The Evil Within Review

Barbed wire and color red; get ready to see a lot of it.

So I've been itching to do this review for ages, to review one of the newest and more original Survival Horror works to come out in recent times, it's just taken me ages to finish the game. Shinji Mikami is no stranger to survival horror, having put out most of the original Resident Evil games, including the critically acclaimed and marvelously fun Resident Evil 4, as well as being the creative producer for some Suda 51 works like Shadows of the Damned and a co-writer for Killer 7. Now with credentials like that, to say my expectations were pretty damn high would be the understatement of the year. Having finished the game now, I can say that I enjoyed it thoroughly. It's not the most  original game in the world, and it's not flawless, but it definitely belongs to a long tradition of awesome action horror games like Resident Evil 4 and Dead Space, both of which I utterly adore. So without further ado, let's dig into the Evil Within.

Gameplay

 

Get ready to see scenes comparable to this a lot too.

 Now the gameplay is fun, but to be honest, nothing special. If you've played a Resident Evil game after number 4 or Dead Space, you've gotten a taste of the Evil Within's gameplay, and that's honestly not a bad thing. Resident Evil 4 and Dead Space are super fun, and I think third-person, over the shoulder shooters are probably my favorite of the shooter family, so there's nothing really wrong with that. I will say that it detracts from the survival horror a little bit, in that it disconnects the player from the character, but it still works, and makes the experience fun. I love that the inventory screen doesn't actually pause the game, merely slow it down, which is a nice compromise between Resident Evil 4 offering the ability to reload all your guns between one enemy's swing and another, and Resident Evil 5's game of trade the items while Plagas are preparing to use your brains for finger-painting.

The real thing that I think was painful is that this game is HARD. Really, really hard. Now, don't get me wrong, I've played really hard games before, System Shock 2 and Hotline Miami come to mind off the top of my head, but this kind of goes beyond regular Survival Horror hard of leading a conga line of flesh-hungry mutants around a corner so I can kill them all with a wrench and a prayer, this is 'fuck, let's reload my save for the fourteenth bloody time and try this bullshit boss again.' The bosses are probably the worst offenders here, with all of them being stupidly resilient and all have them having some kind of one-hit kill attack (I think), meaning that you will be fighting them a LOT. I played the game on normal, and the learning curve was pretty steep, however, I would say that by the end of the game, I was more used to it, and the game forced me to fight dirty, kneecapping my enemies and setting them on fire while they're down, and it made the whole thing feel more desperate.

Still, the instant deaths are annoying and there are a LOT of them. There are infuriating sequences and very, very few checkpoints, so if you're not the kind of person who can persevere through that sort of thing, this game will frustrate you very, very quickly.
 

Direction

 

This is where the game really shines, I think, because the art  and direction is utterly stellar. It's got this insane, over the top, visceral feel to it, that would be completely out of place in any other game, but works here. Enemies are twisted zombies wrapped in barbed wire. There are death traps like fans of rotating sawblades and giant brains filled with lobotomy needles and many, many more, like a beautiful love letter to splatter-punk horror and every slasher movie in the past two decades. The feel manages to be cerebral and visceral, dreamlike and also very, very real, and it's really cool when the game manages to juggle and swing drunkenly between these very disparate themes and make it all fit together wonderfully. 

The main props I'd love to give are to the enemy designs, which I really thought were the game's strongest point, and they looked really, really freakish even by the standards of our Silent Hill and Resident Evil desensitized world. My absolute favorite monster was Laura, this lovely lady here, who you fight about three times in the game.  

It's the hair that does it for me.

I'm from Singapore, and like many kids from Asia, I've been almost culturally conditioned to find waifish women in white with long, face covering black hair, utterly terrifying. Everything about Laura, from her insanely creepy, broken marionette-style movement, her incessant ragged breathing that she does as she chases you down, her ability to go from very slow to very fast with little warning, and her boss theme, which sounds like an auditory panic attack, is designed to make your skin crawl. Her one-hit kill move, which she uses more than any other attack is annoying as hell, and to be honest, not that scary, but it makes fights with her a lot more tense. She's pretty much every J-Horror movie from the Ring to the Grudge (she's essentially a ripoff of Kayako Saeki from the Ju-On franchise, down to the death rattle), but fuck, it works. Fortunately, she shares the same weakness every other woman I've ever met has. She really hates being set on fire.

