The first The Evil Within entry is a survival horror game from Shinji Mikami, the mind behind the Resident Evil series, and it clearly reflects his signature style of tense, atmospheric horror. The MC is a detective called Sebastian Castellanos, who is drawn into a twisted, nightmarish world after investigating a gruesome mass murder. The game excels at creating a constant sense of dread, with dark, claustrophobic environments, grotesque enemies, and sudden, shocking encounters that keep players on edge.

Combat is deliberate and punishing, ammunition is scarce, enemies are relentless, and even routine encounters can become deadly if approached carelessly. This game is really hardcore when it comes to it's survival horror elements, way above the average game of the same genre, so be careful when you choose the difficulty level to experience this. Stealth is often more effective, and a must on hard mode, than brute force, emphasizing the vulnerability of the protagonist and heightening the tension.

The narrative is surreal and fragmented, blending psychological horror with disturbing imagery, which can be intriguing but also occasionally confusing. The game succeeds at delivering a genuinely frightening experience, its monster designs are grotesque and memorable, the sound design is unsettling, and the atmosphere is consistently oppressive. For fans of survival horror who appreciate suspense, resource management, and disturbing visuals, this title provides an immersive experience that sticks with you long after the credits roll, it is truly a must-play for this genre.

Alright, so I just finished the main game (haven't completed the DLC yet).

This has been repeated again and again, but anyone knew now that the game is in many aspect, a RE4 clone. From the weapon systems, the enemies (the design, the movement and action, the animation,...), the settings (rural mountain, church, institution,... except the urban setting though, that was not in RE4),... almost everything is a heavy resemblance of RE4, a game from nearly 10 years ago... and they managed to make it not as fun, at least gameplay wise.

But the most irritable aspect of the game is the storytelling. Gosh, the events in this game and how they are depicted are going to drive not only Detective Castellanos insane, but the player as well. The protagonist is teleported from one place to another at the start of every segment, without any explanation at all. I don't know if the developers' intentions are to confuse the heck outta the player, but they sure did their job here. And now and again, the protagonist experiences ridiculous and meaningless hallucinations of unknown origins, which does not contribute anything to make a complete story at all. Furthermore, the events in the game are not explained even when the player reach the end point: Is the world real? Why are people infected and turned zombie-like? What were those "episodes" Seb and Joseph suffering from? Add to that are characters with unknown origins and motives, especially the main bad guy. Why did he commence his research in the first place? What is the end goal? Why does he do the things he did?? These questions can also be asked for the majority of characters depicted. I walk away from the utterly confused and unsatisfied. Maybe, just maybe, everything will be explained in the sequel. Even then, that is still bad storytelling.

Oh, and finally, don't even get me started on that final boss fight. What ridiculous stuff.

The Evil Within started really strong, the game play was a fun melding of The Last of Us and Resident Evil 4, stealth, survival, and action all mixed together.

The game set up was confusing, but impressive looking, and mixes in some really frightening moments.

Then about halfway through the game things started to drag.

Instant Death

Throughout the game, there are many challenges, be they bosses, traps, or puzzle, that will automatically kill you if you pick the wrong one. Often the game is aware how challenging or arbitrary these moments are, by putting a check point right beforehand; however, that didn't make the literal hour + I would spend stuck on one segment less frustrating.

Some of these instant death effects are from moments where you literally are guessing between which 3 doors to choose, the randomness of the death and unknown factor creates some great tension, and it isn't time consuming to re-do the segment.

Others could involve fleeing from an nearly unkillable monster, and getting nearly past it, only to die. The moment I nearly quit the game involved moving from platform to platform, while trying to distract killer fish-things in the water. This segment could have been fun and challenging, but instead it was just infuriating because of how janky the controls could be. When I would throw something to distract the fish, for some unfathomable reason my character takes a step forward, sometimes stumbling off platform safety and getting eaten. Other times I would swim to try to get onto a car, and click X to climb, only the have my character stop, pause, think, and then get eaten.

Moments like this are unfortunately common in the second half, with me winding through a maze of enemies to get the perfect stealth kill, only to have the option not pop up, and the creature see me, or throw a match, only to have said match fail, and then I get killed.

Each of these moments are created by structural choices in the game, I think it is ok for some instant death effects, particularly in a horror game, but in the second half of the game they are EVERYWHERE.

Mood

The game managed to do some really unique things with storytelling and general vibes of the environment. Throughout the game you are navigating a constantly shifting reality, which was cool, and different.

There are a number of segments that were legitimately bizarre and chilling, such as having to probe brains with needles.

Music is used to great effect to the game, with save/safe points always emitting the same tune, every time I hear that song I would get excited and immediately start searching deeper.

Many of the creatures in the game take advantage of this amazing tone to be truly horrifying the first time you meet them. My favorite was the screaming crawler/spider woman, hair flailing everywhere, she was amazing.

