“Out of Ammo?!”
Release Date: October 14, 2014
Platform: PS4(Reviewed), PC, PS3, X360, XB1
Developer: Tango Gameworks
Publisher: Bethesda Softworks
Genre: Survival Horror Adventure
Price: ₹2,999(PC), ₹3,999(PS3, X360), ₹4,270(PS4, XB1)
[divider]
Shinji Mikami loves his monsters. While our monsters often hide under the beds, in Shinji san’s case they sleep alongside; tell him their nightmarish plots and backstories. And Shinji Mikami’s tainted love for his monsters is what makes and breaks his greatest stories. Such is the tale of his return to Survival Horror, with the new Tango Gameworks IP – The Evil Within.
Mikami is a champion when it comes to completely f***ing up your mind, and The Evil Within might just have been the benchmark.
The Evil Within starts by replicating an incident from the original Resident Evil, making the fan inside you gutted for more of those nostalgic chills. Mikami is a champion when it comes to completely f***ing up your mind, and The Evil Within might just have been the benchmark. The convoluted plot of The Evil Within pits Sebastian Castellanos, a detective and his team of officers, into an asylum, filled with some of your worst nightmares and other hellish creatures. As soon as you step inside the mental asylum, you realise that this world is not what it seems to be, as buildings tear down and roads crash, trapping you in a Silent Hill kind of state. Insert more of that vintage fanboyism. The game slowly builds up the plot and sub plots, allowing you to hate the world before you actually start hating the lead antagonist – Ruvik. The major bummer throughout the game is that Mikami wants to lay out the intertwined story pivots and construct something solid out of it, but the gameplay somehow overwhelms the cause. As a result of which, you completely lose track of what the story is all about, or how the central character is emerging out to be, and your only direction is to survive.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2loS7H8Kim0
In one of my earlier The Evil Within speculation articles I wrote how I adore classic horror, and honestly, Mikami nails all those moments in the best way possible. Although the first gameplay chapter hangs Sebastian upside down and leaves a feeling that it is way too close to Tomb Raider’s tutorial chapter, the Butcher stands as the differentiator. The Butcher is the first monster you meet in The Evil Within; devoid of any primary arsenal, Sebastian needs to slither through the map, avoid bloody traps, and simply escape. A fat, wretched character, with a butcher’s knife dripping human blood, he splits human flesh with open eyes. Once he is aware of your presence he will exchange his knife for a meatier chainsaw and charge you until he gets close enough to drill the machine right through your spleen. The amount of monstrosity that concocts each of the bosses in The Evil Within is pure admirable, and within your playthrough you realise that they have their strengths and weaknesses. Escaping the clutches of the butcher, I found myself wasting my precious bullets on other monsters, jarred, deranged creatures who hunt you in The Evil Within. The game hates making peace with your mind or thumbs/fingers, and even the safest spot would be open to monstrosity time and again.
The game tries its level best to mix stealth and run and gun
Even though the plot turns fascinating by the middle of The Evil Within (especially when the roots of Ruvik are discovered as a part of his memory stains), it is the gameplay that takes the centre stage in this 16 hour long single player story. The game tries its level best to mix stealth and run and gun, however the enemy AI, hidden traps and the difficulty settings in the game always push you to rush it, and you choose the latter, even though a stealth approach is more apt in a game where resources are limited. There is no instinct button in The Evil Within, with which you can CAT scan the exact location of your nearby enemies and plan your way to sneak out. Add to this, tons of bombs and bear traps that you need to be wary of. While a Listening Mode may have helped you out of situations (reflecting on Naughty Dog’s The Last Of Us), it seems that the developing studio was headstrong in throwing you into a gunfight, with tons of enemies and limited ammo. Which brings me to the next context: you need to run a lot. Enemies aren’t as fast as you would imagine in The Evil Within, and often come in horde, but if you get surrounded there may be a chance that you will get butchered with a few blows. The melee isn’t godlike, so avoid meleeing someone for the heck of it. The camera movement felt kind of buggy while I was playing on the PS4, and there was definitely a delayed response while I was trying to adjust Sebastian to look towards/away from the target, this completely broke down my run and gun strategies. Since these enemies aren’t the RE brawlers, but manifestations of Ruvik’s nightmarish plot, they often charge you with chainsaws, hammers, or snipe you from distance. Your health bar won’t auto heal to its maximum, unless you heal yourself with a Medi Kit (they are absolutely rare), and you will need to stop running if you’re running out of stamina (shown in a bar next to your health) or else Sebastian will break a sweat while running (automated action) and enemies will beat the hell out of your dear character. All these clinical difficulty aspects make The Evil Within a commitment and less of a rejuvenating survival horror experience. Prepare to throw your controller away, a lot.
