The Evil Within

Bethesda, you probably know who these fellas are. Famously known for Elder Scrolls, and if not that then their work on Fallout since the third entry. Over the years they’ve acquired several teams of developers to work by their side. Serving as a publisher for their games until Microsoft decided to buy them out in 2020. They are now a company within a company, but the real question is if Bethesda is good? Well your answer to that question is gonna vary nowadays, but personally I do think Bethesda are good. There’s a lot of talented people working under the studios they own and their games have more heart put into them than a majority of the Triple A games put out today. Sure Starfield and Redfall were bad, but within the last two years we also received Hi-Fi Rush and Indiana Jones and The Great Circle. Games that redefined the respective genres they hail from. They know when to cook when they want to and that’s why I still maintain some respect for them.

If you’re an avid Bethesda fan or mild appreciator like myself then you easily list off the studios who’ve worked under them and the games they’ve made. Id Software, the creators of the Doom franchise. The reason why first person shooters even exist and a team who continue to put out banger after banger. Well that’s somewhat true because the franchise that really started the FPS genre out was Wolfenstein, which is now handled by Machine Games who recently did Indiana Jones and The Great Circle like I mentioned earlier. Arkane , creators of the well beloved Dishonored series and Prey. Revivers of the immersive-sim genre and creating what I believe to be the best modern examples on how to make these kinds of games. For a majority of people these are most likely going to be the most popular answers for games and studios that live under the Bethesda name, but one name isn’t as commonly listed. That being Tango Gameworks, or what is now the defunct studio who no longer lives under Bethesda. Just last year the studio got shut down after a tax write off by Microsoft, which was unfortunate. Their most recent title, previously mentioned Hi-Fi Rush, was well praised and one of the ebay games Bethesda ever put out. However, it didn’t meet the sales Microsoft had hoped for so they killed Tango. Only for them to turn around, say they want to focus on single player titles, and have their audience question them.

Microsoft hates fun. Anyways, Tango could’ve rotted away but recently they got purchased by a new company called Krafton. The sun is rising in the distance and Tango promises to be the best it can be going forward. With a sequel for Hi-Fi Rush possibly being the works and if not that then maybe something grander. Tango might not have been my favorite Bethesda studio, but they are the ones I respect the most. They have a lot of passion for the games they create, and I will always respect people who love what they do rather than do it for the sake of doing it. So let’s go back to the first game they’ve ever made. The legendary Shinji Mikami’s first major project after he left Capcom. The Evil Within, a game that acted like it would be the next major innovator in the survival horror genre and spiritual successor to the older Resident Evil games. A lot of hype surrounded this game when it was first revealed. I mean you had Shinji Mikami serving as the lead director. Before the reveal, Resident Evil wasn’t doing so well with the sixth entry being a major stinker for the franchise. This felt like a return to the magic that made those older Resident Evil games what they are. The Evil Within was ambitious and had a big name backing it, but just cuz you have a big name backing you doesn't mean you’ll end up with a superb product.

So how did The Evil Within turn out?

Good, kinda. Scratch that, the reception for this game was rather mixed and to this day all those who played it argue whether or not it was good. Look up the wikipedia page for it, scroll down to the reception section, and stare at the review scores. A wide arrangement of eight, six, and seven out of ten. With a single nine out of ten review score to break up the mixed reactions. Those are only the major review outlets! Ask the fans and they’ll tell you it’s either one of the greatest survival horror games ever made and one of the most disappointing pieces of trash to ever be conceived in the genre. It’s easy to see why The Evil Within got the reception it did, but there has to be a reason why so many people talk about it to this day. Why did a game with such mixed reception become more memorable than a majority of survival horror titles? Why do fans look back on it even though most of the feelings it gave off was dread? Simple, The Evil Within was memorable. It did something so insane and unique for its time that no other survival horror game has managed to capture. I’m not gonna say it aged well, but if a game manages to maintain its relevance years after it is released then it certainly is doing something right. There’s a reason why it got a sequel and Tango continued to make games instead of being shut down immediately. 

I reviewed the sequel a very long time ago. I don’t remember it much, but I do remember it being quite good. A nice game that contained the interconnected open ended levels similar to that of a recent first person Resident Evil game, but the third person camera angle of the remakes. Played it without having played the first game, but recently I've decided to play games from franchises I’ve never gone through the entirety of. The Evil Within was on my radar and I managed to get it during a sale. Now having finished The Evil Within the night before writing this review I confirm that this game… is weird. I understand why it got the criticism it did, but part of me likes it for what it did. I enjoyed The Evil Within, but wouldn’t recommend it to anybody even if they are fans of survival horror. Why is that? What did it do right? What did it absolutely not do? What did the sequel do to improve the foundation?

