The Evil Within
The Evil Within. The EVIL Within. THE EVIL WITHIN.
The Evil Within is a survival horror game, that was directed by Shinji Mikami , who most notably worked on Resident Evil 1-4. Released in 2014, by mikami's fledgling studio Tango Gameworks, to mostly positive reviews. Released in the shadow of Alien Isolation, The Evil within still managed to carve out it's own identity and attract a huge following of die hard horror fans who to this day in 2023 continue to sing it's praises.
Now in 2014 I played Alien Isolation. I loved it. But on release of Evil within, I struggled to see what the hype was. At the time I was a Resident Evil 4 hater, and this game felt very much like resident evil 4 to me. But I knew I hadn't given it a fair shake. I couldn't have, everyone was telling me bro, it's not resident evil 4 trust me bro It's not resident evil 4. So I Gave it a shot. A fair shot. I played the whole game front to back and took it in. So lets get to the point and the reason why we are here.
My review of the evil within.
The Voice Acting
I want to start in an area in which I feel the game lacks the most. Which is unfortunately the voice acting. It feels like most of the actors completely phoned it in. Which is really unfortunate because overall I find the words to be compelling but the delivery will often make you confused or laugh. Which I mean does not feel like the intended direction of the game. The voice acting for me lowered this game from what could have been a horror monolith, to something far campier. Basically The Room Within. Now this is not to say All the voice acting is weak.
Ruvik
I found the vast majority of ruviks voice work to be wholly compelling and honestly quite foreboding. The way he sounds they way he talk the words he use, it is all ominous. You can hear his conviction to his goals with every word that falls from his mouth. He is obviously the star of this show for me.
Dr Jimenez was hit and miss. Some of his lines were delivered exactly how I would expect someone in this situation to sound. Other times, it felt like we were not experiencing the same horrifying shit. the closer you get to the end of the game, the better he gets however. As the story develops so too does his demeanor. And they really delivered on him as more is revealed about his character.
Sebastians partner Joesph, was honestly a shining light through the game. The things he said was usually goofy as hell, but the delivery was always played straight and I loved hearing him talk . Most of the time.
[has it been hard for you to move lately repeated]
plus Look at this guy, he is fresh as all hell. He wears this fit way better than Sebastian.
Immersion
I love to immerse myself in the games and worlds I play in . But for a while I really found myself struggling in the first half of the game. The voice acting and cut scenes really do a number on the game, and unfortunately. For example When you visit the doctors friends house is a perfect example of how bad the immersion breaking is marred by the VA and cutscenes. You enter this dilapidated house and all you hear is mumbling and squishing as you enter. It really puts you on the back foot. This is supposed to be the home of a potential ally. You move through the first floor and eventually see the doctors silhouette hovering over a corpse very grimly as he mumbles nonsense to himself. 10/10 I am here for this. The first cut scene plays, then the fight, is tough the room is tight and you start out with him right on top of you. The intensity is palpable. You beat him then the second cutscene plays. And it really took the wind out of the sails. Instead of being tense they chose to make it just almost unbearably strange. It felt like they were trying to just make you cringe instead of literally anything else. It really just took me out of the game. Many moments are really just taken down a peg or two from the cut scenes. After facing this boss in what was a pretty intense little fast paced fight. What the fuck Joseph? You the see the boss is still up an at em. And yet all you care about is your glasses. The way the lost glasses are dealt with just makes the second phase of the fight just feel goofy. And when you finish the fight Joseph has some really bizarre things to say about not having his glasses that really just make it feel like getting those glasses was just a real waste of time. While I need glasses myself, If I'd lost my glasses because a giant beast managed to knock them off my face, I no longer have glasses and we should leave. But what should have been an excellent cap to the chapter is just goofed on because Velma not only can't see without her glasses but needs them to feel “Normal”
ok joseph whatever.
