Evil did not survive
User Rating: 6 | The Evil Within XONE
I have been a huge Shinji Mikami fan since I was in middle school. I played the first Resident Evil game shortly after it came out when I was in sixth grade, and it left a lasting impression. The atmosphere and mood was, for the time, something wholly unique and unlike anything I had experienced in my life. It was my introduction to horror as a genre, and I have loved the genre in all its forms since. Resident Evil was- for me- an adventure that put me on the edge of my seat, listening through the disturbing piano music for that wet shuffling sound of a zombie just around the next corner, and knowing that I only had four rounds of handgun ammo remaining. It was stressful, full of great puzzles, and constantly kept me on edge in spite of the bad writing and laugh-inducing ridiculousness of the whole affair. It gave birth to a genre that saw games like Silent Hill and Dead Space rise to prominence, and has stood as the de facto measuring stick by which all other games in the survival horror genre would be judged. Unfortunately, as time went on, the survival horror genre has started to sink toward an action focus, with Dead Space 3 and Silent Hill Downpour putting a lot of misplaced effort into combat and confrontation rather than the nail-biting encounters that rocketed the genre to prominence. Horror needed to pass the torch, and here comes a game promising a slew of new ideas and a return to the old-school horror that made the genre great. Well, Shinji Mikami certainly said that. The Evil Within is not what you are expecting. It’s not exactly horror, but it is stressful. It isn’t action but it’s certainly visceral and fast-paced. It’s really not any genre I can nail down, but I can absolutely describe it in a word: survival. That half of “survival horror” is absolutely on full display here. In fact, the game puts so much effort into making the game nearly impossible to survive without multiple tries that it becomes tiring, frustrating, and loses any sense of tension that the game would otherwise have, resulting in an experience that is exasperating, confusing, and smaller than it at first seems, and has made me roll my eyes more than a few times. You play as a detective with a stupid name in a city with a stupid name, and you and your partners get called in to an incident underway at the city mental hospital. There are a few quips about some urban legends about the place and the game thrusts you into the action rather quickly. You look on a security cam monitor and see a guy who looks exactly like a zombified Assassin’s Creed protagonist go Albert Wesker Matrix on a bunch of cops and before long, you’re hanging upside down among a bunch of corpses, running down a hallway full of spinning blades, driving through a city going full-on Inception and rearranging itself to stop your progress, and then you’re stranded at random in what appears to be a hi-res rendition of the countryside from Resident Evil 4 with little to no context whatsoever. That is the first thirty minutes of the game. Then there are zombies, or maybe they aren’t zombies, or maybe they’re projections from the protagonist’s mind or whatever, but it certainly doesn’t make any sort of sense. You can transport through mirrors to the save point, which is a mental hospital front desk. There is also a chair out of a saw movie that lets you upgrade your weapons and character, and it’s actually a nice touch. As little sense as it all makes, it does have a sense of continuity that feels consistent and gives the game plenty of character and sets the tone early. What exactly that tone is in service of is a bit up in the air, but this game is nothing if not consistent. Credit where it is due, this game does look fantastic. The letterbox display is a bit disorienting and there is some texture pop-in, but I will not lie- the game bleeds cutting-edge detail, especially in the environments and lighting. The character models have a very Japanese Resident Evil look to them (it makes sense when you see it), but the enemies are at the very least inventive and stand in stark contrast to the environments in which you find them. Many of the environments are dilapidated, run-down areas of artificial right angles and straight edges, while the enemies have an organic and round sensibility that feels at once intentional and almost natural, and it somehow heightens the visual bar. The lighting is soft, and the depth of field effect is used brilliantly, with each step causing you to grip the controller that much closer. The graphical presentation truly is next-gen on the PC and Xbox One versions (the versions I have had the chance to play- I own the game on Xbox One) and I am sure the game looks just as dazzling on the PS4. Alas, all those fantastic graphics do not service a grand experience. The game is split into chapters, and the areas in which these chapters take place are laughably, pathetically tiny. Chapter 3 takes place in an area the size of a couple city blocks. That won’t stop you from taking a while to finish each chapter, because the expectations are often ludicrously unclear. The number of times I was just sitting there wondering what in the hell I am supposed to be doing probably padded out the play length by a few hours at least. The true tension comes as intended from enemy encounters, but not in the way old Shinji may have been envisioning. As I stated earlier, this is a game that takes the “survival” portion of “survival horror” and shoves it to center stage. The enemies can end you in just a few hits at full health, so keeping some distance is key. The problem is that your weapons are frustratingly inaccurate, depressingly weak, and infuriatingly unreliable in a fight with even the least lethal of enemies. The game does give you a melee attack, but I think they did it to mess with you. Don’t bother. To date I have never successfully killed an enemy with melee. Your first hit with melee appears to stun-lock the enemy, so you are lulled into a false sense of security and you hit them again, only to have them slap you right back and send you flying. You can pick up melee weapons like torches and axes, but they break after one hit, so you may find that you have taken down one enemy, but you’re knocked to 10% health by the one standing behind him because your animation didn’t end in time. Stealth is possible early on in the game, but quickly stops being a viable option. The game seems to favor head-on confrontation, but absolutely will not equip you for it. Making it though each chapter felt like two parts luck and one part knowledge through repetition. After a while, the parts that had such excellent pacing and such exquisite slow build just became boring, frustrating, and almost made me want to stop playing altogether. This is a game that is fantastically well-made, but not well planned. Nothing it does seems to be in service of anything besides “this is a horror game.” It doesn’t make a lot of sense, the combat disadvantages you to the point of absurdity, and it hides behind what it calls “difficulty” when it feels like it is padding its length though cheap kills and cheaper thrills. There is a lot to like here, though. The audio is great, the graphics are truly remarkable, the character models look amazing, and the ambiance is very unique. But as a game? No. Not full price. Don’t do it. Old-school Resident Evil fans should play it when the price comes down. Other horror gamers may also like it, but wait for a price drop. I don’t know what I was expecting, but the biggest horror was my disappointment.
