The Evil Within is a modern horror masterpiece.
This is the sort of full-on game I've wanted to play for years, with an unmistakably old-school Resident Evil feel but a very contemporary design. It's virtuoso survival horror gaming for a new generation and I love it.
When I say this game is full-on, I mean it. My first death was graphically getting decapitated with a machete. The second was being cut in two by a chainsaw. The third had an explosive device blow my body into about six pieces, each of which oozed blood.
I died a lot in The Evil Within - 110 times, to be exact, and every single one of them was pretty horrific.
The game is packed with an insane amount of gore and creepiness. Flies buzz around viscera, horrible little bugs creep all over the place. If you shoot an enemy at close enough range, their blood will splash out and cover you.
Everything is in keeping with this hardcore tone - upgrades are applied via a torture chair, even the loading icon is nail repeatedly going into a head. It might sound like a bit much, like it's so over-the-top it becomes silly. It's definitely not silly, but the tone of it is more Evil Dead than Saw and the extreme amount of gore is just one part of what makes The Evil Within the successful horror it is.
It generally avoids cheap jump scares, although there certainly are a lot of frights to be had. There is a great mix of suspense, anxiety and dread with moments of terror. The Evil Within plays out like a nightmare, it got under my skin and put me in a weird, on-edge psychological state that was very pleasing as a horror fan by, y'know, distressing me a lot.
A big part of what does this is the game constantly distorting between different levels of reality, but also the things that are relentlessly trying to kill you. The most common sort are the haunted - deformed humanoids that are very zombie-like, but not zombies. There's hundreds of them to waste and even the most basic ones are surprisingly lethal.
There is stealth mechanics and you can hide from monsters at times, but that sort of gameplay is far outweighed by taking enemies down with increasingly massive firepower. Ammo and health aids are scarce though, often leading to a skin-of-my-teeth success in a battle that I threw everything at, limping away having beaten the enemy but with almost no bullets or health left.
The new mechanic of using matches to burn downed baddies is highly gratifying, especially timing it to engulf not only the fallen beast in flames but also another that is still advancing upon you.
Some of the toughest haunteds are invisible until they're right up on you at lunging range. When invisible beasts start pushing around wheelchairs and gurneys as they advance upon you, and you can hear them but not see them, it's chilling.
Then there are the bosses.
There are four main bosses that you bump into multiple times and if you've checked out any of the promotional material for the game you're probably already familiar with them; the Butcher, Laura, Ruvik and the Keeper.
These enemies are very tough and some of the battles against them took me upwards of 20 attempts. It got really frustrating at times, but oh-so-satisfying upon completion. Laura in particular is a challenging foe that got the better of me many, many times.
The main game is made up of 15 chapters, each of which are unique, well thought-out and meaningful. There's so much imagination packed into these chapters, it's crazy, and if 15 doesn't sound like a lot, my rushed first play-through took 17 hours and 33 minutes.
What is the game about? You play as Sebastian, a detective sent to a mental asylum where multiple homicides have been reported. Very quickly, Sebastian's journey leaves the plane of reality and enters a nightmarish, psychological world of terror. It's always unclear what's actually going on, but it's very compelling.
The narrative could ultimately be stronger. I love it the way that it is, but a few plot lines are left unanswered at the end. Tying everything up and leaving it completely devoid of mystery would be doing the game a disservice, but the enigmatic conclusion means it doesn't resonate with me as powerfully on a story level as it does as a gaming experience overall.
I'm not crazy about everything in the game. The graphics have a very washed out, colour-drained look that grows more or less intense depending on what setting Sebastian is in. It's intentional, of course, and fits in well with the tone of the game, but it's not as aesthetically impressive as the many brighter, more vibrant recent games.
Special mention must go to the sound design and music. The creepy breathing noises of the haunted, Laura's screams, the Butcher breaking bones and severing flesh of a carcass he's hacking up - a lot of work has gone into making this game sound amazing. The music is also fantastic throughout, using a nice mix of different styles that add to the overall intensity.
There are loads of little things I really dig about The Evil Within and I won't bore you with all of them. But an example is how when you're in a battle with friendly characters helping you, they actually pull their weight, inflicting damage upon enemies and even killing them. This is a small detail but one that many games don't get right.
Towards the end as things are building to the epic climax, it gets increasingly trippy and weird. It takes full advantage of the fact it is a videogame, and that the medium allows for very bizarre stuff. Rather than trapping you in generic, manmade structures, you'll battle between gigantic mannequin heads and run through passages made of flesh or brain tissue that occasionally spews blood and sometimes has massive blinking eyes set into it. Awesome.
I loved both the overt and subtle nods to loads of other horror movies and games, including the classic Resident Evil. There are also occasional bits of humour that punctuate the game. After climbing a few ridiculously long ladders, at one point Sebastian is in the middle of a particularly long elevator ride, and says to himself: "If I make it out of here alive, I'm never riding in an elevator again!"
And although the game is published by American company Bethesda, it was developed in Japan and has a very Japanese feel to a lot of it, including the dialogue. This sometimes makes for laughs too and adds more endearing quality to it.
If you consider Resident Evil 1 - 3 as game director Shinji Mikami's first survival horror phase and the landmark Resident Evil 4 as his second, The Evil Within is the long-awaited phase three. But it's also very different than any Resident Evil game - more complex, uncanny, mature and much more rooted in horror rather than the action of later Resident Evil sequels.
It's the first game from Mikami-sama at his new studio, Tango Gameworks. It feels as though it may be his final love letter to the survival horror genre, or it could be the birth of a new golden age.
Either way, horror gaming doesn't get any better.
Five stars.
3 News
The Evil Within
:: Publisher: Bethesda Softworks
:: Developer: Tango Gameworks
:: Format: PlayStation 4, Xbox One, PC, Xbox 360, PlayStation 3
:: Rating: R18
source: newshub archive
