In the grand scheme of things, The Evil Within did something very cool – it created a messed-up world where an egomaniac controlled what existed and what would die. The concrete and rebar became rust and rubble. But when you get down to it, there’s no real method to the abundance of madness.
Sebastian starts the game right after coming off of a case. He receives a call and heads right towards Beacon Mental Hospital with his partner Joseph Oda and junior detective Juli Kidman, where things quickly go off the rails. Apparently, there’s a powerful madman called Ruvik who drags them into his mental world and send his forces to kill them. Ruvik is the main villain in the game, and he’s nothing to sneeze at – in fact, he seems quite overpowered given the rules the game lives by.
Ruvik is like the mind police. He makes the laws, he writes the physics. The Evil Within utilizes impossible space to an insane degree – no pun intended, as there are a lot of certifiably insane people in this game. Ruvik is like that one kid on the playground that keeps calling upon an “everything-proof” shield when he starts losing at play-pretend. Doesn’t seem fair, does it?
This is where the logic in The Evil Within goes a little bonkers. Ruvik just reaches out his hands and the whole environment shifts and turns into an entirely different city, different building, different weather system. He flicks his wrist and the ground collapses. And yet, Sebastian eventually gets the drop on him. You can’t just make a villain that powerful get destroyed by a normal dude.
I get it – because it’s a game, the player needs to have some kind of method of fighting back or else things wouldn’t progress anywhere. But Ruvik is so powerful that the final battle where Sebastian gets the upper hand makes absolutely no sense. How can a villain that can control the whole environment lose to a rocket launcher to the face?
The whole affair is a bit of a mess. Level design-wise, things could definitely be improved. The very first scene, Sebastian is hung upside-down is a butcher’s kitchen and has to sneak his way out, getting a good-sized chunk of his calf sliced off by a chainsaw in the process – then he goes down a chute and falls into a pool of blood and viscera, and still doesn’t get an infection in his massive wound. Of course it’s a game, but I would up getting exasperated at the amount of damage a normal human like Sebastian had received and was still able to keep going.
Sebastian is the biggest of victims throughout the whole experience. For most of it, he doesn’t even realize he’s inside someone else’s head – this is one of the most frustrating parts, as the player realizes what’s going on long before the protagonist even beings to suspect it.
There’s an obvious use of impossible space in a few of the cutscenes – Sebastian falls down a pit and the gravity changes so he’s actually sliding across the floor – which I thought was really cool, but this technique is only used twice in the whole game, and by the second time it’s used, it isn’t as effective. Little flourishes like that only work as well as the context surrounding them, and obviously The Evil Within came up short. There could have been so much more to it.
But for all its shortcomings, The Evil Within excels in one thing: monster design. It’s a shame that the disorganized level design throws a wrench into things.
Tune in tomorrow to get a taste of the gruesome agony that The Evil Within bestows upon its players.