Understandably, The Consequence is meant for players who are already familiar with The Evil Within and The Assignment. If you haven’t played either of those, well, you can jump straight into The Consequence, but don’t expect to be able to make much if any sense of the story. As anyone who has played through The Evil Within and The Assignment will tell you, it’s a complicated story as is, and the story-telling can be hard to follow (intentionally, one could argue). That said, The Consequence begins at, and simultaneously refers to, the end of the events of The Assignment. As we learned in The Assignment, Juli Kidman was contracted by the mysterious, powerful organization known as Mobius to infiltrate the Krimson City PD. From here, she was to kidnap Leslie, a unique patient residing at the Beacon mental hospital.
Without trying to spoil too much, the mission didn’t pan out, and Kidman began to know more than Mobius would have liked her to. She begins to take matters into her own hands, under the duress of both Mobius’ mind games and the threat of Ruvik. Her pursuit takes her through many strangely warped, nightmarish places, several of which will be familiar from not only The Assignment but also the original game. Seeing different perspectives of areas previously visited is a game design element that can be really cool and rewarding for players who have ‘been here’ before, and I thought Tango Gameworks did a good job handling these moments. Note that, while you are revisiting some areas, Juli’s experience here is quite a bit different from the times the player was here before. Also, I should point out that for the most part, you are navigating through new areas not before seen.
In my review of The Assignment I noted that playing as Juli (as opposed to Sebastian from the main game), was a refreshing change of pace in that she relied much more (and often exclusively) on stealth than she did weapons. This worked to both ‘hide’ some of the worst aspects of the original game (i.e., the combat) while also providing means for some really intense sneaking and stealth gameplay. The Consequence keeps the cover-based stealth mechanics as a key part of the experience, but, there is far more gun-play than was in The Assignment. It’s somewhere around the halfway or two-thirds mark of this two-chapter DLC that guns are introduced, but it’s not all guns-blazing after that, thankfully. Afterall, this is a survival horror game so ammo is generally very tightly controlled, but more specifically, the story unfolds such that weapons are not an option for a time, until they once again become paramount later in the game.
I mentioned earlier that the story of The Evil Within is involved and complicated. We learned a lot more about the STEM project and many other aspects of The Evil Within universe in The Assignment, and you can expect to learn a boatload more in The Consequence. There are about a dozen of those in-game ‘ghost’ cutscenes in which you see events unfold as they did in the past, giving you more pieces to the overall puzzle. Audio recordings from Dr. Jimenez, scraps of notes unlocked from the Boxhead puzzle cubes, and cutscenes encountered in ‘realtime,’ with core characters go a long way to give players who have worked their way this deep into the story (aka madness) a lot of good information to appreciate and chew on.
I’ve also maintained that the story is one of the best parts of The Evil Within, and that it’s combat sequences are its worst, so I was disappointed again in key parts of The Consequence in which the combat took center stage. This is especially true at the end, where I thought the climax was not handled very well and relied too much on scarce ammo and shotgun blasts. For a game that has such a thick atmosphere that’s just soaked in dread and an uncomfortable, intangible weight, resorting to bland firearms combat and ‘find the prompt’ puzzles/interactions is unfortunate. Yet, on the whole, The Consequence is very much like the main game and the first DLC — disappointing in some aspects, but great in many ways.
With that, let’s get to the summary…
