The Evil Within was developed by Tango Gameworks and published by Bethesda Softworks.
The most prominent entity behind this game is Shinji Mikami, who was responsible for directing and producing Resident Evil 1 and Resident Evil 4.
The following footage was captured on a Playstation 4 Pro via an El Gato and may or may not accurately reflect your own experience.
The Evil Within begins on a rainy afternoon with Sebastian Castellanos, Joseph Oda, and Juli Kidman responding to an incident at a local hospital.
After instructing Kidman to watch the door, Castellanos and his partner Joseph head inside.
Immediately, they encounter a room that’s essentially been repainted in blood.
They encounter a man in the corner of the security office, named Dr. Jimenez.
Before he can respond to their inquiries, the good doctor passes out.
Sebastian is forced to check the security footage for answers.
Upon watching the footage, he sees a man in white move unnaturally fast between security guards, cutting them down one by one.
As Sebastian leans in to get a better look, he locks eyes with the man in white.
This gaze leads to Sebastian waking up hanging upside down on a meat hook in a room that can only be described as Leatherface’s wet dream.
Welcome to the nightmare of all nightmares.
STORY
So before I get into the story, I’m going to talk about the characters.
From the first moment you see Sebastian Castellanos, you’re going to think “Look at this guy, Cool Guy McGee.” That’s what I thought when I see this detective in a vest with a five o clock shadow that says, “I competed in a slow whiskey drinking contest in Hoboken, New Jersey.”
But besides looking like this cool guy that ought to be in a noir, Sebastian doesn’t really have a personality.
He’s the living embodiment of a monotone voice.
This will sometimes make him comedic because he’s so indifferent.
Sometimes he’ll encounter something like a walking abomination and he’ll be like, “Oh, what now?”
It’s difficult to tell if this was intentional.
For most of the game, Sebastian is alone and unless you’re annoyingly quirky, i’s hard to read a personality when a person is alone.
When ever he meets up with anyone, he’s also appropriately objective. “Joseph, we gotta get the hell out of here.”
“Joseph we gotta move”…it’s appropriate, it makes sense.
There was a moment where Joseph makes a quick observation regarding Sebastian’s alcoholism and this puts me at a crossroads as well.
As someone who loves a great narrative and empathizing with characters, I withered there were more discussions about the past and I wish they weren’t so superficial.
On the other hand, if you were to really put yourself in Sebastian’s shoes, you’d know that there isn’t time to discuss the past.
The closest you’ll ever get to understanding Sebastian will be when you pick up parts of his diary throughout the game.
However, these entries are generic. “I met a woman. I married a woman. I love my wife. The chief says I’m a loose cannon but this is my case. I love my daughter. Conspiracy theory!”
This may be one of the few times I say this, but I liked him for being generic. I liked the combination of being generic and indifferent because I really saw myself as Sebastian.
My friend likes to make fun of me by saying that my catchphrase is, “I’m not bothered.”
And I’ll admit there’s been multiple times where I say it.
“If you were Superman, would you help someone in a house fire?”
That’s it? That’s what firefighters are for. Can’t be bothered for some shit like that.
So when Sebastian gets to that point, I laughed because that was me.
The first time he sees a spider woman zombie thing, he gets scared the way I would.
“Oh shit…what the ****?” I wouldn’t scream or yell as if I were hopped up on drugs.
The fourth time he encounters this spider woman zombie, he just gets irritated the way I do at work. “Oh for fucks sake…what now?”
So in general, for me, I find Castellanos relatable because of my own personality.
However, that doesn’t mean Castellanos is particularly interesting. He’s still generic noir detective man.
Ruvik is the game’s antagonist who’s actually pretty cool.
His intentions are never totally clear. What is clear is that he’s pissed off about something.
He’s pissed that his research was stolen. He’s pissed that his sister was stolen from him. He’s pissed about anyone interfering with his work.
He’s not completely blameless either. As a kid he did some crazy violent experiments for his own research.
Some of the puzzles, recordings, and even levels will reflect his cruelty.
As for the plot of The Evil Within, it’s difficult to explain without spoiling it so I will do my best not to.
At the beginning, you’re driving on down to the Beacon Mental Hospital and up until the moment you black out, you’re pretty secure in your reality.
When you find yourself hanging upside down in the butcher’s room, you’re confused about how you got there but you’re more worried about getting out.
