Have you seen those commercials of the people being filmed while playing this game? Players jumping left and right, screaming in fear! Judging by the trailers I knew The Evil Within was going to be a step in the right direction in restoring the once dead Survival Horror genre. In a year where I haven't had much excitement over any game this is one that I had circled on my calender. Come on, Shinji Mikami is behind it putting the game is in great hands....or is it?
The quote on quote "God Father" of horror is back. The man that brought us Resident Evil 1-3, as well as 4 (which I fell was the start of the downhill spiral for the series). Maybe I should have tamed my expectations, ya? But those early RE games has a perfect tone and setting to extract those uncomfortable feelings from your brain so I'm sure he can recapture that magic again.
The Evil Within stumbled out of the gate immediately. The awful rendering where every scene is plagued by late texture pop ups was already an annoyance, and the voice acting was horrifically bad. There wasnt any emotion from any of the 4 characters during the opening scene as a bunch of weird events unfold around them and it continued all throughout the game. Sebastian Castellanos is one of the four characters, and unfortunately is the main character. Some may be able to look past some of the technical flaws but it really broke the immersion for me. I wanted to be sucked in right off the bat and know that this game was taking the genre seriously. Ultimately neither aspect to The Evil Within was able to inject those uncomfortable feelings of horror into my mind and ended up falling way short of my high expectations.
The whole time I just had a Resident Evil 4/5 type vibe. I felt like I played this game before. A game that kinda/sorta wants to be scary, but it doesn't want to scale back the action either which makes the horror portion suffer. Some instances I could see some nice design choices to create an uneasy atmosphere, but then the game will toss you into an action sequence or throw lots of enemies your way breaking the horror aspect. Or it will put you into tedious stealth gameplay that just slows everything down too much. Forcing you to use stealth in the opening scene wasn't adding to the horror aspect, it just added frustration and set a bad tone early on. The Evil Within doesn't quite know what direction to take or what kind of game it wants to be. It WANTS to be a horror game but it just never set that tone. I think it's extremely important to establish what kind of game this is going to be from the get go, the tone I got was action-y. Quite possibly the scariest thing was unintentional when a statue on top of a rat was gliding across the floor. It tried to throw in some cheap jump scares by having things pop at you but they never worked.
I kept pushing through the flaws because I thought that I would finally get the answers to the many questions with a revealing ending but it was all for not. The game is a mystery with strange events that follows "Seb" and takes him on a nightmare roller coaster being constantly faced with death. This unlikable protagonist is accompanied by 2 other equally unlikable detectives, a strange doctor and an equally strange patient, Leslie. You are stalked by man named Ruvik who possesses super natural powers that can alter objects, he can also teleport and has total control of the surrounding environments. His goal is to capture the mentally ill patient for personal reasons. It sounds interesting but it never really goes anywhere. Some events are cleared up by text based dialog, audio recording and newspapers but it never really clears up the important details, just minor plot points. You don't really learn anything during cutscenes or through speech so by the time the game is over you are still puzzled as to how and why things happened.
This all sets up the survival horror gameplay that we all yearn for. You faces hordes of zombie like creatures using stealth, or just go guns blazing. Stealth is most likely the way to go because you only have a limited amount of supplies and scarce resources which I like. Bullets and healing items are strategically placed through the levels (although enemies do drop ammo) so it is wise to not be trigger happy. The stealth however quite slow and tedious, especially if you end up dying and have to go through it all again. 88 times my poor Sebastian was decapitated, sliced and diced, blown up, or smashed to death, so get familiar with dying. Some deaths feel cheap but it is certainly a challenging game.
To aid you, you get your typical revolver, shotgun, and a neat little crossbow that fires all sorts of elemental damage. You can find cogs/gears that can be used to make more arrows, while disarming bombs will also earn you those items as well. Each weapon has upgradeable stats that can make it more powerful, faster to reload, like basically every other game with similar gameplay. Unfortunately the main pull for this game, to me, was the horror and it failed to establish that message early on. The Silent Hills demo made me more fearful, and legitimately frightened in the opening seconds than The Evil Within did the entire 20 hour campaign. It's all about the tone you set in the very beginning, it's key.
At least the environments looked pretty good and was constantly changing. The story elements gave the developers complete control over how to design the levels and they definitely excelled at it. While they were nice to roam around in, I often felt like they exaggerated a lot too to create the illusion that this was indeed a horror game, like the one chapter with gigantic eyeballs looking at you with blood everywhere. Not one place (with exception of the Mansion ironically) made me terrified and cautious. To me it wasn't scary, just bizarre. I was more afraid of getting blown up by those annoying boobie-traps. But as I said, I did enjoy the overall design, it was nice to look at. Enemy design was also a strong point. I wasn't too impressed with the normal "zombies" that you find roaming around, but the bosses were detailed nicely. Fighting them was also a treat and required a bit of problem solving (some did at least) to make the battle easier.
The music was solid too. It desperately tried to pump in those uneasy feelings but to no avail. It wasn't omnipresent although there was always something playing in the backround. It was faint. You knew it was there but it wasn't drowning out the other noises giving you a chance to immerse yourself in the environment. Unfortunately there weren't many "other" noises that struck a cord with me. Resident Evil has the memorable Zombie moan, The Last of Us has the Clickers clicking, but nothing hear made me stop in my shoes when I heard The Evil Within's "Zombies".
My overall experience with The Evil Within could certainly be forgotten. It wasn't a bad game by any means, it just wasn't the game I thought it would be. I wanted something that could scare me out of my socks, sleep with the light on (I exaggerate of course), and just plain scare me but it never did so. With a sluggish story, laughably bad acting, poor rendering, and the inconsistent gameplay styles just added to the disappointment. There are some redeeming qualities like the sountrack, and overall design to levels and enemies, but it's not enough to pick up the slack for an overall generic game. And although I was extremely disappointed with the first 8 chapters, it started to pick up steam by chapter 9, only to lose by the end of chapter 15. I see potential, but I think they tried a little too hard to create a terrifying game.