The environments and tone of the game is phenomenal.

Story/Characters

Like most horror games, the characters here are relatively flat and standard. Cop with troubled past, partner who gets in trouble, odd young kid, deranged doctors, ect. Nothing really memorable

The story is a bit of a hot mess, I perpetually wondered if what I was experiencing was a character entering madness, and their perception of reality was the game. Or perhaps by the end everything would click to together and I would go AH! Not so much.

It felt like the story was more a vehicle to create creepy environments and shifting places to visit. It's fine, but perhaps then do less cut scenes.

Overall

I almost quit this game several times. I am glad I beat it, if only because now I will no longer wonder what if. But I do not think the time spent on it was quite worth it.

At its core, there is a decent game here, but the controls, creatures, and moments could use some polish so that my gaming flow didn't keep getting broken up with instant deaths.

If you really, really love survival horror, might be worth giving a try, but for most, I would say better avoided.

The Evil Within freaking rules. Shinji Mikami's unique tone and approach to game design is 110% "my shit". It's horror that goes all the way. It's wildly creative, freaky as hell, often hilarious, and most importantly, always fun to play. So many horror games miss the mark in that key department. The thing about Mikami's games is that they always give you the necessary tools to destroy the things that torments you, so the game becomes about making sure you enough resources to make that happen.

This game feels a lot like the spiritual successor to Resident Evil 4. More so than RE5, even. It's a lengthy thrill ride of a survival-horror game that takes you down a winding, unraveling road into the the depths of a deeply disturbed psyche. The gunplay, exploration and puzzle solving are all air-tight. It reaches in a ton of different stylistic directions, like a fever dream born out of staying up too late, eating junk food and watching horror movies. The art direction is just bonkers. Where most developers would have trimmed down the concept of the game, The Evil Within's greatest asset is its wild ambition. It's like they had a hundred good ideas and just decided to do them all because WHY THE HELL NOT.

The game is essentially unpredictable because it operates on nightmare logic, where a doorway in a dank catacomb might lead to the rooftop of a sky scraper in a destroyed city, and where the player never feels like they are truly safe from the cavalcade of freaks pursuing them, some of which are the most memorable the genre has ever seen. Thinking about certain moments of this game gives me chills to this day, and it's one I have to return to every so often to revisit. One of the first masterpieces of the 8th Generation.

The Evil Within had a lot of potential and for the first quarter of the game I had a lot of fun. The scares were plenty and the survival aspect was done very well. However, the game quickly loses these aspects and develops a new personality but not a great one. I personally am not a fan of using gore as a means for scaring the audience and Evil Within is guilty of doing so. The main monsters range from 'zombies' to a giant dog straight out of a cartoon and while designed nicely they don't cause much fright. Once again the first quarter of the game has great environments that really set the tone for the player but are bogged down by an overload of enemies that quickly become bothersome. These combined with sloppy game play that slowly becomes repetitive quickly kills any enthusiasm for players.

The story of Evil Within could have been so much more than it was. The sloppy voice acting, which is usually typical of survival horror, and boring protagonist, antagonist, and supporting characters left a lot to be desired. A lot of elements were missing and the collectibles dabbed into more of a history but wasn't touched on in the main story which left empty because of this. After 15 hours of game play I realize that the story could have cut out about 3-4 hours and would have been better. It reminds me of writing papers in school where you force yourself to write more and more junk in order to fill the minimum page requirement and once that is met you wrap up the paper without really touching on key elements.

The game play is probably the worst part of the experience as the player is constantly fighting one kill monsters with unforgiving checkpoints. It seemed that you would get close to killing a boss and a cheap glitch ends the battle and the player is forced to start all the way over. There are common enemies who can kill you in one hit which after defeating a couple rooms of enemies then getting killed right away WITHOUT a checkpoint causes a lot of frustration.

I found myself forcing myself to continue on in this game hoping for more, but at the end I didn't care much at all and was just happy to be done. The rewarding part wasn't that I beat the game, but that I wasn't going to have to play it anymore. Instead of playing any of the DLC I just decided to read spoilers on them, but what I found didn't impress me and I'm glad I didn't waste the money or time with it. I recommend playing the game on easy for people who want to play through the game to get a thrill here and there or are just a fan of survival horror but for the casual gamer I would pass on this.

I’ve started my Terrorthon this October by diving into a franchise I had my eyes on for quite a while, but for some reason or other kept putting off. As a survival horror fan, The Evil Within games were always appealing to me not only because of the Shinji Mikami/Resident Evil link (it is actually almost comical how identical the first entries on both franchises are at times), but also because their aesthetics always looked on point. I had two clearly distinct experiences playing TEW and TEW2, as one of these disappointed me even though it wasn't a bad title by any means, and the other greatly surpassed my expectations. I initially considered talking about both in the same post, but turns out I had more to say about them than I had initially thought, so I’ll focus on both games individually to avoid a ridiculously long post.

