THE EVIL WITHIN (2014)
Producer: Masato Kimura
Director: Shinji Mikami
Writer: Itaru YokoyamaIn a clear dig at Capcom, Shinji Mikami announced that he wanted to return survival horror to its roots in his first game with his new studio Tango Gameworks. This was his big return to horror, a decade after Resident Evil 4, and his swansong as a director. As such, he put quite a lot into it and tried to make something new instead of rehashing Resident Evil (though he definitely ended up doing a bit of that regardless). It’s designed to be a cinematic experience, with gorgeous visuals presented in letterboxed ultrawidescreen. Unfortunately, all the ambition resulted in an incredibly messy and overlong game which feels unfinished. A few brilliant moments are surrounded by heaps of unfocused and underdeveloped filler. The way it changes setting, gameplay style, and level design style so frequently makes it feel like a string of inferior copies of genre classics which fail to cohere into a greater whole.
You play as Krimson City police detective Sebastian Castellanos, who is captured alongside two other cops when he goes to investigate a catastrophe at Beacon Mental Hospital. His brain is then hooked up to the brains of several mental patients through a machine called STEM. He is trapped in a sort of virtual world filled with manifestations of the subconscious minds of everyone he’s connected to. The story predicates that the entire game is based around an ever-changing setting — the old surreal horror trope of opening a door and finding yourself in an entirely different place, or having a headache which precedes a sudden change in surroundings. This premise could have been the basis for a wildly trippy horror game where each character hooked up to the machine has a distinct personality which manifests in clear ways. Sadly, the studio decided to go a different, less creative route, opting for a haphazardly blended mashup of several types of rather generic horror featuring many types of gameplay. Even this less creative approach could have worked well if the game had been paced accordingly, but the pacing is a complete mess.
The nature of your surroundings isn’t revealed to you until about halfway through the game, making the first half an irritating slog through a number of seemingly random environments with abrupt and disorienting transitions between them. For instance, the game begins in a horrific human butchershop filled with traps, but before long, you’re driving through a collapsing city in a ridiculous action sequence and end up in some spooky woods. One level starts in the ruins of a castle, until you find an elevator. You make your way to a church, and suddenly you’re transported to strange ruins in a cave. These ruins lead to an industrial basement, which abruptly transforms into some sort of hospital or mental asylum. The game ends up feeling like a hodgepodge of ideas which have been done better in the survival horror classics. Many elements of the game call back to Mikami’s classic Resident Evil titles, but on the whole, it feels more influenced by Silent Hill, especially given the unreality of the basic premise and the fact that Castellanos lost his daughter. There’s even a recurring safe headed butcher boss that looks suspiciously similar to Silent Hill 2’s Pyramid Head (alongside a recurring bloody 6-armed naked lady, who has the classic japanese long-haired creepy lady look).
Part of what made those classic survival horror titles (or newer, more successful entries like Resident Evil 7 or even the sequel to this game) so compelling was getting to know the spaces and having your expectations defied, but The Evil Within never manages to establish a consistent atmosphere or sense of place. As such, this game shines most when there is a larger area that you can explore at will, but these areas are few and far between, with most of the game opting for linearity. There’s an open area in chapter 3 that takes place in some old wooden farmhouses populated with enemies and gives you many tools for dealing with them, allowing you to pick between stealth and combat. It’s one of the tensest moments of the game and allows the player a great deal of creativity. Unfortunately, this is followed by a string of dull and linear setpieces, and the game doesn’t open up again until chapter 9 (more than 7 hours later), in a tribute to the original Resident Evil Mansion. Chapters 9 and 10 are the highlight of the game, and the only parts of it which inspire real scares, all thanks to a bit of extra focus. Even the sudden scene changes work after they’ve been contextualized by a larger area with a puzzle and a bit more story, making it all feel more purposeful after the extremely story-thin first half.
If the whole game had been up to this standard, it would have been quite enjoyable despite its other flaws, but it seems the developers couldn’t decide whether to make an open, player-driven experience or an on-rails ride. They were also more focused on quantity than quality — a single playthrough of the game’s 15 chapters takes about 18–20hrs, making the game quite long for the genre. It’s padded on both a small and large scale — not only do some chapters feel unnecessary altogether, but every chapter is padded with extraneous sequences. Take the game’s grand finale — as you walk up to the elevator which leads to the final encounter, you’re suddenly transported to a very cool looking arena, where you’re forced into a string of horde battles, including two lesser bosses. You’re forced to confront two safe-head bosses and navigate a series of traps before you can return to the elevator and fight the final boss after some cutscenes. There was no story reason to delay the final boss for nearly an hour, and while it did feature some excellent art design, it ended up feeling like a frustrating waste of time. Ironically, the game has a lot in common with RE6 in that regard — I thought that was the game this one was meant to kill!
