Bethesda; PC/PS3/PS4 (version tested)/Xbox 360/Xbox One; £45; Pegi rating: 18
Shinji Mikami is universally acknowledged as one of the games industry’s true luminaries. He effectively invented the enduring survival horror subgenre with 1996’s Resident Evil, but he also sowed the seeds of what purists see as its downfall, by moving 2004’s Resident Evil 4 (the last game in the series on which he worked, and a game that truly deserves the epithet “seminal”) in a more action-oriented direction. The good news for those who like their gore-laden adventures untainted by the merest hint of compromise is that he has now gone right back to his roots.
The Evil Within is pure, unadulterated, first-principles survival horror, with an equal emphasis on both the survival and horror parts. If you crave fast twitch gaming, you’ll be disappointed: The Evil Within is all about making the most of limited resources, nailing headshots and working out the correct tactics to take down the mini-bosses and the major bosses (both of which are plentiful and satisfyingly bizarre) as well as assorted groups of mutants.
The enemies will be pretty familiar to Resident Evil fans, despite the game’s more supernatural focus, and as the action progresses, they increasingly resemble what Frankenstein may have come up with if he’d had access to modern medical technology. As a measure of how determined Evil Within is to conform to survival horror principles, the only way you can be sure that most mutants won’t get up after you knock them down is by burning them – and in your base state, you can carry a grand total of four matches.
Mikami has clearly been liberated by not having to worry about the Resident Evil universe, with all its characters, conflicts and interlocked timelines. The Evil Within’s storyline is madness incarnate, containing all manner of alternate realities (falling is a recurring theme, as is temporary suspension of gravity in cut-scenes, and corridors routinely reconfiguring themselves, leading to unexpected places).
The story of mad doctor Ruvik, the eminence grise behind an outbreak of ghostly murder in Krimson City, unfolds as the game progresses, and the further in you get, the more Hellraiser-like the general vibe becomes. The Evil Within makes no attempt at the sort of general plausibility that is the current vogue on the horror film scene, but ratchets up the weirdness and reality-warping to deeply chilling effect. As with its gameplay, it takes an old-school approach to scaring you.
At first, it places stealth to the fore – you can sneak up behind mutants and execute them with a single stab to the top of the head. Which is just as well, since you start with only character Sebastian Castellanos’ police-issue revolver, and ammo is virtually non-existent. You do find things like axes but, while they will dispatch mutants with a single blow, they disintegrate after a single use. If you are spotted, you need to nail those headshots. Soon, though, you get some great weapons – the mega-powerful shotgun is every bit as fulfilling as the one in the Resident Evil games – but the stand-out is the crossbow, which lets you craft various types of bolts which freeze, deliver an electric shock or temporarily blind enemies (allowing a stealth take-down), or operate as sticky bombs.
Each type of crossbow bolt can be crafted from parts scavenged from traps that you defuse. Traps loom large in The Evil Within – you need to use them with precision to take down certain bosses, and there’s one recurring boss called Boxman (who has a safe for a head, and a penchant for ripping that head off so that he can respawn into another safe and continue pursuing you) who lays traps that can be turned against him.
Luckily, The Evil Within’s inventory system is vastly less fiddly than that of Resident Evil. The upgrade system is great, too: Castellanos collects green gunk, which is its currency, and can upgrade a vast array of abilities, weapon attributes and, handily, ammo capacity. Upgrading is enacted by strapping yourself into a sort of torture chair, in the game’s hub area which, naturally, is a mental asylum.
20 hours of terror
The Evil within offers a pretty meaty gameplay experience of about 20 hours, depending on how well you play, even though it eschews modern niceties such as multiplayer or co-op modes. Even on the laughably named Casual difficulty setting, it’s dead challenging, so cranking up the difficulty does add replay value.
The brain-melting storyline, you suspect, was at least in part conceived as a means of allowing the gameplay to jump-cut around multiple locations – including a creepy manor house straight out of Resident Evil central casting and that old Japanese developers’ staple, a city turned inside-out by an earthquake. Some of the chapters bring puzzle-solving (generally a means of getting to inaccessible areas) to the fore, others offer a succession of boss-encounters, a few put you at the heart of chase sequences and you do sometimes encounter Resident Evil 4-style waves of mutants. The Evil Within ebbs and flows nicely, and some of the later chapters in particular, are thoroughly epic.
So, is The Evil Within a proper, back-to-core-values Resident Evil for the 21st century? In a word, yes. It couldn’t even resist the temptation to put “Evil” in its name. It more or less is Resident Evil, with its unathletic, slow-moving protagonist, devastating shotgun, crates to smash, near-monochrome visuals, reel-to-reel tape recorders, squelchy mutant bosses and so on. You even see the odd typewriter, but disappointingly, you can’t interact with them.
Mikami’s latest work is not enormously 21st-century, though: the graphics are serviceable rather than beautiful, and it has a designed-in level of clunkiness that forces you to play in a certain way. It does, however, take the opportunity to ditch some of Resident Evil’s more annoying traits – you don’t turn like a tank anymore.
The upshot is that The Evil Within will give survival horror purists a rare contemporary pleasure fix. But be warned: if you prize smooth, silky action above all else, it will drive you insane.
