K-SCORE: 12
Publisher: Bethesda
Developer: Tango Gameworks
“Why does Sebastian get tired of running after only three seconds and then have to stop to pant with his hands on his knees even if he knows a four-armed black-haired freak is coming to pound his face into the floor?”
Director: Shinji Mikami
Designer: Shigenori Nishikawa
Writer: Itaru Yokoyama
Spoiler Level: Major, but the story is nonsense so who cares.
The creator of the Resident Evil franchise, Shinji Mikami, got fed up with Capcom’s decade of bad policy and stagnant development, teamed up with Bethesda, founded his own studio and boldly released a new IP in the survival horror genre with the newfound freedom to make whatever game he wanted. So he made Resident Evil 4 again, only worse. The Evil Within is a flashy hunk of horror garbage, a blight on the genre, a pathetic excuse for modern game development, and a random splattering of cliches and story nonsense.
I played Resident Evil 4 for the first time long after it was released, so was fairly forgiving of some of its more archaic game elements. The fact that so many of these have carried over into The Evil Within is now inexcusable. If I’m playing a story-driven, linear, survival horror game, where backtracking is so discouraged that shattered wooden debris, collapsed buildings, convenient ledges that can only be traversed one way, gates that unlock only on the first side you encounter, and pink-fleshy obstructions prevent any kind of non-forward progress, do I really want a game that also encourages me to scour every corner and break every crate for the random chance of having rare ammo drops? Absolutely not. The survival aspect of the gameplay mismatches the horror entirely. Because ammo is so rare, enemies so numerous, and everything moves so slowly, it’s best to tiptoe your way through The Evil Within’s dimly lit environments, only allowing yourself to proceed if you’ve flawlessly stealth-killed a section or headshotted each plodding zombie, which is not scary. You should be running for your life, shocked when enemies jump out at you, encouraged to blaze by the interestingly rendered zones as you just want to find an exit to the monstrosities that inexplicably want to kill you. Instead though you’re forced to crouch to disarm bombs that start hard to disarm and become fucking impossible to disarm, knife erratically moving zombies in the brain unless they turn to face you for no reason at the last second, and study enemy patrols like you’re in Commandos with ten times the amount of randomness and a far less tactical camera angle. I frequently could have continued forward with the game but didn’t because I’d missed one or two shots and I didn’t know if I’d need all five of my sniper bullets for the next boss so couldn’t abide the resource loss. A horror game like this is bogged down by constant reloading and made less scary when you have to be this meticulous with how you proceed.
Let me ask: why do a random five percent of these tentacled brainy monstrosities have a few shotgun shells inside their bodies? Why do all corpses evaporate after a few seconds? Why does a single dropped match instantly kill entire packs of enemies if and only if one of them was lying on the ground when you struck it? Why are these matches a thousand percent more damaging than Sebastian Castellanos’s revolver? Why can Sebastian only punch like a lumbering ogre, all shoulder, with all his might, and no direction? Why are there so many cardboard crates littered about this dystopian nightmarescape of Krimson City? Why does Sebastian have to shoot birds to get more ammunition? Shouldn’t shooting harmless animals be a waste of ammunition? Why does Sebastian have extremely limited ammunition with all his guns but the zombies that get to carry guns have unlimited ammunition? Why don’t enemies that actually use the same weapons you have drop ammunition for those weapons when you kill them? Why do hatchets break after you swing them into one zombie? Why does Sebastian have to zoom into an over-the-shoulder, terrible camera angle, forced reticle sway aiming mechanic whenever he wants to shoot something but the zombies with guns autotarget him with flawless accuracy and fire at greater rates? Why can Sebastian only run straight ahead or turn slowly like a car? Shouldn’t stepping to the side be possible? Why does Sebastian get tired of running after only three seconds and then have to stop to pant with his hands on his knees even if he knows a four-armed black-haired freak is coming to pound his face into the floor? Why does Sebastian spend the game picking up “personal documents” and newspaper articles that give the backstory on himself, people he knows, and old cases he was intimately familiar with? Doesn’t he already have that information in his own memory banks? Why can he fight the zombies forever without ever eating food or drinking water, jog through the entire game, and get shot, bitten, chopped with an axe, electrocuted, burned, stabbed, inhale noxious fumes, blown up by bombs he failed to disarm, get his feet trapped in bear traps, fall from great distances only to land on hard surfaces, and have his ankles sliced by Roomba robots from hell only to recover all his health when he stabs himself in the shoulder with “medicine?” Many of these problems are standard gameplay nonsense. The problem in The Evil Within is at times it's fully committed to its realism of you playing an underpowered, regular ol’ city detective. So that they added a mechanic that you can’t sprint anymore if you’re really low on life because you're too injured makes me go, "okay, realistic, but what about adrenaline?" What about jumping? What about hiding? And these choices aren’t fun. It just makes everything more excruciating as you struggle with the game’s pathetic controls.
