Well well well. If it isn’t Covid. Still here I see? Well fuck it then. Halloween month. I put lights up, I got all the spices associated with pumpkin, I got some gummi sweets, and I'm gonna whip something promising out of the old backlog.
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| Thinking you should consider changing optometrists. |
This year's spook-em-up is Tango Gameworks' The Evil Within. A little bit of a spiritual successor of Resident Evil 4, one of the highest acclaimed games in its genre and in general. If you've played a shooty game in the past decade, you've probably got a decent idea of what you're in for. A third person over-the-booty shooty with Not-Zombies™, crafting, and gross toilets. How about you lead us in on the story and characters, Al? What is The Evil Within about?
So it’s about a Bruce Campbell lookin' cop dude who is supposed to be investigating a massacre at a mental hospital(?) with his 2 cop buddies but instead he starts trippin' balls and next thing you know the city explodes. Also you collect jars of piss green goo which are EVERYWHERE. And you inject them??? Directly into your brain with some medieval murder chair looking thing????
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| No seriously, medial school credentials? second opinion maybe? |
Now now, maybe only half of it is in jars. The rest can be slurped off the filthiest, muddiest, blood-caked ground. Regardless of how it's sourced, more brain juice makes you brain harder. Seems pretty simple to me, and Sebastian doesn't hesitate or question it for a moment. There is something to be said though that he needs to inject his skull with stuff to think of impressive upgrades like "I can carry an extra bullet of 1 specific type of gun in my back pocket", or "what if I carry 6 matches instead of 5?"
Didn’t get far before I'm clocking that this whole series of events is taking place in some sort of… subconscious brainscape. Some dreamosphere mind prison. Seb keeps passing out and waking up in the next area, and seeing ghosts and shit. I guess it could be frustrating if you don't roll with it, but I'm kinda fine with them making it convenient to just skip to a bunch of wacky locations without having to contextualise a sense of time and place. Now I just never know what's gonna happen.
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| OK on some level I kinda knew this was gonna happen. |
I thought it worked well too. Transitions tend to be really in your face, and met with audible confusion from the characters. When you see the characters roll with it though, it's pretty effortless to just go on the ride along with them. Speaking of "them", I suppose we should do an official rundown of the major players of the game as well. We kind of hinted at Sebastian Castellanos already. He's pretty much your cookie cutter Sad Cop™. The jovial beloved family man, who at the same time is also a workaholic that is always too busy to actually spend time with his family, and then falls into alcoholism and depression when his family is taken away from him. You're expected to just trust them on the former, because you only see the post-tragedy version of him, who's just a jaded, hard boiled arse with sexist baggage.
You’ve got buddy cop Joseph Oda, I think he’s supposed to be kinda stuck up but I love him he’s just doing his best. Other buddy cop Juli Kidman, who's a very Ada Wong-ish high heel kickin’ running off ahead-ing morally unclear kind of associate. Everyone is obnoxiously sexist towards her, nicknaming her “Kid” and complaining that she gets too cocky. She killed a zombie with her foot, Seb.
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| Watch out Costa, they're coming for your maple hazel lattes! |
Joseph would never disrespect her like that. He wears glasses like a real human boy. It's mostly Sebastian and her boss that talk down to her, because she knows how to do things, and it annoys them I guess. But yeah, I like Kidman and Joseph. They're a little underdeveloped, but you quickly care more about them than you care about the lead. There's also Leslie, who's just a scared little boy who you chase around. Not much to say about him. He just freaks out a lot and is terrified of the monsters. Fair though. Then there's some obviously shady dumb professor guy who's way too chill about the nightmarescape full of death and destruction. Immediately sus, and you kinda wait for him to eat dirt. Can't even say if he does in the end though.
And then finally there’s “Ruvik”, a mysterious ghost in dorkass Assassins Creed cosplay who likes to appear every now and then just to shit you up. On top of that there’s your token videogame not-zombies and an exciting rogues gallery of pretty terrifying ghosts mutants including WOMAN WITH ALL TOO MANY LIMBS and OBVIOUSLY PYRAMID HEAD INSPIRED GUY WITH A SAFE FOR A HEAD. I sound snarky but their encounters are actually fantastically tense and each new enemy design you encounter fills you with dread. You got a favourite enemy encounter, Tobi?
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| Damn bitch you live like this? |
Oh boy, do I ever. The most terrifying and startling enemy in the game for me were the friggin' bomb traps. They're these proximity sensing devices that will know if you're near, and will blow you up into bits. You can catch them off guard by crouching and sneaking, which lets you safely disable them and recycle them into scrap parts for arts and crafts. They place these bombs all over the place. Often around corners or at the start of new rooms. My most memorable one though is when you enter a room, see some ammo or a jar of tasty tasty brain juice in the distance. As you approach it though, you pass a stack of crates, and immediately behind it is one of these beeping suckers, ready to pop. Not only did it startle me good, it also got me again when I watched Allie play. Absolutely disgusting.
Ok yeah fair point. This game resembles Resident Evil 4 in a lot of ways, but it adds in some new hooks that lend well to what's already there. One is the traps that create a whole new kind of jump scare, and the other is the CROSSBOW weapon. You have a (frankly rather pointless) craft system to make speciality bolts of your choice, where can zap enemies, flashbang them, blow them up. 2 outta 5 of your options are actually any good, but they do a lot of damage and have decent range, and it's pretty fun to pin a ghoul to the wall and watch their ragdoll do a little jiggly dance. Not so scary now- well ok that's actually horrifying I guess. Any more thoughts in that big juicy brain of yours?
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| Hello im a local representative from the conservative party can we count on your vo- |
Not really. I thought it was good. Not Resident Evil 4 good, but I liked it. Will play the next one at some point. Fun game to play, and a fun game to backseat hassle someone else over. It never does anything terribly original, but I guess that wasn't a huge problem.
I give this game a ZOMB BOMB out of 10. It was flashy, campy, and it didn’t disappoint. I think I enjoyed the hell out of it. I tend to prefer a more actiony game to the stealth horrors like Outlast and Alien Isolation, and this one managed to prove that you don’t need to spend *all* your time hiding in cupboards and fixing generators to be a properly tense, scary game. Though ok, it had a bit of that too.
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| Ah, to be an advertising agency in a Japanese horror game. |
