I touched on this idea when I wrote my critique on Resident Evil 7, but I’ll go ahead and say it again: not everyone is affected by the same kind of horror. Some people can’t stand gore, some people reel back from psychopaths, and some people even have phobias of such mundane things as Styrofoam (yes, I know a guy).
When making a horror game, the developers and game designers should understand that not everyone will have the preferred reaction to the morbid little surprises they pepper into their demented little world. Some of them, unfortunately, don’t exactly get the message.
Bethesda Softworks published a game in 2014 titled The Evil Within. The title already reveals a lot of what to expect, but I’ll clarify if it seems too broad. The Evil Within is a game where you quite literally explore the dark recesses of a calculating, murderous scientist’s mind. No, really.
With a premise like this, it gives some serious freedom of design and creative expression – you can do almost anything when the setting is a crazy person’s brain. There are endless possibilities. However, therein lies the problem with The Evil Within: it tries to do way too much at once.
While the monster and environment designs are cool and show the effort put behind them, there doesn’t seem to be any effort to narrow them down to any specific kind of “scary thing.” There’s a whole lot of blood and barbed wire on display throughout the whole experience.
The levels are a bit disorganized as well. They’re set up in a way that you could literally take each chapter and rearrange them in a different order and the game would still make the same amount of sense.
And don’t even get me started on the tropes…okay, well, I’ll get myself started. Your protagonist is a 5-o’clock shadowed, gruff detective with an alcohol problem whose family is no longer in the picture – at least his name is unique, though. Sebastian Castellanos. That’s a lot more creative than anything that sounds vaguely like Dick Tracy. However, Sebastian’s voice and dialogue can pretty much be predicted, so I suppose the gritty apple doesn’t fall far from the detective tree.
So, here we go. Let’s fasten out badges and plug into the brain of a crazy egomaniac with The Evil Within. Tomorrow we’ll really dive into the nitty gritty.