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The Evil Within Complete: Crazy Clown Time!

I’ll just get to the point. I love this game! If you’ve read any of my blog posts in the past then this shouldn’t come as a surprise. I really love survival/horror games. In particular I love Resident Evil, old skool survival/horror and I like spooky atmospheres and hostile environments and this game delivers—almost as if custom made for me, albeit diabolically, albeit imperfectly. Although this is the game I was wishing for, it falls a bit short, but otherwise still great!

I honestly didn’t know much about the game until it was released. I wanted to go into it fresh and I was pleasantly surprised for doing this.  The game is definitely strange. I’ll even say the game seems a bit schizophrenic at times.  I can’t really compare it to any other game in recent memory, but that doesn’t mean that it isn’t familiar. On the contrary, this game is essentially a remix of many other survival horror games combined into one (Resident Evil 4 and Silent Hill most notably). One main departure is that the game stages are laid out in a dismembered and illogical way that likes to weave in and out of itself like barbed wire. The only other game that comes to mind that shares this level design is Eternal Darkness, which also jumped around in time and locations as well as having a psychological element.

Each chapter appears to embody self-contained worlds. There doesn’t seem to be a consistent direct connection between each chapter at first or towards the end of the game as you progress through 15-20 hours of the main campaign which is composed of 15 chapters. Trying to figure out why these worlds exist or how they are connected functions as a motivation to continue to the end of the game, which is somewhat lacking in narrative and character development which is disappointing.

Some of the better reviews I’ve read have avoided spoilers or synopsis of the game, so I won’t spoil anything either. The one thing that is new in this game is stealth mechanics, although it isn’t always a perfect system. A lot of the gun play in games like RE 4 – 6 also makes a return as well as some melee action, which personally  I mostly avoided (the melee part). The game is also full of traps. Spike traps, wire traps, bear traps, motion sensor bombs that require you to creep along at certain times. One of the more powerful weapons in the game is the cross-bow. It is a bit slow and your inventory is quite limited but it does offer a variety of area-of-effect attacks like explosions, freezing or stunning with lightning damage. You will get out of a lot of binds when using this thing, especially useful for large mobs, or boss fights. You can also take apart wire traps and bombs to build more bolts  for it. Most chapters end with a boss fight which, were pretty common in games like Resident Evil and Silent Hill, and they are common here. This game mostly plays like a retro PSOne or PS2 survival horror game except with a few more added gaming mechanics. Oh, and you can also level up your skills by sitting in an electric chair! Awesome!

The thing I really loved the most about the game was the atmosphere, environments and sound design. The game has a “cinematic” presentation from beginning to end, meaning there are black bars across the top and bottom of the screen throughout the whole game, which is umm…different. There’s been a lot of controversy about this design choice and I’m not going to chime in. The black bars at the top and bottom of the screen didn’t keep me from finishing the game and it did add to the tension for me, although there are ways to remove the black bars and a way to pull the camera back to give you more real estate on PC. (I played on PC and I didn’t do this). There is also some issue with frame rates on consoles and PC, but it didn’t really affect my gameplay. I was suffering a bit of frame rate dipping but that’s mostly because my PC isn’t brand new, but it didn’t prevent me from playing or finishing the game. I was also running a PS3 controller emulator so maybe that’s why? There is a patch available for consoles which fix frame rates, but I cannot validate that info.

This game is just gorgeous! It is really violently gross and bloody and uses graphics, shadow and lighting to really showcase this. It reminded me a lot of the Gamecube version of Resident Evil which still maintains a superb graphical presentation to this day.

To conclude, I love it! There isn’t anything revolutionary about this game that will convince new players to try it out or win over gamers who dislike this genre aside from maybe the visuals. It plays a lot like Resident Evil 4 and this game is truly its spiritual successor except it has more of a psychological theme to it and a lot more death traps. You will die a lot. This game has a lot of ways for you to die and you will probably experience most of them. The game is designed to guarantee this. I would not recommend for the impatient or rage quitters. 

 

 -@asrealasitgets