Women, amirite?

Now, I can't talk about the direction of this game without getting to one fairly critical fact. Like Resident Evil 4 and Dead Space, it's not really survival horror. Now, I'm not one of those purists who think that anything that gives you the capacity to fight back disqualifies a game from being survival horror, I'm just saying, at the point the game gives you several grenades and a gun that literally shoots lightning, and tells you to kill a room with respawning waves of enemies, you can pretty much hand in your survival horror card. The Evil Within is many, many things, but one thing it really isn't is restrained. It's scary, don't get me wrong, but there's no sense of really, empty, creeping dread that I got from my favorite survival horror games like Silent Hill 3 or System Shock 2. 

I would say that the main problem I had with The Evil Within is that it can't decide if it's going for serious or tongue-in-cheek goofy. Resident Evil 4 pretty much jumped headfirst into goofy when it decided to introduce its supervillainous Spanish midget in a Napoleon outfit that talked like Speedy Gonzales, and while The Evil Within doesn't go quite that far, there are a lot of little details, like the immense guy wearing a safe over his head who kills with a meat tenderizer and a bag of nails and drops barb-wire mines that break the mood a little bit. Ruvik, our baddy sets up traps that would make Jigsaw cringe, and at times, the sheer amount of ludicrous, over the top insanity takes away from the atmosphere, like the bits near the end where the zombies start using military grade weapons and the final level, that drops all pretense and dumps the player into a Quake 3 arena to fight waves of respawning enemies. 

Speaking of goofy, this is where I need to talk about my favorite part of this game. It is simultaneously the most stupidly awesome and coolest weapon, as well as having absolutely zero in-game justification and being a huge mood breaker. This is the Agony Crossbow. 

Because survival horror and subtlety can suck my dick when I have a motherfucking crossbow that shoots LIGHTNING. This thing is a combination steampunk crossbow/speargun that can conjure magic bolts that do everything from freeze the enemy, set him on fire, explode (if you're boring), staple them to walls, electrocute them or poison them. This ridiculously versatile weapon is acquired pretty early in the game, and from there, every trap you disarm, Sebastian can Macguiver up more magic ammunition, until you're mowing down crowds of enemies like the Green Arrow went off his meds. How Sebastian gets this level of technical aptitude is completely unexplained, and it gets even funnier when he encounters a fairly simple electrical puzzle and complains that he's 'not an electrician,' which can happen right after stepping over the smoldering corpses of enemies char-grilled with home-made lightning. Now, again, don't get me wrong, the Agony Crossbow is fucking cool, and I used it as often as I could. It's just the kind of weapon I would expect to find in Quake, or Mortal Kombat, not a weird cerebral thriller like  The Evil Within. Ultraviolence has its place, no doubt, but when you're trying to put together a horror game, you really don't want to make the player feel overconfident, and every time I was loading up a new grenade spear and yelling 'WITNESS ME!' before I turned another crowd of zombies into paste made me feel that someone perhaps missed that memo.

Storyline

 

Again, I want to say that the game really stands out here. I'm about to spoil the shit out of the story, so if you haven't played the game, seriously, go play it before reading this next bit. Spoiling yourself for this game is a BAD IDEA, and literally cripples the experience, as so much is built on what you aren't seeing. Essentially, the entire game takes place in a machine that links minds, with Ruvik, wonderful mad scientist turned serial killer as the Game Master essentially. Within the machine, he can control reality, and while the rest of the characters are contributing (which is a nice excuse for why you keep finding guns and ammo), Ruvik is in control.

Now, I don't feel sympathy for bad guys often, especially in video games, since my main urge is re-purpose them fertilizer for getting in my way, but I actually did feel for Ruvik (even if my main character, Sebastian, didn't). He's an awesome villain with a tragic past and good, clear motivations for every nasty thing he does, and plays the entire cast like a fiddle, toying with them like a cat and very rarely losing his cool.

