A Resident Evil Fan's Take on The Evil Within

Share.

This installment of survival horror flirts with the genre’s past and its present.

By Jose Otero

As a veteran Resident Evil fan, I’ve eagerly anticipated a chance to play The Evil Within and experience it for myself. I’d seen pretty rad trailers and in-game footage, but our PAX East impressions felt like a crushing blow to the sternum that reset my expectations. The demo didn’t look scary and, admittedly, that was a problem. But scares in survival horror aren’t the only concern I had for director Shinji Mikami’s latest work. I hoped to see his response to an even larger trend with big-budget survival horror games as a whole: The genre has undergone some major changes in the last decade, one where ammo limitations and awkward controls fell to the wayside in favor of better over-the-shoulder cameras and action-oriented fare

In a lot of ways, Mikami himself was the arbiter of this approach to survival horror games. Could he re-balance the two camps and deliver a hybrid of old and new tricks? I got a chance to find out for myself when I played The Evil Within for two hours, and the answer (so far) is yes. I should be clear that I’m still cautiously optimistic for the final game. The two chapters I experienced oscillated between tense moments and awkward ones. Sometimes it reveled in gross-out horror and ambience; other times it slinked into weird cutscenes and bizarre dialogue. But honestly, none of that bothered me because I also saw a game that married ideas from survival horror’s past with its present.
The action in The Evil Within took place from an over-the-shoulder camera, but Sebastian’s animations and reactions felt deliberately slower compared to the spry Leon Kennedy of Resident Evil 4 fame. The change forced me to make serious adjustments in combat, especially when it involved enemies who often ran up with deadly, sharp objects in-hand. The eerie arm-flailing motions and reckless abandon of the A.I.-driven enemies led me to prefer a wide range shotgun to a six-shot revolver. Only decapitation by headshot or burning a downed body would put an enemy down for good, and I could carry a mere five matchsticks at a time.

I should emphasize the initial chapter I played – set in the middle of the campaign – turned ammo and matchsticks into a precious resource. Enemies dropped ammo, but only in small doses. In fact, I learned lessons the hard way when I got a little carried away and wasted all my pistol ammo in the first few minutes. Since melee attacks only bought mere moments of respite, I was inevitably flogged to death by one of the residents without hesitation. Thankfully, The Evil Within offered some alternative actions to run-and-gun tactics, like sneaky stealth kills that helped me conserve ammo where possible.
One specific encounter at end of chapter 4, subtitled Inner Recesses, put me up against a small army of enemies. I had to carefully use a mix of pre-set explosive traps and wits to lure the dim-witted bunch to their deaths. So far, A.I. in The Evil Within doesn’t rewrite the RE4 playbook, but I didn’t fight anyone nearly as coordinated as Los Ganados.
But an early tutorial video in my demo spoiled a potentially cool discovery that affects The Evil Within’s combat [Editor’s Note: turn back now or you’ll suffer the same fate]. Sure, main character Sebastian Castellanos has a handful of weapons, including one curious addition called The Agony Crossbow that fired impaling, explosive, or even electric-tipped bows into enemies, but sometimes pure firepower meant nothing. In those cases, I just had to run away and try to get away — an idea prevalent in lost of indie survival horror games today. The now infamous crawling monster with long hair that ripped its way out of a corpse and into my nightmares was one example, the other was an invincible ghost named Ruvik that stalked me throughout the second chapter of my demo.

Ruvik actually played a major role in the scare department, more so than the standard enemies I often fought. During chapter 8, subtitled The Cruelest Intentions, this fierce specter would appear randomly in a mansion and stalk Sebastian. If he got ahold of me, Ruvik would drain a large portion of health via an attack and then vanish into thin air. I honestly couldn’t anticipate when he would appear, but a Bethesda rep told me this ghost’s main gripe: Chapter 8 tasked me to explore Ruvik’s large-scale home in the middle of the creepy woods and, clearly, he wasn’t a fan of this intrusion on his haunting ground. Whenever these attacks took place, the screen took on a blue hue that signaled I needed to stay out of his reach or even hide in a closet or under a bed.
The Evil Within deployed other scare tactics besides ammo limitations and impervious apparitions that got my attention. The graphics and settings dripped with film-grain and ambient atmospheric touches. I heard giggles while standing in the middle of empty rooms, observed trippy effects that teleported Sebastian into endless hallways dripping in blood, and even witnessed anatomy statues, which were tied to in-game puzzles, that blinked as I tried to uncover their secrets. Oh, and enemies kicked open doors with a jarring slam if they sensed me on the other side. That sound mix definitely caught me off-guard a few times.

I found plenty of throwbacks to survival horror in The Evil Within, including puzzles that felt ripped from the pages of Resident Evil, but it rarely fell into predictable territory outside of some awkward character exchanges and dialogue. In most cases, you could cut the tension as I played with a knife, even though the visuals looked mildly impressive but not genuinely jaw dropping. Most importantly, the mix of old and new survival horror signaled a reason to hold onto hope for The Evil Within. But we’re not out of the woods yet, and only time will tell if this game shifts the tide for an entire genre the same way Mikami’s seminal RE4 did.

Jose Otero is an Associate Editor at IGN and host of Nintendo Voice Chat. You can follow him on Twitter.

Originally written and published by at IGN PS3. Click here to read the original story.