The Outerhaven writes: While I hold Bethesda's The Evil Within series as some of the best Survival Horror games available, it's clear that Bethesda has no intention of revisiting the series. While Capcom is still working on its Resident Evil series, I look back at the now-dead survival horror series from Bethesda, wondering why the series was left wide open, and yet still not revisited.
An OK horror series left behind. It had some great ideas, but it never knew how to play to its strengths. Instead, it came out like just another RE4 clone.
I would love for a third entry to come out, but it needs to learn to lean in on the psychological aspect and move away from the generic "pew pew" ideology at the center of the gameplay loop. It doesn't need to abandon it; it just needs to put it into better context, is all.
Also, try a first-person perspective instead. Too many 3rd-person games with nothing to offer but an avatar taking precious screen space. At least make it an actual option and not that janky-ass mess the second game pretended to have.
Tango Gameworks was working on new The Evil Within content & had a 6 months old prototype of Hi-Fi Rush 2 in the works prior to closure.
...they didn't close, they changed owners. As far as i know HFR2 is still in the works.
Hifi 2 is still in development. The devs themselves said what they wanted to do with the sequel.
The Evil Within Anniversary Edition?
Good God. We were robbed.
I would imagine they would have improved the graphics and animations to bring them more in line with the second game. Wishful thinking but it would have been really cool if they redid the voice lines from the first game aswell with the same actors from the second, I felt they had more personality in the sequel. The only person I thought gave it a bit more than the others was Jennifer Carpenter as Kidman but the sequels voice actress did a great job aswell.
Microsoft is going to do f*** all with the IP and we'll never see a second Ruvik and Seb showdown.
I hope Krafton goes back and gets it after Hi-Fi Rush 2 if it was only because they didn't want the initial purchase to get complicated.
I wasn't really making a point at what game was overall better, just the voices were so flat in the first one and it would be nice if the animations and the like would be improved upon.
I really got to get around to playing the first one, I really liked the second game.
It hurts so bad knowing that there might have been new content for Evil Within..love those games
What a stupid, short sided move by Microsoft. Comparatively it would have been cheap for them to hang onto their only Japanese studio, with actually good games that people want to play. I struggle to understand how Phil Spencer is still employed. At this point it is Kathleen Kennedy levels of failure.
Well said about him being Microsoft's version of Kathleen Kennedy.
All he has been doing is to destroy Xbox and it is unbelievable he falls upwards.
The Evil Within, Ghostwire: Tokyo and Hi-Fi Rush studio has closed its doors.
Ninja theory. Others will follow as well. The smaller studios MS owns should all be worried. Maybe MS will try and release some of their games day and date on ps5 to save some of these studios.
I can see Ninja Theory. At least Tango made a game that was reviewed well. Ninja Theory spent a lot of years to release a tech demo that didn’t do well at all.
I get it that Hellblade 2 is a boring game, but I hope they are not the next to be closed.
@repssahj
Ninja Theory is likely on the chopping block too. They released Bleeding Edge which bombed, took 4 years to release Hellbalde 2 which doesn’t seem to be doing well, and still have Project Mara in limbo. They’re high on the chopping block.
MS was likely expecting their God of War / Uncharted quality game from NT based on Heavenly Sword, Enslaved, DmC, and to an extent Hellblade 1, but NT hasn’t delivered since Hellblade 1 which was 7 years ago.
3 trillion MS is worth, yet they do this, well Phil the shit bag did. No studio needed to be let go, when you are worth this much.
Sad, but I see characters and posters of either less than average or barely average games.
Have to disagree here duder, with respect. Evil Within was a good game and the sequel was fantastic, as was HiFi Rush. I'd concede Ghostwire was pretty average but regardless, shuttering a studio which just put out MS best game in donkeys years was complete shithousery on XBox' part.
Microsoft paid 8B to buy Zenimax then fired well over 1000 people from Zenimax between the time they closed the deal and they announced these shut downs.
People talk about the 1900 they fired most recently, but that was only one wave of three sets of layoffs from their gaming division so far this generation totalling around 5000 people this generation. Not counting the dozen plus studios they canned last gen including Lionhead the original Fable developers.
By every real metric HiFi was an average game. I don't see an Evil within poster in the thumb, which is a shame, because if they threw their weight behind that IP, they might have still been around.
I don't understand how you can say it was average in every metric when it garnered the reviews it did?
Very good review! Thanks for ur honest opinions =)
Compared to Alien: Isolation, this game feels like something from 2005.. yeah, RE4 basically, only worse, much worse. And not only gameplay wise but graphically too it seems to be stuck in 00's. Alien is next gen though, gfx at least
Great read
i agree with your score too
that game disappoint me greatly
the first few chapters were good to great
but after that i was forcing my self to keep playing
This game sucked in my opinion compared to something like the original Dead Space. More like a 5/10. Also, who the hell is Shigenori Mikami?
Garbage review, the whole time you were talking about what you were expecting the game to be. Nothing about what it actually is. None of Mikami's games were particularly 'scary' they just combined fun gameplay with great atmosphere through the sound and level design. I don't know why people were expecting something ridiculously scary. Its not as if the original resident evils were anything properly scary like the silent hill games or say amnesia.
I personally thought the game was great and in terms of gameplay is the best thing ive played all year. Yes, it has its technical issues which can't be excused and the graphics are inconsistent from level to level but the game is extremely fun. 8.5 for me.