This is a game that I played about a week after discovering it existed (by reading a review from someone else on Grouvee), and I'm quite glad I did. Evil Tonight is a rather odd title in that it is a clear classic Survival Horror homage that has the aesthetic of SNES era titles like Chrono Trigger. The game is light on being actually horrifying or scary, but it definitely leans into its genre, despite the fact so much about the game, even in its gameplay, is quite different from what you might expect. You wander around a confined otherworld version of an academy facing all manner of monsters and ghosts, collecting keys, hunting for precious resources, solving puzzles, and reading numerous notes to unravel the story. But the gameplay, while still managing to feel like Survival Horror due to the limited resources, feels much more action packed with the knife being far more viable than it tends to be in the classic Resident Evil games this is calling back to. While I had my complaints, I feel this blend between familiar and strange mostly worked really well and for its short length, Evil Tonight is a unique game that's a blast to play.
The combat and controls for Evil Tonight are smooth and intuitive. While there are times it feels a little jank and the auto-aim that is necessary at times can screw you over, I found adapting to the gameplay to be very approachable. It didn't take long before I felt like I knew what I was doing, how I should be approaching encounters, and that when I took damage, it was my fault for not doing things correctly. There are definitely some parts, especially later in the game, where I feel the game actually exploits some of its own weaknesses and is rather unfair, most of the game is very playable and just feels good. Resources are useful and the excitement of finding a key to unlock several new areas you've seen previously is done well. Exploring the academy, fighting its monsters, and uncovering its mysteries are all rather enjoyable and combining the resource-management of Survival Horror with the action gameplay is surprisingly pretty fun.
The overall presentation of the game is a bit hit or miss. The pixel art is really pretty and the various rooms in the game have lots of good details. There is decent evocative atmosphere as well. However I feel this is one area where the game's marriage between familiar and strange cuts against it. The characters and dialogue are goofy and our protagonist Silvia is constantly cracking jokes and approaching her circumstances with a generous helping of snark and irreverence. I think this could work in moderation, but while it does characterize Silvia more than a lot of horror protagonists, it just came off a little cringey and made the cartoony appearance of the game feel more definitive of the narrative's tone than the juxtaposition it could've served as.
My other issue is that I think the game could be balanced better both in terms of content layout and simple difficulty. Often the parts I found most challenging were just when rooms or enemy arrangements felt like bullshit. Further, the resources weren't too limited, but were spread throughout the game at odd intervals. After dying and getting set way back, I rushed through one portion sloppily and used a lot of healing items around the 50-75% mark. Unfortunately the last quarter of the game had almost no healing items at all and I had to play a bunch of the last stretches of the game as if I were doing a no-damage run, which resulted in a lot of frustrating deaths. Sure, some of that is because I got sloppy, but when healing items were so much more plentiful early on, I wasn't expecting to suddenly just find almost none anywhere, leading me to ultimately back up to an earlier save at one point just to save a little health for the end boss.
The backtracking in this game also feels pretty bad. It seems very clearly like the map layout and arrangement of where the doors corresponding to your keys are were clearly designed to inflate the game time. It feels like almost every key you get that is used more than once will for instance have one door in the west wing, one door in the east wing, and one door all the way in the building you start in, requiring you to backtrack across almost the entire map several times throughout the game. This is made worse by the fact that the game does not have a map, even on the pause screen. The Steam page even brags about this, saying "No map. No hand holding. Like classic survival action adventures of old, Evil Tonight features exploration in its purest form." Ya know, despite the fact that almost every single classic Survival Horror game I can think of has a map in the pause screen. It didn't bug me too much since I played through this game in one day, but I imagine coming back to it after a break would be a huge pain once you forget your mental map.
But despite my complaints, for what it is, Evil Tonight is simply quite a lot of fun. The game's only about 4 hours long, so you shouldn't expect anything too grand, but for the time it takes, it's a great time. Despite all its callbacks to previous titles, there's a lot about the game that just feels fresh and like an interesting take on its source material. While I've said it a few times, it's a game all about marrying familiar and strange to create something new and unique that amounts to more than merely a nostalgia fest full of Easter eggs related to your favorite horror games. I don't think this game is for everyone, but its digestible length and snappy gameplay that never really drags make it worth a try.