“Sebastian Castellanos plays like mannequin with his joints glued together being pushed around by a gorilla on psilocybin mushrooms”
Sebastian Castellanos plays like mannequin with his joints glued together being pushed around by a gorilla on psilocybin mushrooms. The aiming reticle sways so much without any input of the controller that you can’t line up headshots even on zombies that are two feet from you and not moving. Even if you have it lined up, the bullet spread is high enough that you’ll miss half of all shots regardless of your skill. Getting the camera to successfully look up, down, behind you, or around corners is a huge chore because the game thinks it’s smarter than you are and knows where you really want to look. It’s not. I didn’t want my field of view to be 70% wall and 30% the back of Sebastian’s head. The damage on the guns is completely inadequate for dealing with enemies making the best strategy running away, only the game prevents that possibility in most encounters, forcing you to kill things by praying for critical strikes. What gets consumed by explosions and fires is inconsistent, which wouldn’t be a huge problem if your shotgun and electric-bolt firing crossbow could actually kill things instead of just knocking them down. And you have no feedback as to how well you’re doing at making the enemies closer to really dead because they have no health bars. There isn’t even a way for you to tell if the corpses you find lying on the ground are actually corpses not worth spending your resources double-tapping or whether they’re going to stand up and murder you the second you start to turn that crank. The only way to know is to have played the section before and reload. Reloading takes a long time and forces you to re-endure most cutscenes, which are unskippable. True cutscenes are, but a solid quarter of the game features a stumbling Sebastian staring dumbly at enemies emerging to kill him, during which time you can’t move, reload, or shoot.
The Evil Within is also jam-packed with quick-time events that make you mash buttons like a lunatic even though I thought the gaming community collectively decided five years ago that they never want to tear the skin off their thumbs pounding X ever again. Did we not agree on that? It throws in chase sequences which would be perfectly manageable if you were granted the line of sight that Sebastian, your character, has, but instead they make things three times as awkward by flipping the camera around, not giving you the ability to look at what you’re running, and giving you a wonky angled shot of the horrifying miscreation of man and beast that is chasing you and will instantly kill you when you stumble on that slightly darker patch of ground. In a game like Dark Souls, your character is really underpowered and the challenges that he or she has to overcome are enormous because of that, but at no point when playing that game did I say to myself, “I would be better at this.” I said that constantly when playing The Evil Within. Having never fired a real gun in my life, having never had to fight for my own survival, I’m positive I’d have been better at getting through the events of The Evil Within than this idiot cop.
Even if it were just old gameplay with new and original content it would be bad, but the content is neither new nor original. The weapons you utilize and then unlock for future playthroughs are all exactly the same as the Resident Evil series too. You start by getting the pistol, then the shotgun, then the sniper rifle, then the magnum. You unlock the machine gun and rocket launcher for later runs of the game, just like RE 4 and RE 5. The zombies you fight and the boss designs are all nearly identical to what you’ll find in the Resident Evil series, right down to the tentacles shooting out the tops of the heads of a random ten percent of them. I’ve seen crawling demon girls before. I’ve seen chainsaw-wielding brutes before. I’ve seen malformed dog beasts before. Hell, an average of two and a half times a year I play a game with a psychopath wearing some kind of box on his head. Was Shinji Mikami just completely out of ideas?
“ In a story with fifteen chapters, the hero wakes up / regains consciousness no fewer than forty times.”