As you can expect, the storyline is really surreal, as the entire game takes place in this dreamscape, and while there is little sense of continuity, the idea of this huge mental battle happening ala Nightmare on Elm Street is a really powerful one. The main character has a similar tragic backstory and past, and all the characters are well developed and deep. I really didn't want Sebastian to die, and I wanted to protect my friends, even though I usually hate escort missions. I don't want to spoil it too much more, as I've already done that a lot, so play the game for yourself, but let me tell you, the story does not disappoint, and the few times I looked ahead to see what was going on , I deeply regretted the decision. 

Originality

 

Hmmmm...

 If there is one place The Evil Within shoots itself directly in the foot, it's here. If I was going to summarize this game in one sentence, I would either say 'Resident Evil 4, but scary' or less charitably, 'Resident Evil 4 meets Saw'. I don't know if you can plagiarize from yourself, but Mikami really did not do much more than remake one of his most famous games. The sets are almost exactly the same. The enemies are almost exactly the same. Even the level progression goes from a village fighting possessed villagers and a dude with a chainsaw and a mask to a castle, to a paramilitary cityscape. Other than the basic premise, and even that has strains of A Nightmare on Elm Street (with Ruvik being voiced by Jackie Earle Haley, who played Freddy Krueger in the phenomenally shit remake), almost everything in this game is lifted either from another survival horror game or movie.

Now....does that make it bad? No. Does it break the atmosphere? A little. There's a fine line between homage and plagiarism, and The Evil Within walks that line very closely. Resident Evil 4 is just the most obvious comparison to make, but there's loads of things. The safe-headed guy is a faster Pyramid Head from Silent Hill 2, down to nicking his final boss fight. Laura, as mentioned earlier is Kayako Saeki from the Grudge/Ju-On, down to the distinctive breathing and constant teleportation. All the environments and traps wouldn't look out of place in Jigsaw's basement. The opening chapter is basically lifted from Outlast. Now, maybe Mikami was trying to reference horror movies and games and make The Evil Within something of a summation of Survival Horror up to that point, with the cityscape maps having small posters advertising 'White Fog' (probably a reference to Silent Hill) and 'Serbian Psycho.' If that's the case, that's cool, but it would have been nice to see something truly memorable and distinctive come out of this game, something that maybe someone else in the future could pay homage to, which the game seems to be building to, and sadly, never comes.

 

Overall

 

The Evil Within is fun. Really, really fucking fun. If you're looking for an action horror romp with an intelligent story, good characters, and fuckawesome weapons and art designs, you could do a lot worse than this. Still, it was bound to be unable to live up to its hype. Shinji Mikami is something of a celebrity in the survival horror community, and with his success, people were expecting something that would give them heart attacks on the spot, so obviously people were going to be disappointed. Still, for what it is, it's definitely a solid game, and scary as fuck. Just don't go in expecting a huge amount of originality or for it to go easy on you.

Rankings

Gameplay - 5/5- Easy to learn, hard to master, exactly as a game should be. Never becomes too frustrating or too easy. 

Story - 5/5- Keeps you guessing until the end, and has great characters and dialogue.

Atmosphere - 5/5- Like a bad dream or a nasty acid trip, combined with all the slasher films since the eighties.

Level Design -3/5- Levels were fun, but after the first, the locations started becoming more mundane

Originality -1/5 - Yep, I agree. Resident Evil 4 was a great game. Learn to let go.

Fun Factor - 3/5 - Undoubtedly fun, but super unforgiving. Get used to the various death animations, because by the end, you'll have them memorized.

Overall Rating - 4/5- Definitely one of the better Horror titles I've played in a long while, and it's really nice to see something come out that's not Silent Hill or Resident Evil, although to call this a departure from their example is hardly accurate.

- Kephn

The Sasha Heresy

So this is an incredibly stupid story, featuring probably one of my favorite characters I've ever played. There's no real moral to this story, however, in this story, I think I derailed the story more than I ever had in any other game. Keep in mind that I don't do this intentionally. I really do hate trolling stories and players that try to make the game all about them. Still, by playing in character, and making a couple of stupid decisions, I caused what I hope will go down in-universe as the Sasha Heresy.

To begin this little anecdote, I'll have to introduce you to my character. His name was Sasha Nex. He was a Heretek in a game of Dark Heresy I played with about six of my friends.

