For a decade after the launch of the original Resident Evil title in 1996, the recipe for the survival horror genre remained unchanged. Titles typically featured a small cast of terrified characters trapped in a remote building or town, with very little in the way of resources. Soon, awful things would come for them.
In Shinji Mikami’s Resident Evil titles it was hideously transmogrified zombies; in the more psychological Silent Hill series from Konami, it was nightmarish shop-window dummies and Jungian beasts with pyramid heads. Whatever the monsters were, you never had quite enough time or ammo; the controls were often ridiculously unintuitive; the camera angles deliberately obtuse. Everything in the world, including the joypad itself, was your enemy.
In the last 10 years, however, game design has moved on. On Xbox 360 and PS3, players became frustrated with the difficult testing nature of survival horror conventions – they were no longer prepared to struggle with aggressively dysfunctional control systems. The very fundamentals that made the original Resident Evil titles so tense and terrifying were being written out of accepted mechanics. Resident Evil 4 was a masterpiece, but Mikami designed it more as an action game than a horror experience, and subsequent titles provided pale imitations of that revised approach. Silent Hill withered; the ghostly Fatal Frame series dematerialised. Survival horror died.
But now it is coming back. Due out in late October, The Evil Within is Mikami’s latest opus, a darkly gothic tale of mad scientists and haunted mansions. The lead character is detective Sebastian Castellanos, who heads to a reported disturbance at an abandoned insane asylum, only to find a squad of police officers dead and a murderous spectral force on the loose. As Castellanos investigates, he uncovers the story of a deranged young scientist named Ruvik who carried out horrific human experiments, attempting to control the thoughts and actions of his victims. The rest of the game takes place through a series of supernaturally charged environments that may be real places or figments of Ruvik’s splintered imagination. Or both.
The horror survives
Judging by the sequence we played, a chapter named The Cruelest Intentions, the game seeks to exhume the traditions of the survival horror genre while making key concessions to the modern era. The level begins in the entrance hall of Ruvik’s delapidated mansion – a start point that will immediately take veteran gamers back to the original Resident Evil where the horrors of Umbrella mansion all branched from a similar start point. In the background is a huge door with multiple locks, around it a sumptuous curving staircase and several other exits. The challenge is to find the keys necessary to progress deeper into the mansion.
The haunted house location, ripped straight from an MR James story, is rendered with sombre detail, all peeling paint, cobwebbed books, and decaying family portraits (in another nod to Mikami’s original horror title, some of these paintings will have to be analysed carefully to solve a specific task). It is a place where your senses must remain alert to every audio visual nuance. The doors squeal horribly as they shut behind you. Torch lights flicker, sending shadows dancing grotesquely over the walls. Things thud and murmur just out of sight.
Suddenly out of nowhere the wraith-like figure of Ruvik will materialise, swooping toward you like the skull-faced angels at the close of Raiders of the Lost Ark. You can’t fight it, you must run away. The action-based controls, complete with run option, and a quiet stealth walk, allow this better then previous Resi titles, and even the environment is more amenable offering places like wardrobes, beds and tables that you can quickly slither into or under by pressing the Circle button. As in Dark Souls, players will have to work out which enemies they can fight and which they must simply avoid. It leads to a slightly deeper form of tension. It is tactical horror.
This is accentuated by the addition of a new leveling up system. Throughout each environment, players can find vials of green goo which can be used to improve the physical capabilities of the lead character or his weapons, adding to damage or ammo capacity. This upgrading process takes place in a nightmarish laboratory where Castellanos straps himself into a chair and injects himself with chemicals – gorily reflecting the game’s themes of experimentation and transmogrification.
The world is an enemy
The customisation section is housed within a weird safe area, accessible through mirrors located around the environment where players are sporadically able to record their progress. It’s another link back to the less forgiving era of survival horror; indeed, checkpoints are often many minutes apart, forcing a cautious approach.
Continually spooked and guarded, you explore onwards, through blood-splattered corridors, and dank cellars. “In my Resident Evil titles, a lot of the scary moments were confined to the cut scenes,” says Mikami. “However, people tend to relax during cinematic sequences so it’s not as effective. With Evil Within, we don’t intend to scare people during cut-scenes, we intend to scare them during the game.”
Consequently, horrible disfigured enemies jump out at you with no warning. They are tortured human monsters, their faces wracked with fury and pain. A butcher in leather apron and locked metal helmet; a demonic clown with a shotgun. There is a melee option, but this only ever pushes the monsters away temporarily – even shooting them is not enough: their bodies need to be burned (with a very limited supply of matches), to ensure they don’t come right back at you. Meanwhile, there are jump shocks everywhere; you are permanently on edge.
While the original Resi titles restricted the gamer’s view via fixed, highly expressionistic camera angles, the new game creates a similar sense of tension through sound effects (distant groans, footsteps in the darkness), and by giving players a glimpse of enemies though partially opened doors or collapsed walls. There are also cruelly obscured traps that explode if the player stumbles too close. If you spot them however, you can use the stealthy creep option to tip-toe over and disarm them, stealing the parts to create various bolts for the crossbow.
According to Mikami, the positioning of enemies has gone through dozens of stages of iteration – tweaked by millimetres for maximum impact, and then tweaked again. “We changed lots of things at the last minute,” he says.
Evil influences
Throughout the mansion, walking into certain rooms triggers ghostly cinematic flashback sequences that show excerpts from Ruvik’s life as he transforms from a spoiled rich brat into a darkly obsessive doctor. Evidence of his ghastly life is littered around, amid the ornate furnishings – diary entries, medical equipment, abandoned experiments. Mikami has mentioned Hellraiser as an influence, but Lovecraft is here too, lurking in the shadows cast by dying gas lamps. Interestingly, there is just one game visible in his small corner office, nestling beside an opened Vanquish action figure: it is the PlayStation Vita version of Telltale’s The Walking Dead.
Evil Within, then, takes the fundaments of survival horror, established in the first two Resident Evil games: the isolated characters, the jump shocks, the ornate yet eerie environments, the monstrous enemies. On top of these, however, it adds a more complex and authoritative control system, a customisation mechanic, and environments that offer both new perils and fresh escape opportunities.
After four years in development, the big question is whether The Evil Within can match the enthralling brilliance of Resi 4. Mikami has certainly put everything into it. Closely overseeing his development team at Tango Gameworks, it has clearly been a tiring process. “Some new bugs were introduced late on that were ... problematic,” he says at one point, while showing off the game. “It meant a lot of redesign. Bugs are what scare me the most.”
The Evil Within is released on 14 October on PC, PS3, PS4, Xbox 360 and Xbox One.