Once you escape and are in the ambulance, you notice Krimson City is falling apart as you drive through and you think this can’t be real.
As the world begins bending, you realize that no, this definitely isn’t real and that’s when you main objective presents itself: Get out of this nightmare.
The entire game is just you moving closer and closer to the exit of this dream world and just when you think you’re close, Ruvik will mess with you and set you back a few steps.
You won’t really find out what’s going on until the end.
Unfortunately, even with that tiny twist, it’s still not enough information to really know what went on.
If anything, it just forces players to really think hard about what happened and to connect the dots themselves.
For the most part though, it’s just about surviving what Ruvik throws at you as you try to escape this nightmare.
Remember in Inception, where Cobb and his team plan out the inception of Scarecrow? They spend weeks getting it all together, getting it all perfect and immediately, when they finally start this important mission, a fucking train comes out of nowhere and ruins the plan?
That’s basically The Evil Within. Oh so you think you’re out of the village, huh? Let me mess with the laws of time and physics, throw you in some sewers and here’s a giant random tentacle boss!
AUDIO
Technical wise, The Within’s audio surpasses visuals but that’s not saying much.
The voice acting is decent with Ruvik being voiced by Jackie Earl Haley so his voice is pretty haunting as it is.
Sebastian Castellanos’ voice reflects his personality, often monotone and emotionless.
Joseph and Kidman are pretty objecting in their deliveries.
Leslie is another high in terms of voice acting. His voice actor does a pretty great job at making him sound unstable.
The music is nice and tense and does a pretty decent job at maintaining the atmosphere.
Much like The Surge, I have high praises for the music in the game’s safe zone.
Whenever you get to an area where you hear Claire De Lune, you know you are safe.
The song itself is nothing special. It’s a piece of classical music we’ve all heard at some point but for me, The Evil Within created a special association with Claire De Lune and the feeling of safety.
It reminds me of the country song in The Surge or the calm ambient song in Resident Evil 4’s Typewriter rooms.
VISUALS
When it comes to visuals, let’s start with the obvious: this game performs poorly technically.
On a Playstation 4 Pro, you can see assets rendering while you’re playing and even during cutscenes.
The screen tearing can get pretty bad too and this happens all over the game so you can’t even pinpoint it on a specific area.
It’s just really ugly and it’s hard to forget when these things happen throughout the entire game.
On the other hand, the frame rate was never a problem.
It plays at a consistent 30fps and it rarely fluctuated but never while I was actually playing.
The fluctuation of the frame rate usually happened during cutscenes involving fire.
Keep in mind that while all of this just looks ugly, it was never game breaking. You’d notice it, go, “Ugh, that was nasty.” And then move on. None of this ever interfered with the gameplay. Like if I was aiming at a boss, it wouldn’t randomly drop in frame rate so bad that I couldn’t aim properly. None of that.
The cinematic black bars, I’ve noticed is a point of contention. You either hated it or you didn’t mind it.
My opinion? The developers intended for it to be there so I played it as is.
With the film grain, it really gave The Evil Within a look of its own.
However, it’s stupid to hate the game for it because if you don’t like it, you can turn them off and adjust the grain.
When it comes to the visuals design of the game like it’s levels and characters, I think The Evil Within is among the best in the genre.
The locations in the game are far from original. If you did a Mad Libs for a horror movie, all the locations you name are probably in the game: hospital, village, church, mental hospital, mansion, hotel, underground laboratories, etc.
However, the details in these locations are horrifying and well done.
Due to the game’s nature, you’re never in a location for long anyways.
So the levels are creepy enough to unsettle you at first but once you get used to it, you move locations and then you have get used a whole new area.
The best bit of the visuals is the lighting.
With all the technical problems and all the cliche locations, the lighting really is some of the best I’ve ever seen.
There would be times where I’m just running around in complete darkness and other times where I’d get startled by my own shadow.
The enemy designs are interesting.
The most common enemies are these gray people that look like they were recently tortured. There’ll be guys with barbed wire all over them or with things sticking out of their body.
The more powerful versions of these enemies have masks on which are simple and yet pretty unsettling.
There aren’t many bosses in the game but the ones that are remind me of Silent Hill in that they weren’t created to just be spooky but to be thematically relevant.
GAMEPLAY
Alright so gameplay wise, The Evil Within is technically a survival horror.
