an option, thanks to its horrendous intro sequence which has you sneaking around a chainsaw wielding brute, (need I remind you this is a Shinji Mikami game?) though in practice, the stealth is clunky and often gets you into more trouble than it saves. Not to mention, the game seems to forget itself that the stealth mechanics in the form of bottle throwing and stealth kills, even exist, as it tends to pepper stealth sequences in at random points throughout the course of the campaign, while the rest of the time you are mostly fighting enemies head on.

Enemies in the game are also extremely flammable. Drop a match on them and they go up in a fiery inferno. If you time it right, you can also catch oncoming enemies in the blaze for a double or triple kill. Matches too, however, are in no short supply and herding a group of enemies over one downed body only to light them all ablaze tended to detract from any type of horror the game was going for.

The game seemed confused in that respect as well. What type of horror is it going for? For the most part, I couldn’t tell. Some chapters would have you believe that it was a psychological thriller which was genuinely compelling in its mystery, dealing with themes of madness and perceptive realities. Other chapters are more akin to the later Saw films in all their ‘gore-porny’ horror. There are some legitimately interesting ideas brought up by the more psychological of The Evil Within’s chapters. For instance to spend ‘green gel’ - a substance you collect off of the corpses of your enemies which is never quite explained - to obtain character and weapon upgrades, Sebastian looks through deeply into mirrors or other reflective surfaces and is transported back to a mental asylum where he sits in what seems to be a spooky Clockwork Orange inspired dental chair. Though, this area is never quite explained. At least not in a way that feels satisfying. I’ll be the first to admit that being dropped into a mental hospital that exists, for all intents and purposes, in a completely different reality every time you want to spend upgrade points is novel, but when it goes mostly unexplained, it ends up feeling flaccid in the end.

The Evil Within is also quite lengthy, though quite a bit of it feels like padding. Through my roughly twelve to fifteen hours with the game, I ended up experiencing the same three boss encounters, virtually copied and pasted, two times each. The game doesn’t even go particularly out of it’s way to make each encounter feel original either, other than occasionally having you fight two enemies instead of one. It just comes off as a cheap way to artificially lengthen the game. The boss fights aren’t particularly interesting or challenging, and having to go through them a second time is more or less just a chore. This is a good as time as any to gripe about the fact that there’s no way (at least on the PS4) to remove the two black bars on the top and bottom of the screen that are placed there for “cinematic effect.” Artistic licence aside, they rendered one boss in particular completely invisible, as I was tasked with lining up an environmental shot in time to inflict damage on them, resulting in several unfair deaths and incredible frustration. The issue is not that the bars are there, I actually tend to like letterbox. The fact that they obstruct action and get in the way of gameplay is unacceptable however and was infuriating on more that one occasion.

While The Evil Within’s story will take you through some interesting locations, and at times feels like it’s going to show you a glimpse of genuine terror, it ultimately ends up falling flat. This is due, at least in part, to its two dimensional and archetypal characters. So much so that you can basically pin them right from the start. Sebastian is the tough detective who doesn't play by the rules and has pain in his past. His partner, Joseph Oda is the by the numbers cop with an inferiority complex. The rookie cop, Kidman has something to prove and something to hide. You can all but read it on their faces the first time they are introduced. Not that the horror genre isn’t littered with character archetypes, it just happens that in this case they’re all fairly boring.The voice acting is mostly fine, with the exception of Sebastian’s, who’s delivery started to grate on me after a time, but the characters are uninteresting the entire way through the game. They all just kind of wander. There are no meaningful arcs, no one changes, nothing is gained (or lost for that matter) you just kind of make it to the end and then that’s it. Albeit after an admittedly cool final boss encounter.

And that, in the end, is my biggest problem with The Evil Within. Nothing ever seems to go anywhere. Were the stealth fleshed out a little more, it could have been an enjoyable part of the game. If the characters were a little more interesting, it could have made for a more compelling story. Had the game committed to one form of horror instead of the back and forth it went with, it would have been scarier. Had it bothered to explain some of its more esoteric elements I might have thought it less flat overall. I want to be clear in saying that I’m all for leaving things up for interpretation, but there’s a difference between ambiguity and leaving things that should have an explanation unexplained. Unfortunately in the case of The Evil Within I left feeling unfulfilled. Not because I had to draw my own conclusions about what had happened, but because I felt that some elements of the story and gameplay were somewhat lazy. While there were some times where The Evil Within showed some potential, I was ultimately disappointed. That being said, I’m glad that this game exists. I would like to see a return of horror games and between this, Alien: Isolation and the upcoming Silent Hills, it seems like we might be getting just that. It’s just unfortunate that this entry wasn’t what I want from the genre.