The Evil Within promised a lot of things upon its announcement and subsequent previews, and I'm more than happy to say that it's delivered, on just about all fronts. The Evil Within is a game that's as tense as it is terrifying, and as difficult as it is cerebral.
Upon starting the game, you're thrust into the action almost immediately as detective Sebastien Castellanos. Alongside your two partners, Joseph and the female rookie detective Kidman, you're off to investigate a strange occurrence at Beacon Mental Hospital, in the strangely named Krimson City. Without spoiling anything, things start to get weird; fast. You're almost immediately hung out to dry by a madman wielding a chainsaw, and this is where the game introduces one of its main mechanics; its stealth system.
Throughout the game, you have a dedicated button for sneaking, and can perform brutal stealth kills ala The Last of Us. The mechanic itself works much like you'd expect, but as you'll soon come to realize, The Evil Within is very stingy when it comes to dishing out resources. Checkpoints are few and far between, you're always on the search for ammo pickups, health syringes, and you're usually trying to not be spotted by the fantastically designed enemies and monsters. This makes for a game that plays out extremely tense. When you have one bullet left in your gun, or just enough health to take one more attack on, the game is at its best. Thankfully, this is the case through most of the game.
The boss fights throughout the game are a shining example of this. Most, if not all, of them display a marriage of solid level design and enemy balance, as well as forming that ever-so-precious tense relationship with the player. For the most part, boss fights can end with you using up that last grenade in your inventory, or being down to the last two shots in your sniper rifle. A lot of these boss fights make for unforgettable experiences, yet they also don't take anything away from the rest of the game, considering it is all so tightly designed.
You have a small arsenal of weapons at your disposal, ranging from handguns, to shotguns, to sniper rifles, and like I've mentioned, ammo can be extremely scarce for all of them. The most interesting weapon of the bunch, though, is the Agony Crossbow. Throughout the game, you'll run into a variety of booby-traps, likely paying homage to the works of Wes Craven, or even the Saw movies. These traps can be elaborate, such as barbed-wire laced bear traps, or can suffice for a good ol' fashioned exploding tripwire. Point is, awesome as these are (and as gruesome and gory a mess they leave), you can disable these to earn parts that are used to craft different types of crossbow bolts. These range from freezing bolts, exploding bolts, electric shock bolts, etc. Some are more useful than others, and the game knows this, considering some bolts require more parts to craft. The bolts and the implementation of crafting them adds a serious layer of strategy to the combat.
If the combat weren't deep enough as it is, some enemies just won't stay dead unless you burn them. You can down an enemy with several shotgun blasts only to see them stagger their way back onto their feet. When they're down, you light a match, throw it on them, and burn them to death. You can also train enemies to a fallen body and, with a single match, burn multiple enemies at the same time. Again, this adds a very important strategic layer to the already frantic and visceral combat system, and the small things like this are parts of what makes The Evil Within so good.
The variety in levels here is almost jaw-dropping. You can be stalking enemies in a creepy forest-village, ala Resident Evil 4, trying to avoid having your head chopped off by a spinning saw blade in an almost circus-like environment, or be walking down the literally fallen apart streets of Krimson City. The variety and pacing of these levels all manages to feel natural, and the game as a whole just really reads as a complete experience because of this.
Graphically, the game fares OK. The character models, especially of the enemies, all look great. The environments are extremely varied, yet always nerve-wracking. It's so clear that everything implemented into this game's design was for the purpose of adding tension, and it's not only incredible to see it work so practically, but that it's done so extremely well. Despite the game aptly looking as dreary and panicky as it should, there is a ton of texture pop-in during cutscenes, and occasional framerate drops within gameplay. Neither break the game, at all, but it would be nice to see a little more polish in this area.
The story that plays out here definitely starts with a bang, and (again, not to spoil anything) kind of ends with a head-scratch. Most of the narrative remains interesting through the whole experience, and though everything isn't definitively closed up by the game's end, you're bound to get more value out of the game's story the more you're willing to analyze it. Upon completing the game once, you're granted character trophies, with descriptions tied to them that largely serve to clear up narrative openings. It's not that the story here is lacking, by any means. It's that it's fairly opaque. If you want to get anything out of it, you absolutely have to pay attention to everything the game throws at you, and to be willing to look at it on an analytical level.
The Evil Within is an excessively tense, wildly gory, often terrifying game, drawing inspiration from all types of horror films and literature through the years. Be it zombie films, grindhouse flicks, or modern Japanese horror, The Evil Within is grade-A horror, through and through. On top of this, it's just incredibly well designed and feels solid. The Evil Within is definitely the best survival-horror game I've played in the past 10-or-so years. Don't expect to walk into this game to solve Resident Evil or Silent Hill style puzzles. Expect survival to actually be key. Expect the unexpected through tons of variety, tense encounters, incredible boss fights, and a cerebral narrative. If it's a survival experience you're looking for, The Evil Within has you covered. If it's a horror game you're looking for, The Evil Within shines, and it's so clearly a love-letter to not only survival-horror, but the horror genre as a whole.