Art by another player in the game, who was playing a sociopathic sniper. Pretty good buds with Sasha

The Adeptus Mechanicus has always been my favorite Imperial faction, so, while I've played them a lot, I've always tried to put a different spin on them. My first character was a naive, young nooby Mechanicus trying to appease his masters in the Tech Priests and the Inquisition. My second character was a fire and brimstone preacher from an Old West themed world, who merged Cult Mechanicus philosophy with being a cowboy gunslinger. Sasha was my last Mechanicus character, and he stood out because he was an actual scientist, not a follower of the Mehcanicus creed. Because innovation is a very bad thing within the Imperium of Man, he was cast out, joining the Dark Mechanicus, before realizing that those guys were totally, utterly, batshit insane, and defected again to join the Inquisition.

Sounds like a derpy backstory, but I really wanted to play Sasha as someone desperately searching for a purpose in life, someone to accept him, and when he fled to the Inquisition, deserting his Dark Mech comrades, he believed, truly and utterly, that he had finally found the last bastion of sanity within the Imperium of Man. Sasha was a Heretek, fused with his mechanical implants into a bio-cyborg of nightmarish proportions (Complete with nifty draco-cyborg wings. Random mutations charts sometimes are nice to me), having studied the Warp, Chaos and Tech Heresy to the nth degree, all with the ultimate motive of creating a new golden age for mankind. He's....misguided.....to be sure, just like every other mad scientist, but what I'm getting at is that this guy wasn't really malicious, or evil for evil's sake. He was a guy with a dream, a dream of a beautiful utopia, and he was willing to commit the vilest and most terrible atrocities to achieve it. A true visionary in every sense of the word.

Sasha and Mordecai the sniper being morally ambiguous BFF's

As you can imagine, Sasha got along with some members of the party more than others. The utterly sociopathic and kill-crazy sniper took a liking to him and had his back, as illustrated in that ADORABLE comic. Even the more puritanical members got along with him, when he proved his loyalty again and again. Still though, Sasha was constantly looking to push the borders of science, science that would inevitably get lost or be left to languish, without any recognition. It was this act of desperation and an unfortunate random encounter when we got lost in the Warp that mark the beginning of the Sasha Heresy.

So we got lost in the Warp thanks to a roll, and we were working on how to get out of it when the ship was contacted by another ship. A very large, terrifying daemonic ship that made our ship look like a canoe at best,, and was readying it's forward firing death ray to kill us. People were panicking, and no matter what we did, there was really no way we could fire our Warp Drive and get away without the ship killing us. Sasha was not prepared to die before his genius could be rightly revealed to the universe, and didn't want to see his friends dying either, so he did the first stupid thing. He contacted the ship over an encrypted channel. He agreed to become the daemon's representative in exchange fir both his friend's lives and the power to make his vision become reality.

Funnily enough, no one suspected him when he got the warp drive working 'just in time.' Just goes to show that sometimes finding the heretic is just a matter of pointing to the guy with demon wings and chaos tattoos.

YOU SEE NOTHING

So, fast forward a couple of months out of game. We finished our mission and our Inquisitor sends us on the most dangerous mission yet. We are to go to Holy Terra and investigate one of the High Lords. Now for those not versed in 40k lore, this is essentially the equivalent of going up to the king or queen of the land and accusing them of treason. The High Lords are almost literally beyond reproach, but the Inquisition's job is basically making sure nobody is beyond reproach. They need to seek Heresy everywhere regardless of how dangerous. So off to Holy Terra we went.

Now, obviously we agonized a little about how to hide my presence, as I was going to be about as welcome on Holy Terra as a guy with severe necrosis at a strip club. Turns out this wouldn't be a problem, as we got ambushed as soon as we landed our ship on Terra. Now, middle of a shipyard, weapon fire going off everywhere and our cowardly little Heretek hiding in the ship trying to figure out what to do.

Now, everything beyond this point is the result of my very stupid decision here. I decided to overload the engine of ship, hoping to cause an INTERNAL explosion that would allow us to get away.

Now, hindsight is 20/20, and I know that a lot of you are probably following the example of this Astartes up here, and I really don't have any excuse. It was a stressful situation and it seemed like a good idea at the time and....well, fuck, it was a mistake.

