Max Deville – Special to the Southern News
Coming as one of the two most anticipated horror games this year, The Evil Within is the latest to bring itself to the main consoles in the recent resurgence of horror games.
The Evil Within is also the comeback for Shinji Mikami, one of the game creators who helped lay the foundation for the horror game genre, whose last venture, Resident Evil 4, nearly a decade ago terrified a fair majority of players. With such hype and legacy behind it The Evil Within is not entirely the second coming of the survival horror genre that we all hoped for.
The game starts out very well as we are introduced to our character, Detective Sebastian Castellanos, as he arrives at a psychiatric hospital stumbling upon a slaughter. After some investigating Castellanos is captured by unknown forces and winds up at the mercy of a chainsaw-wielding psychopath. This opening section of cat and mouse is one of the most frightening sections of the game, resembling other survival titles such as Outlast.
After this intro Castellanos finds himself in a crashed ambulance wandering around rustic villages brimming with twisted and murderous villagers, and forest brimming with monsters as you sneak, stab, and hide in your quest to find out what is truly going on.
The game itself looks and feels like an updated Resident Evil 4 as it shares the similar setting, a man in a rustic setting with monsters and bloodthirsty villagers, and also the typical third person shooting and controls of the Resident Evil 4 age, minus all the improvements made for that style of play since then.
The funky controls used to be a big part of these games as the clunky feel made the horror games scarier in trying to survive hostile situations, but nowadays that sort of playing gets frustrating, especially when trying to stealth kill one of these villagers and they attack you because their AI just happens to know you are sneaking up behind them.
A second installation within the game is the retro survivor horror game arsenal: little ammo, guns which have such bad stats and rates of fire that they require heavy upgrading to be necessary for combat.
The combat though follows this downward trail as where the crossbow and stealth functions to a decent degree, these poor guns really ruin the times where combat is absolutely necessary to progress. As well there are chase scenes in the game
However this may be, the combat plays well into the story as Castellanos can set up traps which lay about the world and use them to his advantage, but also in the way matches work in the game. The enemies of the games will keep coming back if you do not torch them or incapacitate them greatly.
This ups the level of fear greatly as you must constantly balance burning enemies or killing and moving on through the levels of the game even though your enemies may be coming for you once again.
One of the better points of the game is that it never rehashes old scars. There is always an increasing variety of monsters besides the typical zombie like enemies as Castellanos progresses through the story, darkly lit corridors filled with traps and whirling blades, and a variety of locations like foggy villages or open-air daytime sections in flooded cities.
Overall the biggest issue, but most admirable aspect of the game is that it tries reaching in so many directions. This aspect is negative because as it tries to implement so many different things, it never feels specialized on doing what it is meant to: scare you so bad you will need a nightlight again.
The Evil Within is a noble effort to revive the survival horror genre, but it could have learned from games nearly a decade old. It has its moments of terror and brilliance, but overall it is earns 3 owls out of 5.
Photo Credit: BagoGames
