The Evil Within, and the BS Without

 Imagine you’re a police officer. Your wife and daughter have been lost to you, and your efforts to solve the case have been stonewalled. You’re already in a pretty bad mood. Then you have to go to some mental hospital to respond to a crisis. When you arrive, you and your partners quickly discover the scene of a massacre. You quickly find a survivor, a pale patient, and the doctor who is trying to help calm him down. But then your attention is drawn to a nearby security console where you witness a hooded man take out some of your fellow officers with supernatural ease. Then he appears behind you and you are out like a light.

Sound good so far? Well, this is where things start to go sideways. You wake up upside down in a meat locker. You break free, but then must sneak to the butcher’s room and steal his keys without notice. Got ‘em? Good. Now open the nearby locked door and… you are being chased. You have no weapons; you have no way to defend yourself. If you are seen, if the chainsaw guy catches up to you, you’re doing this all over again. Still, this scene isn’t the worst “stealth” horror game I’ve played… and thankfully once you escape the hospital things change.

 

You escape, with some colleagues, in an ambulance, but then the city around you begins to collapse. Is it an earthquake? Is it a Titan? Is it being hooked up to a computer the whole time and secretly a program that’s being run while you’re hooked up to the machine? At this point, God and the people who think they’re God that run Facebook only know. (Screw you Meta… and your desire to hook people up to a “metaverse” like a bad horror movie plot!)  But then suddenly you’re in a Forrest. The ambulance has crashed, and your colleagues have vanished. But then you find one, having turned into a zombie, eating another colleague in a scene that looks like the initial zombie encounter in Resident Evil. I mean almost shot for shot… oh it’s a Shinji Mikami game! This should be good! And now, you can fight back! But also, stealth! And also, running and hiding, and also absolutely none of these mechanisms are polished at all and none of them work quite right! Wait, this is a Shinji Mikami game?

 

Stealth will get you through the next area, but it isn’t long before there are too many enemies, who are far too aggressive for this strategy to work. This is fine because the game is generous enough with ammunition to make shooting enemies an option… although aiming is clunky. It can be improved with upgrades, bought with brain goo you’ll collect through the game, but even as you adjust to the not-as-good-as-RE gun play the game’s worst feature rears its ugly head. One hit kills. Not for you. No. Done to you. Over and over and over. If you heard a lot of expletives emanating from my house, this was why. It’s as if Shinji Mikami, a man who used to set trends in the horror game space, started chasing them instead, only to end up with a game that is part survival horror, part action, and part stealth game, while doing none of these mechanics particularly well. So, since he couldn’t scare you the way other games have, he’d scare you by giving almost everything a means to one-shot you, including a multi-encounter boss, Laura, whose only attack is a one-hit kill. This is the only thing “hard” about this game, but it’s not as hard as it is obnoxious.

 

And the story? Well… it’s weird enough that you get pulled into all kinds of different environments at

random, not literally, but at first, none of the areas seem connected at all. Then you have characters witnessing their family members turn into monsters that you must put down only for that NPC to barely react. But Shinji Mikami isn’t that bad of a writer. I knew right away something was up. This wasn’t a typical zombie story. But while the game sets up a massive mystery that I admit had me hooked… the twist to the narrative left me feeling let down. Spoiler alert. The bad guy is basically Mark Zuckerberg, and you’re hooked up to the Metaverse.

 

It’s not necessarily a bad story, but it doesn’t quite land in a game that borrows heavily from every other game in the genre while refusing to polish anything it took. The game is clunky and uneven, frustrating at times, but not bad. It’s just not as good as it could have been. The story also tries to fill in its own plot holes the same way Final Fantasy XV did… with DLC. And now the game decides it wants to be a stealth game, like Outlast. A game I was never particularly fond of, as games like these don’t scare me, they tick me off like Meta’s uneven rules enforcement.

 

The game throws a myriad of interesting monsters at you, but the only thing any of them will be remembered for is being rip-offs of Silent Hill, who one-shot you if you so much as blink wrong. There’s even a monster, “Safe Head,” that looks eerily like Silent Hill’s Pyramid Head, and wouldn’t you know it, there’s a boss battle towards the end where you must fight two of them… just like Silent Hill.

 

It may seem like I am raining hate on this game, but if so, it’s only because I expected more from it. The legacy of Shinji Mikami is deep and rich. This is the guy who gave us Resident Evil. But somehow, rather than creating another masterpiece of gaming horror, we got a mid-quality Sci-Fi Channel movie plot, with gameplay that was all over the place, made more painful by the over-reliance on one-hit kills instead of genuine tension, atmosphere… or even jump scares. The game isn’t bad. It’s just not good either, and that’s the worst part of it.

 

3/5. Play it, if you’re out of better games to play. Just don’t expect anything special.