So I rigged the engine and ran outside, hoping my wings would carry me away from the explosion. Now, several things happened at once.

First the ship's engine exploded. Warhammer 40k ships are pretty huge, like the size of several football fields, so it didn't take out the ship itself completely, but it did make a giant, flaming, melting wreckage.

Now, docking bays are loaded with lots of fuel. In Warhammer 40k, the most common flammable substance is Prometheum, essentially super-fuel. So, all the Prometheum canisters on the dock explode, killing the ambush people, our men, and several party members.

Next, the ground beneath the ship has had about as many massive explosions as it's going to take, and promptly collapses, taking the three thousand plus ton ship (which is on fire) and thousands of gallons of flaming Prometheum with it to the dock directly below it.......which also has a ship.

Now, you can see where this chain reaction is going, because everyone below me did. This giant fiery stream of death burned through dozens of layers in Terra's main dock, destroying most of it, hitting critical infrastructure, before finally hitting the Underhive. Terra was held on military lockdown for the next two decades if I'm not mistaken. In a single instant, Sasha Nex caused the single greatest heresy in human history since Horus walked the earth 10,000 years ago.

Now, for those of you in the know, I was using a Black Crusade character sheet (essentially the same system as Dark Heresy but with some different stats to represent my character's more deviant ways.) Now, one of these stats that it added is one called Infamy, which is essentially how far word has spread of your dark deeds. Hit 100, and you become a daemon prince. Now for upstaging Abaddon the Despoiler himself, I shot straight to 100, but got taken out by an angry former party member who insisted on personally hunting Sasha down and killing him. Still, the Slaanesh daemon who was his patron was quite impressed with his deeds, and installed his soul in a suit of Terminator armor.

So, there's no great moral to take away from this. Just.....I don't know.....think before you do stupid shit in any RPG. But then again, accidentally winning at Black Crusade while playing Dark Heresy isn't the worst fate a character can come to.

You'll get there one day Abby. Don't stop believing.

- Kephn

How To Play Evil Characters Without Ruining the Game

So, today I'm going to be talking about a topic that I feel quite strongly about. With my recent post about alignment and other argument starters, there's something I feel that I didn't address, that's quite important, and something that a lot of DM's and players don't understand. So, I'll leap right into the meat straight off. I love playing Evil aligned characters. Now, most DM's hear that and immediately, their knee-jerk reaction is to tell me to stop trolling, and for the most part, I agree. However, I think with my track record of writing articles, you might guess that I'm not the kind of guy that joins the game just to troll it for the other players. One of my favorite storytelling tropes, as I mentioned from my Alignment post, is that of the reluctant or unlikely hero. The sort of guy who's amoral, or outright evil,  but is forced to do good for the sake of his loved ones, the greater good or just because it's in his best interest. I think playing Evil or Neutral characters can be very interesting, and I have done it many times without wrecking the game or ruining it for everyone else. To explain this, I want to examine the motivations of the characters in question and try to explain how to be an evil aligned character that still has a reason to help the party and contribute, and does not necessarily have to slit their throats over a kit-kat.

First off, I'd like to start with a story. I mentioned an anecdote for this story in the alignment article, but I'd love to expand on it a bit, with a character very close to my heart. Meet my very first Dungeons and Dragons character, and I'm pretty sure my first roleplay character that wasn't in a Play by Post forum. This is Ollie/Olly, the Neutral Evil Changeling Rogue.

He wishes he looked this badass

Now, I've played Ollie in two games, both of which went for about a year, and with some of the same players, so he was the same character, with a level of continuity between the two games, and even today I still think of him as one of my favorite characters I've ever played. Ollie was a shapeshifting, money-obsessed hedonist. He loved everything that glittered and his dream was to live in luxury, preferably with all his (many) enemies dead. Now, this sounds more Neutral, and I would agree, Ollie was very much leaning toward Chaotic Neutral, however, he never lost his evil edge. he was selfish, completely self absorbed, and would have happily stolen from an old man and leave his victim starving and impoverished in the street, if not dead. Now, he might not have sounded like the most fun guy to roleplay with, but here's the thing. Ollie never had a family. Ollie never really had people who cared about him, and one of his character traits, despite the nastiness, was his loyalty. If you treated Ollie well, he'd be your best friend in the world. He'd steal and kill for you. he obviously got along with the second party (which was mostly Neutral aligned) more than the Good aligned first party, but in both settings, he wouldn't have sold them out. (Except maybe the douchebag Chaotic Good paladin of Bahamut. Fuck that guy).  This brings me to my first point.

