Resident horror aficionado Toby is unnerved by what he finds in The Evil Within -- but for all the wrong reasons.
By Toby McCasker on May 27, 2014 at 11:31 pm
First things first: at the time of writing, Bethesda popped up out of the hedges and told us out of nowhere that The Evil Within's release has been pushed back to October, "so Shinji Mikami and his team can even further balance and refine the game."
This is not a massive surprise. The preview sesh I was at was pretty suspect, consisting of an opening sequence and two E3 demos, both of which were incredibly conspicuous. Why? Because of how utterly random they were.
The first one kicked off in chapter 4, and the second barreled all the way ahead to chapter 8. Narratively, I had no absolutely no idea what was going on. When a survival-horror jaunt bills its "intricate story" as highly as its "horrifying anxiety," that feels a bit derpy. It seemed to me to be an obvious and maybe even calculated cherry-pick, and that's usually a red flag. Chuck in that recently swollen release date and you've got a klaxon going off, too.
In practice, it was easy to poke a finger through the holes that need plugging. Chapter 4 saw our guy Detective Sebastian Castellanos accompanying some bumbling doctor NPC to a rural-ish burg not wholly unlike the one in Mikami's hallowed Resident Evil 4. This is cool and intentional and there's even a gruesome throwback to that first flaming pyre scene, but some of the exact same problems that game had are present in this one, some nine years years later – chiefly, the NPCs.
The doctor guy would periodically insist on breaking any and all tension by frequently announcing something stupid in opposition to the game's attempts at eerie build-up. The Evil Within's appropriation of Silent Hillian surrealism – and, oddly, Silent Hill: The Room's relentless, unkillable nemesis who can appear at any moment – is appreciated, but only ever carried off as a very cheap, transitional plot device.
There's also an over-emphasis on puzzles that, while not exactly abstract, are annoyingly vague. Usually this involves looking and listening for hints or tips or anything god just anything that'll help you guide your scalpel/laser/whatever to the precise part of the corpse/exposed brain/whatever that needs perforating.
Chapter 8 tasks Sebastian with running a mansion gamut of bafflingly elaborate puzzles to open up a huge vault door in order to pursue his quarry (who, you'd surmise, will be long gone by the time you get that thing open one hour later). The three major puzzles all revolve around listening to an audio tape and trying to work out which part of a severed head to zap. Every time you fail to pretty much guess where you're supposed to stick your thing, you lose a good chunk of health for no conceivable reason.
It is entirely possible, therefore, that you can kick the bucket right as you're about to ace the third and final head puzzle correctly, and if you do? The generous* system kicks you right back to the start of the whole debacle. Enemies kill you instantly (and gruesomely) if they get within grabbing range, and couple this with the fact there are blazingly sudden death traps that just happen and what you've got so far straddles the border between tense and outright frustrating.
*terrible
The Evil Within has been pushed back to October 23 on PC, PS4 and Xbox One.
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