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