Three years ago, The Evil Within took players on a twisted and scary survival horror journey. I enjoyed the game and its DLC, but loathed the combat because the protagonist, Detective Sebastian Castellanos of the Krimson City PD to be exact, had poor stamina and clunky controls. The low ammo and tight health supplies come with the survival horror genre, but Tango Gameworks left some room for improvement.
Enter the aptly named sequel, The Evil Within 2 (TEW2). The story takes place three years after the horrific events at the Beacon Hill mental institute that saw Castellanos and mysterious partner Kidman delve deep into the reaches of STEM, the bizarre, highly technological and dangerous Matrix-like invention of a shadowy corporation known as Mobius. In TEW2, players again reprise the role of Castellanos, who, in the three years since the mentally exhausting encounters at STEM, finds himself alone and trying to drink his issues away. The main issue on his mind is the guilt he feels from the death of his wife and daughter, who died in a terrible house fire. In an opening cutscene, Kidman and two Mobius agents enter the bar, and inform Castellanos that he is needed for a new mission, with a significant personal interest. His daughter, Lily, is not only alive, but she’s the Core in the latest iteration of the STEM — and she’s trapped inside of it.
Castellanos is understably reluctant to believe Kidman but the idea that his daughter might still be alive and that he has a chance to save her is too much to ignore (not to mention he didn’t have much of a life going on otherwise). He joins Mobius at their facility and prepares to dive back into STEM. Mobius wants to him to discover the whereabouts of a five member team they sent in, and to secure the Core. Right now STEM is on auto-pilot and the danger of that is severe. Castellanos’ focus remains on his daughter; he takes a communicator (walkie-talkie) into STEM that allows him to keep in touch with Kidman who is in the real world, and is dropped into the city of Union, a typical ‘Anytown, USA’ complete with small store fronts and other things you’d expect to find in a quaint small country town. The setting felt like Silent Hill at first, not necessarily a bad thing.
So, right away I noticed several things about TEW2 that differed from the orignal. This is basically an open world surival horror game, which is centered around this town called Union. There are friendly NPCs, including Kidman, that you stay in contact with via the Communicator, and safehouses where you can go to save, restock goods, and craft. There’s plenty of danger, but these elements drained some of the fear and atmosphere from the game, but not too much. I was worried the communicator would greatly reduce the immersion of the experience but I can’t say it really did; your mileage may vary of course. The Communicator is also used at save stations and to track down objectives, including many secondary objectives that are off the story-path but will yield weapon parts and other goods you can use to craft ammo and medical syringes, and also to kill some zombified enemies and get that green juice you may remember from the first game. Interestingly, and as a design decision I was pleased to see, weapon upgrades and ammo replenishing is done from exploring and finding loot, or through crafting, but these actions do not take away from the currency used to purchase character upgrades.
Union is relatively large, but also relatively small, if that makes since. It’s big enough to feel like a very small town, but also much bigger than about anything I can recall from the first game. This more open level design and open-world game design is a significant departure from the original game, and I couldn’t decide if I liked this change or not for a while. I kept thinking back to some times of playing Left 4 Dead years ago and being in areas with zombies in the streets that I could try and attack and probably fail or sneak past (and also potentially fail). I like that TEW2 gives players the option, and also the freedom to pursue side objectives that offer challenge, but also offer a way to tackle the bigger story or side missions. I remember times in TEW where I felt stuck on a mission with little recourse except to grind it out, and that’s rarely fun.
While TEW2 creates a fantastic atmosphere and sense of the unknown that you’ll want to discover everything about, it has a few flaws, too. Combat situations for me still created a lot of those “ugh, really?” moments whereby some immersive exploration and enjoyment were marred by an irritating combat encounter. Not all encounters are like this, and I felt like Castellanos had a lot more stamina for running than three years ago, but there are enough face-palm moments of having to load back to a checkpoint due to struggling with combat that I was tempted to drop to the Casual difficulty. I really wanted to learn the secrets of STEM, etc., just like the first game, but the combat still had that sense of being arbitrarily clunkly for difficulty sake. Additionally, sometimes within combat, there was a lack of impact, making it difficult to know if what I was doing was working or not, leading to some further frustrations in that arena. On the other hand, the sneak kills and well-executed traps left no doubt that, yeah, that worked, and was awesome.
In most every other way, though, TEW2 does a great job of building an interesting atmosphere that you want to immerse yourself into. It’s spooky, but it does this in the way I prefer games do this — with a sense of dread and uneasiness, not with jump scares, although there are some of those too. The story is interesting, even if Castellanos is a little bit flat as a protagonist (the washed up cop character type is a bit too routine), but there is certainly enough going on with the story, Castellanos, and the other characters to invest in. I liked some of the gameplay changes including being able to take on side missions to get additional resources, although survival horror purists may feel the opposite, and while it took some getting used to, the open world like nature of the game ended up working in its favor. All in effort to say that TEW2 is a great game, tempered a bit by combat woes but nonetheless a game I gladly recommend to fans of the first or newcomers to the series (or genre, for that matter).
###