Let’s explore these questions in today’s review.

Story

We follow Sebastian Castellanos, city detective for Krimson City and murder case solver. What a perfect name for a horror game city. He and his partners get called in for what’s the most insane case yet. A series of murders happening within Beacon Mental Hospital. Yep, nothing suspicious about this at all. The team are a bit worried about what they’ll encounter, but try to go in a tad bit confident. Hoping to get the investigation done as soon as possible and report back to the station. The hallways are littered with ruin, bodies, and blood. The further they go the more everything starts to get stranger. Sebastian uncovers security footage of what happened, and it shows that all of the staff at the hospital were knocked out through paranormal means. He doesn’t understand this, but quickly turns around to find a white cloaked figure. Jabbing a syringe into his throat and falling unconscious. Sebastian wakes up to find himself dangling from the ceiling from what appears to be a slaughterhouse. Within the same room are dozens of corpses, and occasionally entering the room is a killer who drags one of the corpses away to butcher. 

Sebastian is horrified by all of this and manages to escape by the skin of his teeth. He exits the slaughterhouse to what appears to be Krimson City falling apart. The ground has ruptured and the city’s walls are shifting about. Working against him and trying to consume him whole. Good thing his partners manage to show up in time to rescue Sebastian and escape. They do so with an ambulance and in it is a doctor they found unconscious earlier and a patient. They seem to know a little bit about what’s going on, but before more questions can be asked they all crash and pass out again. Sebastian awakens yet again this time in a new location. A forest village containing dozens of insane civilians. They waddle around as if they’re zombies, and if they encounter an individual not like them they murder them in the most brutal way possible. Something is amiss here. What’s the deal with the doctor and patient? How did Sebastian go from a butcher’s room to the city and eventually a small village? How did the city get destroyed within a single day? What destroyed the city? Who was the white hooded individual from earlier and are they the reason they are where they are now? Only time will tell as Sebastian fights his way through the nightmares before him. Seeking an exit. Tumbling deeper down into the mind.

Gameplay

The Evil Within is a third person action survival horror game similar to that of Resident Evil 4 or the Dead Space series. You aren’t navigating an interconnected world solving puzzles, but rather linearly designed levels and set pieces. Facing off against the monsters that are thrown your way and occasionally rooms in the hopes they contain the supplies needed to survive longer. Supplies are scarce with ammunition for stronger guns often being harder to come by. Items you can loot will often shine, so telling what you can and cannot loot is easy. You can also break containers as at times they’ll drop more resources. There’s five weapons you can use to defend yourself in this game. First come first serve is the pistol, and second is the shotgun which is what you expect if you ever played a shooting game before. There’s two long range weapons, the rifle and crossbow, but one of them is rather unique. The crossbow is the only weapon in the game to contain various ammo types, and you can craft said ammo types using scrap. Each bolt has a unique property to them and  if you use certain bolts at the right time you can save yourself during tricky scenarios. 

There’s the normal bolt for dealing critical damage at a long range. Explosive bolts to deal heavy damage within a small area. Electric bolt to shock, frost bolts to freeze, and flash bolts to blind enemies for a short period of time. Final weapon is the grenade, which you know what it does by now if you’ve played a shooter. Enemies in The Evil Within are quite varied. You have the basic zombie who runs up towards you and some are armed with either melee weapons or guns. A few shots ought to take them down with headshots being lethal. The real kicker are the monsters who occasionally appear during your journey. Killers with unique skills and quirks you have to work around. For example, the earliest one is a fast skulker who you can’t hit and can teleport around using dead bodies. However, she is weak to fire and when set ablaze you can dish out damage. There’s this one enemy I really like which is the locked safe head guy. He wields a hammer and can charge at you, but when you kill him he’ll respawn shortly using one of the other safes lying on the ground. So if you need to pull levers to open the way forward you have to do so quickly and consider where he may respawn in the area. The game is plentiful with ammo, but will at times signal to you fighting isn’t always the best option. In fact, you have multiple options.

Running has always been a trope of survival horror games. If you’re low on supplies or don’t think you can handle it then just run. You can hide as the game occasionally gives you places to tuck yourself in, or you can stealth around because The Evil Within came out during a time when every game needed either half baked stealth mechanics or cover shooting. You can move around slowly and silently, and if you get close enough to one of those basic zombie men you can then stealth kill them. Killing them instantly and making them less of a problem. Most of the time when you kill enemies they drop this green goo. This goo can be collected and taken back to the safe haven. A place where you’re away from the monsters and rest for a bit. Here there is a chair and this chair allows you to spend green goo to upgrade your stats. Base stats, weapon stats, how much you can carry, and strength of your different crossbow bolts. Spend the goo wisely as more often than not these upgrades are expensive. Specialize on what you think is best in the field. Get a little further, fight some bosses from time to time, and reach the end of a level. Progress further and try to make sense of what is possibly going on. Let’s hope you can stop whatever madman behind all of this and make it out alive from this nightmare.