These criticisms aside things really start to pick up in the second half. Which happens right after you recover josephs stupid normal glasses. The environments get more claustrophobic and the lighting is turned way down. The cut scenes in this half of the game really move towards making the game great. From dank caves to a sprawling tight mansion sprinkle in some underground catacombs and you have a recipe for greatness. The threat levels feel significantly higher in these areas, and the enemies make sure you feel it. It's oppressive and I love it. There is one particular moment I want to highlight. You find your way into these trap laden catacombs with honestly some of the scariest enemies the game has thrown at you so far. And then the game is like hey, you like traps? We like traps. Use those traps on the enemies. [quick cuts of dropping traps on enemies to bfg10k] and It's like oh fuck this is awesome. The enemies are still a clear threat, accentuated by low resources you have and will find in this area. Following this is My favorite boss fight off the game, the guy who I am dubbing Mills. Every time you kill him he just gets back up but in a different location and the only way to kill him is to escape the room. And his death is gorey and fun. The fight itself though is fan fucking tastic
The game thrives when no one is talking and you are left alone. But when the game has something to say, it does so with it's mouth full of popeyes biscuits, and it refuses to take a sip of it's drink The potential was really there to make this game absolutely legendary, but they just HAD to let all the goofy seep in. But this game feels like it's taking itself very seriously. It wants you to take in the world and feel the weight of it's plot but every now and then the main character gets hit in the face with a frying pan to looney tunes sound effects. It can often make it very hard to immerse yourself in it's world because of this
Anyway. Moving on
The Game play and Mechanics
ok, so fair warning, I'm going to do a good bit of gushing here. The actual game play is genuinely excellent. The gun play feels and looks very visceral and brutal. There isn't a lot of variety in the weapons you get, but what is there feels focused and important. More-so than in any horror game I've played did I feel I needed to swap weapons. For example, dead space, I can and will only use the plasma cutter(footage of absolute mayhem with the plasma cutter to the tune of the Super Gore Nest). The pistol is effective when enemies can move at you in one direction, but if you are in a pinch you might not be able to get a critical with a head shot because of weapon sway. So if you have multiple enemies coming in fast, It's shotgun time baybeeeee. If the crowd is dense the Agony cross bow with explosive bolts will deal heavy damage to all enemies within range while knocking down what it doesn't kill, giving you much needed breathing room. While we are here, we might as well talk about the Agony Crossbow. There is not a more useful weapon in this game than the damn crossbow. It has 7 different ammo types all of which do different shit. You got the standard harpoon that can pin standard enemies to shit. And is the best weapon for ranged stealth kills. When it's fully upgraded it can catch enemies ablaze which is particularly effective against almost everything. The explosive bolt is excellent for some serious crowd control and tends to destroy whatever basic enemy it was attached to. It can also stop charging bosses and stagger them. The caveat is that if it explodes near you, you are taking some of that damage too. The flash bolt is great for crowd control as well but deals no damage. It affects all basic enemies to an extreme degree and is great if you really need to get away. The Freeze bolt is honestly one of my favorite utilities, against the laura reborn it can be used to straight up stop her while you toast her ass with flame traps. On basic enemies you can freeze em then make em crumble with melee or other weapons. Its really effective on faster enemies who are dodging all your attacks. The shock bolt is great for stunning and knocking down enemies. When they are knocked you can drop a match on em killing em instantly. The damage they deal is minimal but their usefulness is more to focus of them. Hit a small crowd with one and you can take em all down with a single match. 10/10 There are two more bolts which I won't be covering as I never used em, the Poison and incendiary bolts. So all that said, the weapons all serve their purpose and they serve them well. It's more like DOOM in the way the weapons are implemented, Not all guns are solutions to the situation, but one of them is guaranteed to be the solution.
Now I found the movement to be a little cumbersome. At times it felt too loose. There were times when i'd be looking over an edge and just turning around from the edge I'd just fall off. I often got stuck to stuff in combat and sebastian was so stiff that I would have to stand my ground and hope I wouldn't die in that tiny corner I was stuck in.
The stealth is a lot of fun, and really helps you conserve resources in many situations so long as you are paying attention. Even when I had the ammo to clear a room and then some I would often just try to stealth kill everything. It feels satisfying and very brutal. As an added bonus whatever you stealth kill stays dead. None of that pretending to be dead bullshit.
Oh yeah, enemies pretend to be dead. You fill an enemy with some lead and it falls over and you are like oh yeah got him. Walk past him to handle your business and suddenly he's breathing down your neck. And that's where your matches come in. all corpses can be burned guaranteeing the absolute death of an enemy, but not all corpses are pretending to be corpses. So you if you burn every corpse in your path you will run out of matches very quickly and very often. Burning corpses can also be used as a weapon. If you are standing over one and bait an enemy to walk over to you you can drop a match catching the enemy on fire with the corpse resulting in an instant kill in most cases. This can also be employed against most bosses dealing serious damage or outright killing them.
The way the world works and the tools that are given to you honestly make it fun to play from start to finish. A lot of thought went into how the game plays and it really shows. This is what got me through the first 6 chapters. It really pulls it's weight and then some.
Now Let's move on to what I consider the most divisive part of the game itself.
The Story
What can I say but Wow?
Actually I can say a lot.
The Evil Within's story is complicated. Not complicated in that it's detailed and very detailed, because it isn't really all there. Very little is explained directly which normally I appreciate, but I am still very confused about the events of the game.
