I love me some horror, absolutely eat it up. With parents that allowed child-me to inappropriately stay up late and watch movies such as Child’s Play and Halloween whilst gifting me with survival horror titles such as Resident Evil 2 and Silent Hill for good grades, it’s no damn wonder there’s a deep, deep part of me that can’t get enough. While I’m inoculated against most scares, I’m not so immune I can’t enjoy a good fright, the amusement park kind that goes “it’s fun to be scared.” Of course there are other kinds of terror in this world, the worry when a loved one is injured or your credit score dips too low, or when you over pay for a video game that’s not finished because its well financed hype machine convinced you it’d be the horrorfest event of the year.
Welcome to SPOOOKY Tuesday. An annual (maybe, doubt it) event in which we examine creepy games that deserve only the best Terrible Tuesday treatment. I guarantee you the titles in this feature will be as fun as having your house egged while devouring a moldy pumpkin full of candy corn.
The Evil Within comes to us via the Granddaddy of Horror ™ Shinji Mikami and his publisher, Granddaddy of Glitches, Bethesda. Mikami-sensei’s the brains behind Resident Evil and Resident Evil 4, and should be given credit where credit’s due as both of those titles can very well be cited for changing the face of how Resident Evilses are played. Now Shinji had lightning strike twice, and as advertised on the package and in all of its marketing Evil Within will most definitely make it strike a third. I mean hey, advertisers would never, ever lie to us right?
Now let us fill the shoes of detective Sebastian some kind of Italian-last name, raised through the ranks of Krimson City’s boys in blue – Yes it’s actually called Krimson City. Sebastian along with his partners Joseph Oda and Juli Kidman get an emergency call to explore a spooky mental asylum. Now if you’re at all versed in survival horror you generally know visiting any kind of medical facility is typically pretty bad news. You know what else is bad news? Not being able to go to a medical facility at all because you don’t have Obamacare. Get on that. Your health is not a joke.
So Seb, Jo-Jo and Kiddy walk into the mental asylum to find corpses strewn everywhere, and next thing you know good ol Seb is knocked upside his head by some kind of digital ghost guy who is definitely not Resident Evil’s Wesker. Next thing you know he wakes up in a festering pit of a slaughter house with some psychopath wielding a chainsaw carving up flesh and Seb is clearly next on the menu. So now you have to escape what’s basically the worst hospital ever with the chainsaw psycho right behind you. Thanks, Obama. The psychopath slices open Seb’s leg, Seb falls face first into the ground and our resident Psycho, like any good chainsaw murderer… Lets Seb crawl away because how else could he show off his James Bond-ian murder trap of a spinning blade room?
One should never miss a chance to show off their ridiculously elaborate slow moving death traps.
Okay, sure, whatever, baddie caught us then let us go because I guess if logic worked here we wouldn’t have a video game. I’m sure someone brought this forward to Mikami-sensei during the meeting, pointed out that a spinning blades room is kind of stu… Oh, Shinji baby didn’t have any studio oversight or accountability whatsoever? This was his OWN studio so he could do whatever the fuck he pleases? I mean that’s fine, that usually works, no studio oversight gave us such masterpieces as Hideo Kojima’s Metal Gear Solid 4 and George Lucas’ second Star Wars trilogy, so all’s well that ends well.
Back to the game. For the next hour or so you have it pounded into your skull that stealth takes priority over all. Pay attention to your enemies pathing, make sure they NEVER fucking see you, hide in the lockers no one ever locks and good lord do not pee yourself. The bad guys can smell urine, they can see urine, and if they can see your urine, you’re not keeping hydrated enough and you most definitely need Obamacare because dehydration can lead to serious issues.
Seb, i.e. the player eventually reaches safety in the hospital’s elevator. Seb doesn’t need Obamacare because he has some kind of incredible Marvel comics-esque healing factor that seals that gaping wide chainsaw wound in his leg that had him limping the past half hour. Not only that, but Seb must also be a really good tailor, because you’d think his trousers never had a chainsaw through it at all. No studio oversight. So after a car chase scene pulled straight out of the smash hit game Alone in the Dark 5 for Xbox 360, Seb is back on his own and ready to tip toe around some more through the psychotic masses.