Thoughts

My opinions on The Evil Within are gonna be a little all over the place. I already stated near the beginning of this review it’s not a game I wholeheartedly recommend, but I also said it’s a game I still like despite all of its shortcomings. I enjoyed my time with The Evil Within amongst all the ups and downs, and can understand the small minority who love this game for what it is. I’m not in the boat of people who think it’s an underrated masterpiece, far from it. Yet, there is stuff to appreciate even if you come out with negative reactions. I want to talk about the gameplay first as there’s a lot going on. The game acts like it’s survival horror, but honestly leans more into the action territory of games like Resident Evil 4 and Dead Space 2. Throwing waves of enemies at you, giving you tons of ammo to combat this, and the linear design of each level always pushes you forward towards the goal. After the first few chapters it feels more like an action shooter than a survival horror game, which begs the question of what The Evil Within is trying to be. It’s obviously not a survival horror game, because the game is plentiful with ammo and sometimes just blasting away is the best option. Yes, aiming does matter and you don’t want to play too carelessly, but I never found the game to be too unforgiving with the resources it gave me.

The game has stealth, but stealth in The Evil Within is utterly useless. A majority of the time if you try to use it you kill one enemy and get spotted immediately. Areas are often open and don’t give you enough places to hide. Enemies always are positioned to move towards your direction, so trying to stay out of their line of sight is hard. Stealth just feels like it’s there. It was tacked on because it was a popular design trend in other video games at the time. This game acts as if every enemy is a threat and you should be scared, but I’m not. There was never a point where I felt any sense of fear in The Evil Within, and if the game did take me by surprise it was through a cheap gameplay moment where it killed me instantly. I love the monster encounters in this game. The idea behind them and what they were going through every moment. I love the first encounters with the skulking lady and vault head dude. Discovering skulker is weak to fire, and fighting her in a room where you gotta use environmental hazards to your advantage. Having to rush through poisonous gas to escape the vault head dude who keeps respawning. I love those moments, but dear god there are times when The Evil Within becomes frustrating to play. Through either really monotonous encounter design or trials that feel centered around death and repetition.

I remember an Amnesia review from Josh Strife Hayes awhile back. Great guy, been getting a lot of useful advice from and if any of you appreciate the making of games I urge you to check his videos. In the Amnesia review he talked about how Amnesia will despawn monsters after a short period of time or when too many are in an area. That’s because if the player is killed too much the sense of horror will be lost. It’s no longer scary, it’s frustrating. That is what a lot of the main monster encounters in The Evil Within. Testing both your endurance and patience. I hate saying all of this, because if I were to look at The Evil Within as an action horror game rather than the traditional survival horror game it advertised itself to be, I'd say it’s pretty damn good. Shooting feels good, guns have weight, and when you’re fighting wave upon wave of cannon fodder foes in environments that feel carefully designed it’s awesome. There’s this one section midway that I really like. It’s the part where you’re given the rifle and in the arena you pick it up there’s four places firing giant bolts at you. They’re out of reach, the barriers open when they’re ready to fire, and you have to use the rifle to deal with them. All the while enemies come from various places. Homing in on your position. This section was fun and showed The Evil Within knows how to make a good combat section. Shinji Mikami did direct Resident Evil 4 after all, and this game is fun when it’s trying to evoke the fluid and engaging combat loop of that game.

I like combat, but I didn’t love it. The reason why is because again there are flaws. Controlling and aiming in The Evil Within does not feel. Sebastian is clunky, moves from side to side when walking, aiming doesn’t feel precise, and running shakes the camera back and forth. I forgot to mention earlier you have a stamina bar to run, and when it runs out you have to take a breather. This design choice is terrible, and I don’t know why they featured it in a game where you got to be on the move during chaotic combat sections. I do not like how janky The Evil Within is, and I can already see people getting ready to argue that survival horror games shouldn’t always be that fluid to control. Older genre titles were clunky by design. They required you to play cautiously and carefully. I get where they’re coming from. Some games are like that by design like the first Dark Souls and Shadow of The Colossus, but this was a third person action horror game which came out back in 2014. The same year Wolfenstien: The New Order released and that game had much more shooting than this mind you. I find it confusing how a game with such terrible and at times unresponsive controls can somehow have really fun gameplay when it wants to.

