Evil Resides Within

In the last few years, I’ve kind of had this tradition with a buddy of mine: if we ever find a survival horror game that interests us, we set aside a weekend or two and we play cooperatively, switching every chapter or if one of us hits a roadblock. We’ve done this for Amnesia and Outlast, and they were both really fun experiences: There’s something about sharing the horror that makes it all the more fun. So when The Evil Within came out it was a no brainer for us. The game had that freaky aesthetic and for once they gave us weapons, which was definitely a leg up over Outlast and Amnesia where all we could do was run and hide.

The game itself is both fun and terrifying. The controls are a little difficult to pick up, as well as a few of the in-game mechanics. Once you get a handle on everything though the game flows a lot better and starts to feel less clunky. The Evil Within shares a lot of similarities with the Resident Evil franchise which makes sense as Shinji Mikami is the creator of Resident Evil and is now the director for The Evil Within. The game shines through mostly in the combat. It’s practically the same except for one major improvement: You can move while aiming, which is leaps and bounds better than its Resident Evil counterpart.

The Evil Within also follows a similar formula to the Resident Evil style of survival horror. They introduce the main antagonist early on and then subsequently introduce bosses that chase you around and terrify you until you happen upon the perfect environment to kill them. Now this same trope is apparent in a lot of survival horror games. The way they approach it differently in The Evil Within is that the whole time you play, you're questioning your own characters sanity because the more you play, the more surreal and strange the locales become. You find yourself teleporting all over the place and you keep warping through mirrors to this weird upgrade hub, which at time feels familiar but also unnerving. They do a great job of never letting a place feel too comfortable for too long which can be a problem in the genre; if you stay somewhere too long, you start to recognize it for what it is. The areas become less creepy and more mundane, so forcing you to adapt to new areas randomly allows you to never really settle into that comfort zone because you’re always being thrown into new locals.

Now I’d like to talk about the upgrade hub. Every so often you find these doors that lead to rooms containing a cracked mirror, you can then warp into the mirror to enter the upgrade hub (as I'm calling it). Now the hub is one floor of a sanitarium, but it’s never quite the same as when you left it and it’s actually one of the most interesting parts of the game. In most games this zone would feel safe and familiar but in fact it’s the opposite. They constantly throw all these weird and scary events at you when you're in there and it’s not jump scares, it’s just these different combinations of unnerving scenery and music making the one place you might call home in the game far from it. It forces you to always be on edge because you have no idea what’s going to be there when you show up.

I haven't beaten The Evil Within yet, so I can't give you my full opinion but from what I've played so far the game has been really good. I won't say it's the scariest game out there but it's worth looking into and I'd recommend it if you're a fan of the genre. If not though, I'd say hold off and wait for a price drop or try another of the multitude of survival horror games out there.