Being Evil doesn't mean not having friends, or caring about nothing.

Wayyyyyyyyy to many people use Evil aligned characters as an excuse to betray the party, and this is where I usually facepalm and ask 'why?' Even the most self-absorbed assholes alive would probably prefer a group of people who had his back. Look, maybe if the party were abusing him, or were seriously not taking his wishes into account, but overall, most people are not raging psychopaths. Most people like having a group of friends to pal around with, or at least a group that they trust not to kill them in their sleep. Ollie was pretty decent friends with a lot of the second group, and even some of the first group, and in the second group, even began having feelings for a more good-aligned party member. People are social animals and they develop bonds. It's actually pretty unlikely for an evildoer to ditch and betray his friends when they are serving his interests just fine, and even if they aren't, he's probably going to try and sway them instead of just cutting their throats and starting over.

STUPID EVIL

I hate this. I fucking, fucking hate this. Not the show 'It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia,' because that's a fantastic show. I just hate this mentality. You're EVIL. That doesn't mean you're a fucking idiot. So. Take a moment, with just a little bit of logic. Say you're traveling with a group of people. You might not always get along, but you've established that they have your back against all the other goblins, brigands, heretics and inquisitors out there in the big scary world. Now, say you have some minor disagreement. Is it a better idea to a) try and negotiate b) find some way to steer them toward your goal or c) kill them all and go find another group who are willing to help?

If any one jumped straight to c), then congratulations, you have just qualified for the alignment of STUPID EVIL. This is the kind of character that I'm sure most GM's are used to seeing played. It went under the name Chaotic Stupid for a while, but these are two entirely different things. Stupid Evil characters are characters that act maliciously and evil, regardless of how practical it is. For example, say you're paid to rescue a kitten from a tree. An evil character might take the money and run off. Another evil character might save the cat, then try to hold it ransom for a bigger reward. A stupid evil character will kill the cat and the reward giver and leave. Do you see what I'm getting at here? Stupid Evil characters are usually played by emo teens and fans of the Joker, who have a five-year old's understanding of morality. Evil people, usually, don't get up every morning thinking about what evil acts they're going to commit today. They don't do evil just for the sake of it, because that's the kind of behavior that ends you on a hangman's noose. Evil aligned people, usually just want something. They're willing to crack some skulls to get it, but at the end of the day, everyone has a goal, be it money, power, a dark god's favor, whatever. Burning down orphanages for no reason is something only utter psychopaths do, and here's the next important point.

BEING EVIL DOESN'T MEAN YOU'RE A PSYCHOPATH

Yet another important point to playing evil characters. Psychopaths are pretty goddamn rare. Seriously. More importantly, they're also utterly boring characters, 90% of the time. Psychopaths have no emotional connections to things. They have very little ability to plan for the future. They just do what they want, when they want to and damn the consequences. This plays into being Stupid Evil, but Psychopaths are usually really bad characters. They have no real ability to engage with a story, because for them, it's not about the story, it's about doing what suits them now. So yes, if you are playing a psychopath, I would say it is perfectly in character to kill all your comrades, burn down the local town hall and kick the guards in the balls. It is also completely realistic that you would be then ventilated with so many arrows or bullets that they would not be able to find enough of you to fit in a coffee can. Then I would politely tell you to either make a better character or go away.

Think of it this way. Most people, even in a fairly black and white setting like DnD (My inner Planescape Fanboy wants to butt in here and refute that but I will restrain him), most evil people don't really think they're evil. Let's take a bunch of Orcs, who are listed as 'Usually Chaotic Evil.' Let's think about that. Does an Orc think of itself as Chaotic Evil? Or do they simply see humans as weak, and feel that it's their right to take what they want. Hell, their tribe will probably reward them for it, and they'll be doing good by strengthening their tribe against the humans. Sure, a human Paladin can detect the 'evil' on them, but those pansy tin-cans worship Pelor or Heironeous, gods who have a grudge against orcs anyway, and of course would label them 'evil.' Our Orc worships Grummsh, and Grummsh certainly approves of his behavior. What makes one god more right than another?