The story is a rare combination of being both completely littered with clichés and utterly nonsensical. Sebastian is a police detective who fell in love with a former partner, had a daughter with her, lost the child to a house fire, and then lost the wife under mysterious circumstances after the fire ruined everything. Now he fights to save his new cop partner and doesn’t trust this girl who wants him to do things “by the books” and doesn’t know that “sometimes you have to bend the rules to get things done.” Not that any of that has any bearing whatsoever on what you’re actually facing. You exist inside a nightmarish alternate reality of the real Krimson City built as a simulation where people can be jacked into it exactly in the manner of The Matrix (tube into the back of the head) only with no discernable purpose. The brain of a guy named Ruvik powers the whole thing and within this nightmare, Ruvik can teleport anywhere, teleport you anywhere, and do anything, wants to kill you, and doesn’t. His backstory is that he was a genius scientist child who was in yet another fire with his sister Laura that deeply traumatized him. He created research to probe people’s brains to link their minds and killed most of his subjects. Then another scientist, Dr. Jimenez, betrayed him, stole his research, and made this alternate reality where everything is bloody and psychotic for no reason at all. There is no connection between the Krimson City police officers that somehow get jacked into Ruvik’s mental hell and Dr. Jimenez, the Victoriano family, or Ruvik himself. There is no explanation for why the city inside the nightmare is falling to pieces. There is no explanation for why this place is primarily populated by zombies. Despite showing endless signs of being mentally unwell, neither Joseph nor Sebastian ever actually turn into zombies. There is also a rambling nutcase character that’s a boy despite looking like a girl, sounding like a girl, and having the name Leslie, who is said to be super important but never reveals anything important or does anything significant. In a story with fifteen chapters, the hero wakes up / regains consciousness no fewer than forty times. Never does he exhibit a desire to find out where he is or what’s going on. When he meets up with his old partners within the simulation / nightmare / demon-infested unreality, they don’t have any conversations about the insanity they’ve suddenly been forced to endure, nor do they ever discuss where they want to go or what they want to do next to try to escape or survive. Despite this, they have a commitment to pressing forward along the only possible path available to them, usually diving down, deeper into a sewer, mental hospital basement, or old factory where everything is dark, trapped, and horrific, only to be teleported out again.
From a technical standpoint, the game is mediocre. Most textures look good and the character models are impressive. The PS4’s hardware renders designs that look far better than anything from previous generation consoles’ survival horror games. But the way textures meet is weird. The ground will look good for example, and a building will look good, but the building won’t look good situated on that ground. The lighting is dynamic most of the time, but sometimes just shifts and jitters in ways that ruin immersion. Of course the game gifted you with a lantern instead of a flashlight and set most places in near total darkness, so the real problem with the lighting is a gameplay one. You can’t see shit. My favorite loadscreen tip is, “Using your lantern will alert nearby enemies to your presence.” Yeah, but not using it will cause you to walk around in complete darkness until you accidentally set off an acid trap that melts all the flesh off your bones, so I’m going to use it.
I also ran into a number of glitches, one being my least-favorite kind of glitch: the glitched trophy. One trophy tasked me to kill five enemies with each different crossbow bolt. The trophy description is confusing because two of the crossbow bolts are nonlethal, and one is obviously designed to be combined with other attacks, but it doesn’t matter because I killed hundreds of guys with each bolt trying to get it to unlock and it wouldn’t. Other players appear to have only found success when they’ve purchased the downloadable content which gives more bolt options, which I am definitely not going to do. Other glitches I found: one Ruvik clone enemy decided after one particular reloaded checkpoint to climb on a bed and spin in circles for all eternity, the crossbow bolt trajectory line periodically disappeared, zombies had a really hard time climbing and falling down ledges to get to my level, sometimes just getting stuck running into the wall and sometimes clipping into the textures and zooming automatically up or down, and once the never-explained Nurse Tatiana character loaded incorrectly such that her skirt didn’t appear, demonstrating that her legs aren’t connected to her body and she has no pelvis or ass but can still walk down the hallway of the mental hospital at her usual agonizingly slow pace.
The Evil Within is good at only one thing and that’s being very occasionally creepy. Otherwise it’s the product of lazy, uncreative, or untalented game developers, and absolutely not worth your time. Getting through its short story is an unrewarding slog, constantly frustrating, and never fun. The only evil is within its outdated and broken gameplay. Despite the fact that the story has bloodthirsty monsters and deadly locales, if forced to relive it, I’d rather just kick Sebastian Castellanos in the teeth, take his popcap pistol and saltrock shotgun and say, “I’ll do this myself.” At least I can aim and jump.