In a word, yes; in two words, mostly yes. I first encountered The Evil Within (TEW) at E3 2013 and came away very impressed. Having now played it, it’s not quite the sweeping epic experience I was hoping for, but it’s still a very satisfying game. Looking back at my captured gameplay video, voice memos, and notes, my list of negatives actually has more, in terms of sheer quantity, than the list of positives. However, while fewer in number, the positives have a greater impact on on the whole, and the result is a game that is well worth your time despite some shortcomings and frustrations (some of which are addressable through patches, by the way).
So one of the first things I noticed when starting TEW were the graphics; naturally, right? Well, unlike most games, two things about TEW’s graphical presentation were significantly different. First, the game runs in 2:35:1 aspect ratio, meaning that on a 16:9 display, you’re playing in a letterbox with black bands on top and bottom. I kept thinking that after the opening playable scene, the game would “revert to fullscreen,” but that never happened. At least on the console versions there are no tricks to adjust this, and I have to say, it took me a couple of hours to fully ‘get over it.’ I realize that this aspect ratio provides a wider view, but hey, it was different and it took a little time to adjust.
The second unusual graphical nag was the grain. Fortunately, this is an option that you can adjust. The grain effect by default is set to 100%, and at least in my setup (I was playing this on the Playstation 3DTV just 18-24″ away), it greatly reduced the appeal of the graphics and made it harder to immerse myself. For example, all black/shadowy areas had a bluish speckly overlay and I just found this graphical effect unnecessary and distracting. I settled on a value of 30% for this effect, and between that and getting used to the 2:35:1, I was now graphically-comfortable so to speak.
Turns out, this would be the last bit of comfort I would feel in TEW, and that’s a good thing. True to the genre, TEW is a stressful and often intimidating experience. It has moments that are meant to startle you (and were fairly effective on me) but there is a constant sense of discomfort stemming from the realization that you’re really never safe or even prepared in many cases. It’s a difficult balancing act to maintain this type of tension throughout a game, but I thought TEW did it rather well. In some games, things start off difficult and sort of unbalanced, but eventually you turn the corner and your character is leveled up with potent abilities and/or weapons and suddenly you’re very much in control. With TEW, despite a well design upgrade system and several weapons including a powerful crossbow with a variety of interesting arrows, pump shotgun, sniper rifle, and grenades, I never felt like I was in control, or at least if I did it was only in short bursts.
It’s certainly reasonable to think that this unrelenting sense of despair was the goal, and in that regard, it’s a success. But the reasons why you’re feeling this way aren’t so agreeable. One of the more irksome design choices was the protagonist’s paltry aiming and sprinting ability. You can upgrade both, but by default Sebastian Castellanos, who, along with the story I’ll discuss more later, literally can’t run to save his life. I’m being (mildly) facetious, but by default you can only sprint for about four seconds. If you expire the sprint meter, Sebastian will double over, unable to move for several seconds while he catches his breath. Accuracy isn’t as blatantly bad, but it’s worth spending some upgrade points on amending this second key deficiency of Krimson City’s finest detective, too. There are no upgrades available to his personality though, which remains too flatline and stoic for what he’s going through. Anyway, what was even more blatant and annoying is how Sebastian refuses to use his massive hunting knife in any situation other than a stealth kill. If you manage to sneak up behind one of the zombie-like monsters, you can stealth kill them easily. But, this incredibly effective knife that you wield can only be used for stealth kills. When it comes time to melee with one or more monsters, and it will, you can only swing your fists or hit with your equipped weapon. Few moments in the game are as bitter as being mauled by a “standard” monster and not being able to do anything about it because of your melee stats being so darn low, and knowing that you’ve got this big knife literally on your person that’s impossible to use. Sebastian also refuses to pick up other weapons that might be lying about, even ones that enemies drop. Taking these seemingly completely arbitrary limitations and combining them with the sparsity of ammo make for a lot of tough situations that you can’t help but feel are more contrived than legitimate.
I’m almost embarrassed to say this now, but it took me the better part of 9-10 hours of playing TEW to embrace the idea that sometimes, it’s just best to try and run, or hide. The opening sequence in which you are trying to flee from a chainsaw wielding madman shows you the mechanics of hiding, and there are several spots where hiding is available to you and makes sense to do, whether it be inside of a cabinet or under a bed and so forth. But other times, I eventually figured out that, damn it, it’s just time to run and not try to treat this like a standard action game where I need to clear out every room whether overtly or covertly. I’ve already mentioned the running/sprinting limitations, so this is clearly not a viable option in many cases, but as the game continued on, I came to try to use this tactic more, with sufficient success. More success, I think, than had I tried to continue to defeat all threats. This realization isn’t likely to take many of you nearly this long, but as someone with exceedingly few survival horror games under their belt, it was a different, and ultimately exciting, way to play.
On that note, TEW is plenty exciting to play for the most part, whether that’s by design or in spite of it. So it’s obvious that resources are extremely limited and the threats are numerous and very real, which you can expect and generally account for, but some design choices I saw as more of a flaw. These include managing the camera, not accidentally turning on my lantern when I’m trying to quickly turn and/or move, and at times, just figuring out what it is you need to do. The camera is normally not a problem, but it does get troublesome in tight spaces, often at the worst times when you’re getting some facetime with the enemy. While not really the game’s fault per se, I found myself accidentally pressing L3 which turns on your lantern, which obviously isn’t a good thing if you’re trying to stay hidden. And as far as figuring out what to do, this comes primarily in the form of figuring out the tactics for a boss fight or other combative scenario rather than solving puzzles. Usually figuring this out isn’t the distressing part, it’s dealing with the moderate load times that start to add up with each death, and the inconvenient checkpoints. Interestingly, sometimes after loading a checkpoint save, I noticed things had disappeared, including in-game items like matches (used to set defeat fallen enemies on fire RE4 style, or some other objects) that I intentionally did not pick up a few moments earlier, or the oft-used bottles that you can pickup and throw to stun or distract foes.
On the whole the AI were good, but I had a very low number of times where a monster spotted me but didn’t know how to get to me, and some “immersion breaks” like a few too many on screen prompts (some of which you can disable) and in how your friendly AI behave. With friendly AI, it’s up to you to keep them healed by getting close to them and holding X, and even if you don’t have any syringes to heal yourself, you will heal them. Additionally, finding your fellow detectives is a welcomed sight, especially when they’re able to help you fight thanks to their seemingly infinite ammo.
Typically, I envision a horrific experience as one that’s most powerful when alone, but the inclusion of other characters that you encounter was a good thing for the atmosphere and story. It helps bridge the gap between the beginning of the story and the middle and latter parts, which seem so distance from the start by the time you reach them. No character, including the protagonist, gets very well developed, but, I’ve experienced far worse and less interesting characters, so this group is at least serviceable even if largely generic and uninteresting. The story sees this trio of detectives of Krimson City arriving at the Beacon mental hospital after KCPD dispatch requested assistance. When they arrive to the scene, dozens of police officers have already gone inside, but everything is tensely quiet. Upon entering the lobby of the hospital, it’s a bloodbath, with one survivor, a doctor, babbling about someone named Ruvik. Moments later, Detective Sebastian Castellanos wakes up in a dismal and bizarre, sort of parallel universe. The only clear goal is to survive and figure out what’s going on, and the story is intentionally sort of vague and very deliberate about its revelations. I found the story to be very interesting and largely responsible for keeping me gnawing through some of the more frustrating gameplay aspects, and I’m glad I did.
With that, let’s get to the summary…