I'm getting into moral relativism here, and that's the Vampire player inside me coming up, but what I'm trying to get at is that, even if their actions are objectively evil, most people won't see themselves as evil. They could see it as a cynical, dog-eat-dog world, and they're just doing what they have to. They could see it as a bad means to a good cause or even a bad means to a selfish cause, but very, very few people, other than the aforementioned psychopaths, specifically set out to do as much harm as they can. Evil aligned characters are people too. They have friends, they have family, they probably aren't on the job 24-7. Take Ollie example again. He's evil, sure, but he wants to get to know his companions. If he sees something they might like, he might steal it for them. Ollie believes that the world is cynical, that everyone is out for themselves and that the guy sitting on the highest mountain of gold at the end of the day is the winner, and trust me, he wants to be the winner, but that doesn't mean that he doesn't want his friends on piles of gold almost as high as his. Evil characters have hopes and dreams, they have triumphs and they have character flaws that trouble them as much as any good guy. A lot of the time, it troubles them a lot more because they aren't exactly socially accepted, especially if they're obviously evil.

As I see it, the appeal of playing an evil character is to step outside of one's own morality and try to take in another point of view, and it is fun to be the cold, pragmatic bastard amidst the pretentious goody-goodies. There's a lot of prejudice against evil aligned characters, but the main thing I think you should take away from this is to remember, out of game, you're all friends. Evil characters don't have to be douchebags to people in the party. They don't have to backstab their friends and they don't have to undermine them and weedle them at every opportunity. There's plenty of targets outside the party to mess with, who are not currently supporting you and your adventure. Kill them and steal their stuff, but don't get your friends in trouble. Maybe, maybe, if they see how useful you are, they might start tolerating you, and from there, it's only a few steps toward bringing them around to seeing it your way.

Finally, some neat inspirations for evil characters played well, and as flawed, fallable people, and not caricatures.

Reservoir Dogs - An utterly fantastic movie, with deep, interesting characters, all of whom are grade-A bastards. Even the most sympathetic (without spoiling anything), Mr. White is still a cold-blooded killer who recommends cutting off a person's finger if they don't cooperate. The thing is, they're all loyal to each other. They don't screw each other over for no reason, and even the pragmatic Mr. Pink is utterly disgusted when Mr. Blonde (Stupid Evil extraordinaire) executes the hostages, and Mr. White desperately tries to save Mr. Orange's life, and stands up to his boss on his behalf. It's a fantastic character study of criminals as people, flawed and unpleasant people sure, but people nontheless.

Seven Psychopaths - Probably one of my favorite movies ever. It's definitely a comedy, but it has some real heart, and is a perfect examination of what it's like to have a psychotic motherfucker as your best friend. Billy clearly has his friend Marty's best interests at heart, and does his best to support him and  his dreams and ambitions. To say the way he does this is.....creative is putting it mildly, but without spoiling anything, Billy really exemplifies what it means to be Chaotic Evil, and still have motivations, dreams and a best friend forever.

Atlantis: The Lost Empire - I really liked this movie, even if lots of people didn't. Steampunk just makes my nipples hard. Anyway, while it's a Disney movie, so it can't be too dark, most of the crew are an interestingly amoral bunch, that are still clearly loyal to each other, and turn against their commander when he tries to betray one of them. Vinny (the awesome dude with the mustache and the arsenal of bombs) says it best when justifying his actions. "We've done a lot of things we're not proud of—robbin' graves, plunderin' tombs, double parking...But nobody got hurt! (Beat) Well, maybe somebody got hurt, but nobody we knew..."

The Devil's Rejects - Another one of my favorite movies. The Firefly Clan are murderous, cannibalistic rapists, but above all, they are a family, and they stick together through thick and thin. Even Otis and Spaulding, the characters who butt heads most of the way through, stick together and defend each other, and go out as a unit, shooting and giving Johnny Law a good showdown at the end.

- Kephn