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.Įach type of crossbow bolt can be crafted from parts scavenged from traps that you defuse. If you are spotted, you need to nail those headshots. You do find things like axes but, while they will dispatch mutants with a single blow, they disintegrate after a single use. Which is just as well, since you start with only character Sebastian Castellanos’ police-issue revolver, and ammo is virtually non-existent. As with its gameplay, it takes an old-school approach to scaring you.Īt 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. 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. 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’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). Mikami has clearly been liberated by not having to worry about the Resident Evil universe, with all its characters, conflicts and interlocked timelines. 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. 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. 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 Evil Within is pure, unadulterated, first-principles survival horror, with an equal emphasis on both the survival and horror parts.
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