Game Name: The Evil Within (2014)
Developer: Tango Gameworks (Shinji Mikami created Resident Evil)
Platform: PC, PS3, PS4, XBox 360, XBox One (reviewed on PC)
Categories: Single Player, Dark Psychological Horror/Thriller, Scavenging, Survival, Stealth, 3rd Person Shooter, Crafting Lite, Grotesque Mutations, a couple Puzzles

May Appeal To: masochists, the deranged, trial-and-error-ers, ambience-seekers, societal rogues, gore fanatics, survivalists, the bored, and huge boss contenders
May Repulse: the easily queasy, story-seekers, the frustrated, voice acting critics, and those who identify the difference between classic horror and modern ‘gore’or

Comparable To: (less goofy and focused than) Resident Evil 4, (scarier and darker than Resident Evil 5), (better characters than) Resident Evil Revelations, (exceeds the needless frustration of) Demon Souls, (more lighting than) Condemned Bloodshot

Learning Curve: You Know how to play this game already; run and gun is second nature though the stealth elements require up to 30 minutes of practice.
Game Length: About 15-20 hours depending on your exploration and game reloading
Difficulty: Average excluding the cheap, unexpected deaths
Mastery: A player can master the tactics (and exploits) of each enemy within the third confrontational bout. Bonus points for decrypting the hair demon -if fleeing isn’t your thang.

Story: There’s definitely a guy in a hoodie. And I think he’s mad at somebody. Um, the city crumbles into pieces but it eventually gets put back together. A couple people were turned inside out and even more have cattle wire wrapped around them -sorta act like zombies, but not really. You’re a cop, unless it’s all in your head? A couple bland tag-alongs need babysitting and something to do with genetically engineered siamese twins.

Presentation: Little flourishes in particle or lighting effects immerse the player as twisted cinematography plumbs the depths of insanity. The shrillness of broken mirrors exposing white trans-dimensional gateways to asylums gives way to the tinny, crackling Claire de Lune denoting a safe haven from the abominations prowling the hallways -where up is down, down is sideways, and the artificial grain added to the claustrophobic camera exquisitely resonates a smile-less 1920’s portrait and a suffocating acid trip induced at Rob Zombie’s Thanksgiving feast. The combat is crunchy, the atmosphere is surreal, and the textured details burst at the seams as you’re jerked from one fully-realized nightmare to the next. In no small part is this disorienting stimuli boring or tedious.

Unique Features: The clockwork crossbow apparatus is fairly interesting. It fires an array of shock, exploding, piercing, and flash bolts you craft from disassembled bombs, beartraps, and acid sprayers purposefully placed at your own peril. The lighting and camera work are of particular note, and propel the entire genre to new standards. Missed Feature: zombies could have been reanimated unless burned with those matches!

Gameplay: Walk forward, keep going. Oh, there was a spiked ceiling I forgot to mention. Whoops, that barbed wire zombie turned around that time. Ah, the hair monster grazed your path and caved your brain cradle like a post-Halloween pumpkin. Dang, you botched the timing on that bomb disarmament. Surprise! There is a neck-level blade that lops heads like a tornado through a field of dandelions. This level has invisible Zoidberg monsters. Aww, you have no ammo to fight the safehead boss -and you didn’t know to run from his respawns. Tough luck, you once had too many bullets and then used them all on randomized critical headshots on a group of low-tier peons. You spec’ed your character carelessly. You got frustrated and died at the same spot carelessly. You put the game down for a couple hours to collect yo’ shit, carelessly. You then continue playing without caring…. stoically.

Additional Comments: That business aside, you spend your time defeating enemies, collecting ewwzzzzz to level guns/abilities, and staring blankly at a mysterious nurse who says a few words then sits cryptically with a wry expression every chapter. It’s possible to beef up your punches as a primary weapon, plop your points into rifle stats, or toss bottles to stun enemies sneak up and head-stab your way to victory. A multitude of traps hinders your approach and equals boss battles in terms of lethality.