Last criticism before we move on. I do like the upgrade system. Being motivated to kill all the enemies you see or check the environment for goo, so you can spend said goo on character and weapon upgrades. Feeling much stronger at the end compared to the beginning. Having to then carefully consider what to spend goo on, because the upgrades you may want instead get more expensive with time. It’s satisfying, but the only thing I don't understand is why gun upgrades are done with goo. Couldn’t we have spent the scrap we collected? Yes, I know they’re for the bolts but let’s be real. Anybody who has played this game has used three of the five types, because three bolt types do the exact same thing. Freeze, blind, and shock which are all variations of just stunning an enemy. You have a ton of scrap by the end of the game and I’m surprised none of it can be directed towards crafting better gear. F*ck even different guns because there’s only four guns in this game! Why not be able to replace the revolver with a magnum, or the pump action shotgun with a slower but more powerful double barrel. Resident Evil 4 literally figured this out more than two decades ago by letting you unlock different kinds of guns for the same class! My god it’s as if most of the budget went to the graphics and environments…. Which they did.

The Evil Within is a pretty good looking game especially for its time. Remind you this came out during the last few years of the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 era. They were trying to push what those consoles could handle and it shows.The amount of crazy set pieces, backdrops, transitions, and bouncing back and forth between all of them. The incredible detail, viscera, animation, and so much more. The environments are varied enough to prevent your fifthteen hour journey from ever getting stale. However, I wish there was more visual distinction at times. There are some things in this game that blend in with the environment, or are hard to determine because again this came out during the era where every game was brown, gray, or another shade of the two. At times I feel the environments and detail hold back the performance of this game. The Evil Within came out in 2014 with a myriad of bugs, and overtime they patched it to a more stable state. I’m not saying I'm in a perfect state, because the game still feels rather unstable to play. I played this on a Playstation 5 in the hopes it would perform smoothly, but got a message warning me that the state of this game was unstable. They were not wrong, because it’s either the game doesn’t feel good to control, there’s a visual bug, or whatever the game wants to do.

The real kicker of The Evil Within that I want to discuss is the story. This is one of the worst tales in a horror game I ever enjoyed. It’s exciting, thrilling, and goes places I don’t expect. However, what it’s about is something I don’t fully understand. Nothing about this game’s narrative made sense even when you look up a narrative summary online. The information given to you doesn’t add up, it doesn’t lead to satisfying results, and I fail to connect with any of the characters here. Now that’s a strange thing to say for a horror game, but I believe a game’s characters should be likable even if the narrative isn’t good. I do not like Sebastian in this game. He has no reason for you to like. No depth, any backstory that exists is done through logs you most likely skim over, and his voice acting is ridiculously bad even for the time this game was released. This game is about nothing. A lot happens, but nothing is achieved by the end besides escaping the nightmare. I’m not saying every horror game needs to be symbolic like Alan Wake 2, Silent Hill 2, Signalis, etc. I should still be able to care though, and I did not care about this narrative. It's just messy. It doesn't even do that great of a job answering the questions I asked earlier in the narrative section of the review.

The Evil Within somehow manages to be redeeming and unredeeming at the same time. Every single time it reaches a new high it follows itself up with a ridiculous low. It’s a rollercoaster of a game and that’s the best way I can describe it. There was a lot of room for improvement and that is exactly what Tango did with the sequel. The controls were smoothened up so that aiming felt more precise and Sebastian felt like an actual good character to control. Sebastian became more likable as a person with a plot that centered around him, his past, and trying to redeem himself for something he failed to prevent. Combat was much better with better designed encounters that felt less frustrating. Stealth was improved as it felt like an actually useful choice and taking down enemies. You could even stomp enemies like in Dead Space rather than the weird match system this game uses. A system I don’t even want to complain about as this review is longer than it should be. The Evil Within 2 is a much better game in my opinion. Playing the first game made me appreciate it more and I would happily recommend that over this. However, for some odd reason I find it less memorable than the first game. Probably because I played it such a long time ago, but the first game has this touch. This weirdness makes it fun to discuss.

The Evil Within is weird. It’s a heavily flawed game, but for Tango’s first project they did a pretty good job with it. It set the foundation for the sequel and future games they would make, and if it weren’t for it they probably wouldn’t be where they are now. One of the most creative studios in the marketing with highly ambitious ideas. The Evil Within is a guilty pleasure to me. Love and hate it . You’ll come out either pleased or confused by the end, and either answer is fine. I enjoyed this game for what it is and that's why I give it an 8/10.

8/10, Enjoyable