So yes. Keep in stealth. Keep in stealth forever. Keep in stealth until you die. Keep in stealth until you make it to the European village where you have to slaughter a bunch of enemies and shoot chainsaw guy with an exploding arrow… Wait, what? Yeah. So after a ton of studio made let’s plays, nonstop online, television and print advertisements and 2.5 missions that stress stealth, turns out you can just throw the whole thing out the window. Not only that, but I want you, Reader, to keep in mind this game takes place in the United States of America circa 2005, so medieval European villages may be just a tad out of place. Out of fairness I will say this game gives an excuse for Seb stomping around dark age villages and ancient ruins, but it’s a fairly lame and ill thought out excuse to just re-create Resident Evil 4’s set pieces all over again, because you don’t have to have a good reason when no one’s calling you on it.
Speaking of not calling anything out. Perhaps the most frightening aspect of Evil Within is paying 60 dollars for a game that isn’t done. Releasing something that runs at 10 – 15 frames per second is fairly inexcusable, with a day 1 patch that boost the title to a miraculous 20 frames per second. Every outdoor section of that game during the first half is damn near unplayable. I had less to fear from barbed wire zombies and giant mutant dogs and more to fear from a frame rate that wouldn’t allow anything to move anywhere. I will say the frame rate gets better as the game continues, only to be replaced by distracting texture pops. I had to wonder whether it was a multi-armed spider woman coming to kill me, or Pokémon’s Missing No.
Shinji Mikami is the guy who effectively killed tank mechanics in the genre by introducing to us Resident Evil 4. So it’s only fitting he brings back tank mechanics while disguising them as new mechanics. Moving Seb is kind of like moving a submarine through a sea of glue. Combat is, well, functional most of the time, though all enemies enjoy invincibility during any animation that isn’t walking. Boss type enemies vacillate between being unstoppable in one encounter to requiring the player to kill them in the next encounter, then later showing back up and being unstoppable once again. There’s really no rhyme or reason as to when a boss is a Terminator or when it’s a daffodil, and the only way to figure it out half the time is trial and error, wasting a lot of time running when you’re not supposed to run or dying when you’re not supposed to fight.
And before you go “Oh but hey, Jay, these bosses require strategy, I thought you liked that.” They don’t. And stop lying to yourself that they do. Most of my boss wins required I stand in one place and kill it until it died, and if you did anything but that with the exception of a scant handful of them well congratulations, you’ve been tricked into believing these bosses require planning and critical thinking.
So here we are. The game that promises to revolutionize survival horror. Let’s take stock of how we’re doing. Right now we have the combat of the later Resident Evils, a storyline that’s basically Silent Hill, the run and hide mechanics of Clock Tower and Haunting Ground, the crafting and stealth components of Tomb Raider and The Last of Us, and for some inexplicable reason a cutscene pulled straight out of Alone in the Dark. If by “revolutionize” survival horror they mean ‘throw every component of Survival Horror from the past 20 years into a mushy, vegetable medley not worthy of landing on a high school lunchroom floor” then they nailed it.
Now at this point you may think the amount of bitter contempt and overbearing sarcasm towards the game means I didn’t enjoy any part of it, and that’s totally not true. The boss designs, when I wasn’t distracted by their repetitive nature or the graphical glitches screwing up their models, were pretty okay. I could also truly appreciate Juli Kidman’s white shirt moistening mechanics. The game found several reasons to get Juli soaked and remind you that the junior detective wears a black lacy bra. Kudos, Tango Gameworks, I am a straight male and I took note.
I don’t know if there’s any particular reason why the developers felt she always needed to be wet. I don’t know if it matters.
Know what else is cool about it? It came with an actual, for real paper instruction booklet with character bios on Sebby, Jo-Jo, Kiddy and everything. For those of you that aren’t 15 years old and may have actually missed those.
So let’s conclude. If you want, as the advertisements and developer commentary tells us, a video game that uses sound design and unique environments to create the most tension possible, a game where you must use stealth and hiding spots to survive, where every bullet and health kit is a precious commodity, where you are not a walking tank and are tragically mortal, where the game AI learns as you play and adapts to fight you. Well then, the game you want is Alien: Isolation. If you don’t want any of that stuff, buy Evil Within.
I’d take this game a little more seriously if Bethesda, Tango Gameworks and Mikami took me a bit more seriously as a consumer. It basically feels like they took an unfinished, unpolished product and then dumped most of the money they should have used for quality assurance into marketing just to to TELL us it’s the best survival horror game ever as opposed to actually making it so. If it didn’t feel like a game I definitely played before (Resident Evil 4) only not as good, I may walk away a happier camper. However the Terrible Tuesday feature exists for the sake of jest and levity so let’s end this on a punchline:
The Evil Within.