You will run out of ammo and sometimes you’ll just have to deal without.
The game will consistently offer you ways to deal with enemies via traps.
Those traps are two way streets though.
Given that you don’t accidentally run into one and kill yourself, you can use them to kill your enemies. However, if you defuse a trap, you get back parts.
These parts can be used to craft ammo for your crossbow.
While the game is a survival horror, it’s also evident this game has an identity crisis sometimes.
The beginning is very “survival horror”.
Later in the game though, it’s meant for you to be in a shoot out.
But then immediately after without any indication, it’s back to “save your ammo, this is a survival horror”.
This can make the gameplay infuriating or fun.
I found it fun because in those “shoot out” moments, I wasn’t just shooting to take down. I was shooting to kill.
I went for headshots and when I could, I used the environment or my matches.
Because I didn’t know if I would need as much ammo as possible for after the shootout, I would conserve as much ammo as I could during that shoot out.
Saving ammo, risking for headshots, learning the environment while also making sure I didn’t run into any traps myself, made these shoot out segments more tense.
The Evil Within is played in a 3rd person perspective, mainly being over the shoulder. This works well.
With the two black bars and it being third person over the shoulder, sometimes Sebastian may obscure the player’s view but it’s rare and the camera is fully functional so if you can’t see, use the camera.
As a standard of the genre, The Evil Within has it’s fair share of puzzles.
The puzzles are fully functional and they’re interesting and relevant.
Nor are they difficult in any way.
They invoke the same feeling of when as a kid you had to clean up your messy room.
That feeling where you’re stood there and you’re like, “Alright where do I begin?”
They don’t need a PhD to solve. They just need a quick minute for you to figure out what you’re going to do.
The same feeling can be said about the enemies. The game is much more difficult if you try to blast your way through.
More often than not, you’ll take a quick minute to figure everything out, how much ammo do i have, can I sneak through? Can I silently kill some of these guys and save my ammo for those guys?
The Evil Within also features an upgrading system which is pretty clear cut.
You pick up green gel, use that to upgrade health, sprinting, melee, or weapon attributes.
It’s good and if you’re smart about it, it works.
There’s a trophy for not using any green gel as well, so even if the upgrading system was broken (which it isn’t), you can still beat the game without upgrades.
CONCLUSION
I love The Evil Within, I really do.
But the game is really just constantly in the grey area.
For that reason, this review was one of the toughest I’ve had to do so far.
The game is the embodiment of the phrase, “Yeah…but!”
Yeah the game looks great artistically in the horror sense but it’s technically a mess.
Yeah Sebastian is a cool guy mcgee but he’s not memorable.
Yeah the story is interesting once you figure it all out but until you do, it’s a mess.
Yeah the game works as a survival horror but then again sometimes it just becomes a gauntlet and you have to kill waves of enemies.
Yeah the black bars can be annoying but you can turn them off.
For those pathetic tiny dick losers constantly saying, “Resident Evil 4 is better than this garbage”, you guys need to shut up.
Resident Evil 4 as great and wonderful as it is, also has it’s really stupid moments that people seem to forget about.
RE4 was developed with the might of Capcom and it was only for the Nintendo Gamecube at the time.
The Evil Within had Tango Gameworks and it was released on every essential system. It didn’t help that it was published with Bethesda who seems to be having a running competition of “Which game associated with us can have the most bugs?”
By all means compare the two, especially since it’s the same creator behind it, but take into account the backgrounds of the two.
Anyways, The Evil Within has a somewhat decent story, controls that are fully functioning, has great audio, has visuals with its ups and downs, and decent gameplay with great attempts at trying something new.
I bought this game digitally when it first released and I liked it, I played it again for this review just after the sequel was announced at E3 2017 and I still feel the same way about it.
The game is constantly on sale on PSN and while it was on sale, I bought the season pass for 4 bucks and it came with three little stories that explain more of what’s going on in the main game.
My recommendation is that if you enjoy survival horror games, then you should absolutely try The Evil Within. In that last sale I just mentioned, it was 8 bucks for the main game and the season pass. When not on sale, on PSN, the game and season pass is about 20 bucks which is nothing.
If you do not like survival horror games or just an absolute shitty snob about visuals, then this game is not for you.
So from me, the Evil Within gets a 7.5….Out of 10.