What I Liked: Color palette shifts, visual effects, atmosphere, discombobulating dimensional time jumping, and ammo scarcity outshone my original reasons for picking up the game: which was to be scared, possibly horrified (neither occurred). The tight camera resting snugly upon Sebastian’s lapel was irritatingly close at first but I grew to appreciate the cinematic effect of it all and let the game whisk me around to wherever the hell it felt like -of which it took great liberties in evoking a sense of unease and a lack of trust in the fairness of what lay ahead. Believe it or not this is a welcome approach to gaming, matching my perceived sensibilities of a tormented killer’s psychic assault. The enemy design and textures felt appropriately gross without getting ridiculously comical a la Resident Evil -in fact, this scratched many of the same “gamey” itches the previous series alleviated and then some. This had turgid combat, solid weaponry, and a pseudo-victorian-punk feel in many areas -mostly furnishings, pinstripe vests, and ornate metalwork in things like lanterns and ethereal contraptions. (Man, I wish I could own/play Bloodborne.)

What I Disliked: The story is a montage of tense set pieces without any real underlying connection, only a diminishing dread with each electro-shock treatment -which somehow administers the green vials of mutagen inexplicably dropped by monsters at random. At some point, the game forgets about the moody blackness and stealth elements and sends the player careening through a guantlet of timed traps, arena battles, [horrifically!] well lit ranged combat, and finally a QTE memorization challenge against a scripted boss set piece. This game specifically does a poor job of transitioning from in-game cinematics to sequences where I’m expected to run towards the camera before split-second notification of instadeath. Your sprint endurance is initially terrible. Matchbook fire opportunities are under-encouraged. Characters are woefully uninteresting (stop getting shot for 5 minutes wouldja Joseph?) and the complete list of 14 chapters could be scattered to the winds, missing a few, shuffled, and played in any order without detriment to the cohesiveness of the experience.

Glitches Experienced: The Evil Within had surprisingly few anomalies though geometry clipping, floaty mouse, and unyieldingly mistimed pratfalls such as environmental instakills plagued my experience. I count the latter as a glitch since I cried “Bullshit!” X amount of times and I can’t have been wrong through 100% of that whining. Also, the PC version did not have a way to scroll a document from your inventory and the “exit” key used to disengage a point of interest has no on-screen prompt (it’s the C key by the way).

Hours I Played: 26 on Survival difficulty – which is likely too many

My Personal Reaction: I was on a horror binge for some reason. Having been smoldering for a Silent Hill successor, I settled for a Resident Evil descendant that looked pretty, whose gameplay didn’t ring of the absurdity that has become the other series (possibly to be redeemed through refreshing Revelations). TEW intrigued in many ways and delivered a parade of emotionally connotative reactions including desperation, bewilderment, more bewilderment, disgust, dread, mistrust, a bit of empowerment, and finally relief at having stumbled haplessly through my last pitfall. I’m a cautious, meticulous player and still died countless ways -some deserved, most a joint effort with the sadism humming hotly on my laptop screen. Admittedly, the devs did make some effort to tie the pieces together though the “dimly-lit house of mirrors run by the carnie-folk fresh from a local creek bath in a booze-induced stupor” coherence of storytelling is all I’ll remember.

Noob Tips: Save your scrap for when you’re in dire straits and need to fashion some arrows, otherwise, just use whatever weapon has the most ammo. Your health regenerates up to a certain point if you remain still and investing points in ammo capacity is moot if you take a balanced approach to zombie-thing pacification. You can’t go wrong with points in your running skill, find out which bosses you can permanently kill, take the game slowly, and use the environment to dispatch foes whenever possible. Use matches when an enemy gets knocked down -the fire immolates nearby baddies as well.

Depth and Replayability: Medium. There are a disparate amount of map fragments you won’t find on a first run-through and the compartmentalized mission challenges are easy enough to polish off on the fly. Movie sequences are skippable and speed runs aren’t impossible for the laymen to blitz through in scouring for white statues to shoot either. New Game + exists and there are additional weapons to unlock, apparently. The post-game 3D model viewer is a nice touch.

Suggested Value: I bought vanilla The Evil Within for $30 on a Steam sale though it commonly drops even lower. This seems appropriate.

Where to Buy: Steam, Gamestop, most common retail Outlets

Subjective Categorical Ranking:
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