Since the E3 demo days, Mikami was headstrong in delivering a cinematic experience with The Evil Within, and even when gamers and journalists worldwide dreaded the Letterboxing of the in-game frame, the final product featured the exact same thing. Let’s face it, the visuals in the game weren’t exactly mind blowing, but surely embodying the classic Mikami style and naturally immersive, with blood splatters, meat chunks, dead bodies rotting. Yes the framerate wasn’t that consistent, but screen tearing instances were way lesser than what I’ve already seen with other titles. But it was the aspect ratio and the crop area that became the headache in The Evil Within. As a result, my gameplay suffered a lot while I was trying to sacrifice tons of advantages (like visibility of enemies who are above me) for the sake of letterboxing. I would be hit by random bullets fired from random locations, and Sebastian would eventually die with his torso ripped apart into two halves. But these are the glaring shortcomings of this completely new IP, let’s talk of some of the positive bits.
Let’s face it, the visuals in the game weren’t exactly mind blowing, but surely embodying the classic Mikami style and naturally immersive, with blood splatters, meat chunks, dead bodies rotting.
The Evil Within surely features some of the best SFX that I’ve experienced in a game. The wailing in the next room or the shrieking from above me alerted me of hostile presence in an otherwise peaceful looking library. The Agony Bow, no matter how scarcely loaded it was, is one of the coolest weapons I have used in recent times. Switch between Explosive, Incendiary, Frost, Harpoon, Poison (Luring) and Flashbang Arrows and watch your enemies submit to your reign. Unwind proximity bombs or smash boxes to find parts, which you can use to create a bow of your wish. You can retrieve bows that did not blow up along with an enemy, so that you do not go around wasting your limited resources. The shotgun is one of the most NOOB friendly weapons in The Evil Within, and thank god, it comes early in the game. Shoot at enemy pairs with the Shotgun and watch them die. Unless they wake up from the floor again. Yes, Evil Within makes you decide for yourself whether you want to completely kill off an undead (so that it doesn’t reappear in that level) or leave it slumbering on the floor. Of course you will need matchsticks to burn their bodies, and like the other parts, they do not come in plenty. Some of the levels are as terrifying and unholy as the main plot itself, and like I stated once before, there is no rest and peace in The Evil Within.
The biggest takeaway from The Evil Within is Mikami’s old school scheme of letting you take down the lesser ghouls until you are ready to meet the big deal of that chapter, a glorified and horribly overpowered Level Boss.
Everything happens in and out of your character’s consciousness in The Evil Within, and as Sebastian, you will often wake up from the nightmarish missions, trapped in a hospital ward. That will be your only safe point in the whole game, allowing you to save your progress (by signing off in a record book) or level up your character (by going through a lobotomy procedure). Throughout your playtime you will often hear a symphony (that you must have heard in Chris Nolan’s Inception) calling out to you, which is an indication that a portal to reach your safe point is nearby. These portals are nothing but mirrors that break once Sebastian traverses through them, breaking the nightmare, and thus the symphony music becomes significantly pleasing at dire times. The biggest takeaway from The Evil Within is Mikami’s old school scheme of letting you take down the lesser ghouls until you are ready to meet the big deal of that chapter, a glorified and horribly overpowered Level Boss. The classic Mikami not only ensures that you are ready, but also laughs back at you if you are out of bullets and bow, and whack, comes out his most monstrous creation – be it the Keeper in the catacombs, the village Sadist, the Guardian Twins in the graveyard or the shrieking Laura, a reformed version of the ghost girl from the hit Jap Horror – Ju On (The Ring). Mikami wants you to feel under pressure every time a level boss kills you with one hit, and thus you go running, looking for ways to defeat the boss. Each boss has a disliking, for example Laura hates fire, and you will find easier takedown methods hidden within the level. The pace of each boss encounter is so high that it is seriously a task to manage everything. Even though when some of the boss fights are interesting and memorable, repeated encounters with monsters you have already killed frustrates the survivor in you. There is way too much detailing in each boss, the way they move, the disliking, appearance and their backstory, is too much fact for a fast paced boss fight. The Amalgamation Monster is one of the most horrific of Mikami’s creations, and the specific level called The Craftsman’s Tool (that features the Carousel of Blades) is easily one of the most horrific places to be stuck in. And that’s when you embrace the Mikami complex, that’s when you realise how dearly he loves pure, untouched EVIL.
Some of the evil in The Evil Within speak in volumes about the creative depth that inspires the master of horror, Shinji Mikami. He fills his levels up with equal distribution of advantages and disadvantages, it is up to you to get killed by a bomb or use it to kill enemies. Tons of positive attributes bought from the earlier Resident Evil series have been polished further. Enemies’ heads burst like balloon, shooting at their limbs slows them down, and there are other such trivial intricacies that make the horrors within you worthwhile. However the game faces a serious challenge mixing the stealth sections with the run and gun bits, and the lack of a CAT scan leaves even the smartest of gamers praying for luck. The mesmerising SFX department and the detailed enemy characterisation lay down guidelines for future survival horror titles. Ruvik and his encounters are as horrific as they look in the trailers. But there are tons of shortcomings that make me say this, if you haven’t bought The Evil Within yet, you might want to wait up for a Flash Sale or something.
