The Evil Within - Review

I have never been a fan of horror games, well at least not in the current standard of horror games. You see I like a little more edge to my horror, I would rather a good mystery rather an unreal level of explosions. When I first read that Shinji Mikami was going to make a new horror game, I was not entirely sure what I was expecting, The Evil Within is a return to the classic formula but with modern twists.

The Evil Within tells the story of Detective Sebastian Castellanos, who along with his partners is called to an incident at the Beacon Hill Mental Hospital and when they arrive they are presented with some very disturbing scenes and the insanity starts from there. As you progress you will be confronted with some very deranged individuals and even worse some very impossible creatures, but thankfully Sebastian has the skills to help combat these threats, even if he lacks the actual tools.

As a more traditional survival horror, the game does not provide you with an abundance of supplies, it forces you to play smart. There is a very heavy stealth focused mechanic here and should you fail to use it correctly, you will find yourself running out of the limited supplies very fast. Stealth is not just for show, being quiet is almost needed, because if you make too much noise, any enemies located around you may come over to investigate. While you can take a heads on approach to fighting, sometimes it pays off better to avoid the fight and hide and there are even some enemies that you can’t fight, at least not yet.

The game helps cement the sense of isolation here by taking away almost everything from the hud and it works. The game does a lot with very little and by even pulling the camera closer to the character and taking a more cinematic approach to the camera style it make the action and suspense feel all that more urgent. That can of course work against itself, as sometimes trying to move the camera around can result in extremely small view points, but that is a minor issue. As you move around the world, you will find items around the place, these could be things like ammo or gel or even parts which you can use to create bolts for your agony crossbow.

The Agony Crossbow is the games most versatile weapon, you can use to put some distance between an enemy and yourself, or use it to create a trap that can take out multiple enemies at once. While you are able to find bolts for it, creating them is where you will get most of them and in order to create you need to find scrap and the best place to get scrap is by disabling existing traps; Doing that in the middle of an encounter though can often lead to an untimely demise. In fact about the only time you can take a breath is when you enter the games central hub area, which is a bleak hospital space, staffed by a single nurse. You can come back to this place throughout the adventure in order to upgrade your character.

You will also find lockers in this space that you can open with keys that are found around the world and you do want to keep your eyes open for these. There are a lot of lockers to open and you never know what you will end up with, but everything is sure to help. You will also find throughout the world, other collectables that will help fill in some of the story.

The one thing you will notice early on with the game though is that there is a lot of blood here, in fact the gore level of the game is high overall, so anyone with an aversion to blood may not want to start the game. The creature designs are quite impressive, even more so when there is very little repeat on the base models of the simple guys. Some of the larger boss style creatures have really similar looks, but when you start to look at the more dangerous ones, they have a style that is all their own.

The sound is the other area where the game shines, each creature groans and shuffles with real weight and it helps make them feel real. The music plays two roles here, the first and common one is that it helps build the tension, when the score kicks into gear you know something is about to happen, the other time is when you hear a nice quiet piece of music playing from a room, that is a sign that you can take a breath and relax is it is your way back to the hub.

The Evil Within is a return to the survival horror games of old that people have been asking for, but it has not trapped itself in the past. It has taken giant steps forward to show that survival horror is not as dead as we thought. 

The Score

9.5

Review code provided by Bethesda

The Pros

+This is bringing back the classic old school horror game

+The game also manages to tell an interesting story, that contains more than a few twists

The Cons

-Finicky camera controls are annoying

-The game is very gory, which does take some adjusting to