So the game follows to actions of detective Sebastian Castellanos who was sent , along with his partner Joseph Oda and rookie cop trainee, Julli Kidman, to investigate multiple murders at Beacon Mental Hospital. When they arrive all hell breaks loose. The main antagonist Ruvik is introduced right in the beginning however absolutely nothing is known about him. Eventually they escape the nightmare hospital and as they do the whole city is coming apart al a inception ( footage of the city being a particularly spicy bitch.) You spend most of the game trying to figure out both what the fuck just happened and what the fuck is going on. And honestly you really don't get any real answers till like chapter 8. When you leave the hospital you ride in an ambulance with joseph and juli and the new characters Dr jiminez and Leslie are introduced. Dr Jimiez is introduced as this feeble man and honestly his performance and voice acting is representative of that up to a certain point where he has a huge personality shift. It really felt like the writers didn't really know what to do with him till about halfway through the game. Which is a shame because dr Jiminez in the latter half is phenomenal. So you spend most of the game just trying to escape these nightmare creatures and people. Nothing makes sense. But you just are trying to escape. Eventually a little over halfway through the game you are in Ruviks childhood home and you learn his real name is Plot twist, Ruben. But you also learn that his parents made huge donations to the hospital and bought up a shit ton of land making the town residents really fucking pissed. And Ruvik is basically a genius.
Those angery villagers burn down a barn that Ruvik and his sister was playing in. One of the dudes is like. This inadvertently set the games story in motion. Ruviks sister dies. Maybe? He says something about how shes not dead in some notes but maybe he's just crazy. So after this his parents think he's dead? I think? It's literally never confirmed completely. There is a note you find from his mother where she laments her children and she's like oh they are gone wah but I still hear ruvik sometimes like in the basement or some dumb shit but I'm too chicken to go verify that. This is immediately followed by a small cinematic moment where ruvik guts his parents in their room talking some dumb shit. So while he is living in the basement Dr. Jimenez is exploiting his intelligence to work on this experiment which I'm assuming at this point is the cause to all of this shit.
Not much noteworthy really happens till the end of the game. I want to note however, often times when you find a mirror to take you to the other hospital you find these little notes about sebastian where you learn about him. He fell in love with his partner Myra, they had a kid and she died in a fire maybe. Sebastian starts drinking on the job and myra thinks she was kidnapped or some shit, she goes crazy trying to figure it out. One day she disappears and everyone blames sebsation for her disappearance and he's pretty much like bro, I don't know where my wife is, I miss her. And unless you play the DLC, which I didn't and won't, you never see her.
So farther down you are back at the hospital and you learn Ruvik got locked in his machine by some wealthy investors and Dr Jiminez , who at this point was killed in a very unceremonious way, which is always my favorite way to kill off an important character. Eventually you fight Ruvik but he's become this giant monster, you kill him, in a very resident evil fashion, a rocket launcher you just found hanging around. You wake up in the machine and unplug yourself and find ruviks brain in a scifi jar and smash it. Then, get this, YOU WAKE UP AGAIN. In the machine but this time kidman is there and she's like sh bro be quiet or you are gonna die. You pass out and then wake up later and leave the hospital. As you leave you see leslie escape way up ahead, It was implied that ruvik is now in leslie. And then ROLL credits.
I had a lot of trouble grappling with the story even up to the end. I had and still have a lot of questions which I guess is a good thing. My biggest issue is as stated earlier the first half of the game where everything is just fucking goofy and nothing is explained.
This is where the game in my opinion struggled the most. Now I'm not saying I need my story spoon fed to me. I can infer whats going on pretty well most times, but So much was left out in most places I spent most of the game asking, what the fuck? Like give me some crumbs damn.
Conclusion
So in conclusion. It's fine. The game play and mechanics really carry the weight of the game. The level design, which I had not mentioned before this point, is superb. The game itself is a lot of fun to play. But if you are looking for a story this ain't it chief. The Evil within struggles in all narrative aspects. The voice acting is often really bad and the story is about as satisfying as the air in a thrown together submarine that is diving down to visit the Titanic.
So the big question.
Should you play this game?
Yeah I think you should, It's fun,
so I guess I should give the game some scores.
So with Game play I give it an 8 out of 10. It's a lot of fun but could be better
Story I'm gonna give it a 4/10 I'm not gonna explain why again you were just here watching the video you know why
Immersion 6/10 Because after chapter 6 the game feels so good.
And as a bonus
horror Score. I'm gonna give it a solid 7/10 There were times where the game really got me. Whether it be the atmosphere or jump scares. It was good. Not nightmare fuel, but spooky in the moment.
Welcome to the end of my review of The Evil Within, I hope you enjoyed yourself as much as I did.
So with that I bid you farewell.
Slosh out.
Comments