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The gameplay is a bizarre mix of things, and the mechanics change almost as frequently and unexpectedly as the environments. There are stealth elements that are similar to games like The Last of Us and Outlast, which involve a lot of running away and hiding in closets, on top of sneaking up on enemies for quiet kills. There’s RE4-style over the shoulder shooting, with familiar action elements from that game including running from guys with chainsaws and taking down hordes of enemies in a contained area. Unfortunately, the combat is a slog. It’s far less compelling than that of Resident Evil 4 (or even 5), and there aren’t enough opportunities for the superior stealth approach. The game frequently forces you into arena fights, but there isn’t enough ammo unless you can find many very well concealed collectibles that give you access to more. The gameplay in the late-game collapsed city chapters is especially erratic — while these chapters feature some excellent stealth sections, they’re also stuffed with extraneous arena battles, a sequence where you shoot enemies while you’re stuck on a bus, a brief and undercooked vehicle sequence, and even a dreaded mounted gun sequence. Once again, I’m getting flashbacks to RE6.
The game is also held back by technical issues. The movement is janky and imprecise, and the camera is difficult to control. The graphics and art design may look great, but the game is held back by using the notoriously slow id tech 5 engine. The PC port isn’t well optimized at all — even after upgrading my computer, the game performed worse than any of the shinier games which followed it. The engine’s notorious texture pop-in ran rampant here, creating some very jarring blocky scenery, and the framerate was choppy to the point that it often lead to my death — there’s no excuse for this in a game this old.
The game’s inventory is heavily simplified and requires no management (a positive change imo), aside from making ammo for the Agony crossbow from parts collected around the environment. Instead, most of the complexity is saved for the skill tree, which you can level up using gel that is dropped by fallen enemies and found around the environment. The upgrades are quite necessary, as Sebastian is severely underpowered at the start — when the game begins, you can only sprint for a few seconds before your character leans over and pants for several seconds, leaving you vulnerable. There are Resident Evil-esque save rooms (Clair de Lune plays when you’re near or inside one), only instead of having a typewriter or cassette player, brightly flashing mirrors transport you to an asylum area with a nurse. You can save, upgrade your skill tree with a nasty contraption that clamps down on your head, or unlock items with hidden collectible keys in the asylum. Traversing this extra area gets old quickly, especially since you have to transport yourself back to the level after loading a save.
The game initially seems like it’s going to be very story driven and cinematic, but it ends up being very story thin for most of its duration. The story ultimately doesn’t make a lick of sense (for instance, we’re never told why this world is populated with zombielike people and what they are), and it focuses on the wrong things while introducing other backstory bits that seem like they’re leading somewhere but ultimately get ignored in this game (these form the basis for the sequel, and its story is much stronger for it). The main villain couldn’t be less scary — his strange garment makes him look like a bloodied up anime character, and he doesn’t have much to do at all through the first half of the game. It’s a shame that he becomes the story’s focal point in the second half, as the story really doesn’t need him at all and would have been scarier and more compelling without him. Nonetheless, his backstory reveal is made into the best part of the game, so I guess I can’t complain.
Thankfully, Tango Gameworks recognized the mistakes they made with this game and rectified them in the three DLCs they released. In classic Resident Evil style, the first two DLCS (‘The Assignment’ and ‘The Consequence’) follow Sebastian’s partner, detective Juli Kidman, through the events of the main game. Almost every extraneous gameplay element has been stripped out — the skill tree and inventory are gone, healing is now automatic, and combat has been almost entirely removed, replaced instead with a new (somewhat awkward) cover system and an emphasis on stealth. They made the wise decision to not give Kidman a weapon. This makes for a much more focused experience — rather than attempt to better embody the original’s potential for trippiness or expand on its best levels (the open areas that featured a lot of player choice), it does one thing and does it well. There are still occasional detours, like a shooting gallery sequence when Kidman is pinned down, but for the most part, this has the polish that the main game lacked. Even the movement feels a whole lot less clunky than it did in the main game (though I’m perplexed as to why a cop is wearing stilettos — it’s basically a cheap device to make her movement incredibly loud). It’s also a lot more story heavy than the main game — oddly enough, Kidman is a lot more important to this story than Castellanos, and more of the backstory is revealed across these 4 chapters (~5hrs) than in the entirely of the main game. Many areas are reprised from the main title, and yet this time around, we’re told why they exist and how they’re tied into Kidman’s or the villain’s psyches, providing the context to prevent the scene changes from feeling random. Beating these DLCs unlocks a mode where you can play them in complete darkness, forcing you to rely on your flashlight.
The third and final DLC, ‘The Executioner’, is rather different — you play as the Keeper (the safe head boss) in first person, sequentially executing many of the major characters and bosses from the main game. This is a more straightforward affair, focused on smashing heads with a hammer, but it makes combat much more fun than it was in the main game. There’s a new skill system here, allowing you to buy extra weapons and upgrade your weapons and stats. Unfortunately, it’s also plagued with more technical problems, including increased texture pop-in and missing ambient audio during one fight. The story humanizes the keeper, putting him on a search for his missing daughter. As in the main game and DLCs, beating it unlocks a New Game+ mode, this time with extra stages, weapons, and upgrades.
RATINGS:
Main Game: 5/10 — Flashes of brilliance, but Mikami missed the mark.
DLC: 7/10 — The best horror I’ve played in this review series since RE0!
[Originally posted on 2/21/18]