Outlast and The Evil Within. Even though there are a lot of differences in how they approach survival horror, I had a very similar experience with these games in terms of my final impression. On both, I was disappointed because I had built up my expectations to a higher level of quality than what I got, but while I found Outlast bordered on almost not worth the playtime, I actually thought TEW was a pretty decent experience.

My main issue is that the game looks, feels and plays rough, even by 2014 standards. It has this unflattering combination of blurriness, grainy filter and mediocre texture quality that makes it almost physically unpleasant, movement is laggy to the point of actually costing you resources at times, and mechanical incompetence results in silly deaths every now and then. Examples of this are the subpar combat experience (and not in a ‘survival horror combat is supposed to feel bad’ kind of way), the sprinting meter being pathetically short, (which is even worse in the DLC) and the fact that the lack of movement refinement is often at odds with the pin point precision the game sometimes asks of you, e.g. when you’re avoiding, disarming or crouching around traps (stealth is another aspect that gets impacted by all this). In this narrow sense, and because they are aesthetically similar, it actually reminded me of a less accomplished version of Alan Wake, which, if you've played it and remember how mechanically rough it was, is quite and indictment on its own. The game severely lacks polish on several levels, and this hinders the final product.

The story is also a sore spot for me. It works quite well in the way of mystery tone setting, but the lack of clarity and linearly logical exposition from start to finish means you’ll likely finish the game with more questions than answers. I really enjoyed the general concept and was excited to see where it all led, but at the end of the day I felt they fumbled it in terms of narrative consistency, since not everything can be explained away by a surreal, mind-based, dreamlike world. There is also a disparity between chapter length and checkpoints that is pretty weird and hard to justify in any logical way.

However, TEW does something fundamental in any survival horror worth its salt, and that is capturing the feeling of survival horror. Audiovisually (though sound propagation certainly has its issues) this can be a truly unsettling game, with a gripping atmosphere of a good horror mystery that haunts you at every turn. And it works particularly well because resource management is done in a masterful way: this is a difficult game if played on the intended Survival, and you never quite feel you have enough ammo to become comfortable. Resources are scarce, and the game never holds your hand or encourages experimentation, since everything you probe can kill you or explode in your face. In this sense, TEW nails the quintessential survival horror experience of feeling like you never have enough resources to engage a tough enemy. Because of that, it leaves you with a sense of vulnerability that never really goes away, even more so since the game oftentimes isn’t clear on its rules of engagement (the boss in chapter 9 is a clear example). Flawed mechanics aside, you have quite a few tools at your disposal - handgun, shotgun, sniper rifle, grenades, agony bolts (which are particularly fun to use), etc. - and a solid upgrade system, but due to both resource scarcity and inventory limitations, there is always a layer of worry. This layer reaches its climax against the bosses, which often come with this disturbing Silent Hill creature-type energy to them that stretches tension even further. In the survival horror basics, TEW definitely delivers.

One final word for the DLC, namely The Assignment and The Consequence, which are basically Side A and B of the same story. I liked how they changed things up by focusing almost exclusively on a stealth-based experience - which came with a couple of new mechanics -, but this also meant the inventory management aspect was now gone, something I had really mixed feelings about. Story wise, there is a much needed spotlight shed on parts of the narrative specifically on Kidman’s side of things, with a couple of interesting twists, but this was also not without its issues, since it somewhat retcons a fair bit of what we saw in the base game. Additionally, I will never stop thinking a piece of DLC that contributes so much to the base story, especially when that story is so cryptic to begin with, should always be an integral part of the main game.

Overall I liked my experience with The Evil Within bundle, to the point of spending 25 hours with it without feeling bored. But there are significant problems with this game that can’t go unchecked. I’ll still say that this is a must for survival horror fans just because of how much it nails the genre’s fundamentals, but your personal level of tolerance towards poor mechanical implementation and visual clarity will likely determine how much you’ll end up enjoying it. 7.5/10

The Evil Within is the best horror game since Dead Space 2. I was consistently impressed by how creative this game is. They make good use of the premise of being trapped in the mind of a serial killer by transporting the player to a variety of creepy locations making great use of art direction and lighting to create a tense atmosphere. The letterboxing and film grain is a nice stylish touch. At times, the game is gorgeous.

The combat is the deepest I've experienced in a survival horror game. I could shoot my enemies with a variety of weapons, sneak up on them to perform a stealth kill, or lure enemies into traps I find in the environment. The game limits the amount of resources I have pushing me to use combinations of all these to get through the game. Taking down enemies using very few resources made me feel smart, and missing shots and wasting resources had me cursing at the screen.

The story didn't start making sense until the second time I played it. Once I noticed elements of the story clicking, I got obsessed. I took down notes while I hunted for all the hidden documents in the game. Uncovering the story was a satisfying experience.