Usually I’m pretty hesitant to put in a good word for sequels, especially for horror games. I know I’ve given praise to Dead Space 2 and Resident Evil 7, but those two are quite the exception to my stubbornly enacted rule. And I’m not going to break that rule today, either – The Evil Within 2 has some qualities that other people value but I dislike, such as side quests and dialogue trees. But I won’t ramble on about the things I don’t like. The holidays are incoming, so I’ll be nice.

I really, really enjoy the environment design in The Evil Within 2. The design choices made are similar enough to correlate to the first installment, but are unique enough to have its own voice and vibe.

Let’s get something out of the way before I give The Evil Within its praise. There are a couple things about this game that really bother me.

The black bars, top and bottom. I understand where the idea came from, but it just doesn’t work. Designer Shinji Mikami felt the need to make his game more cinematic, which meant adding the widescreen mode to mimic the effect you get at the movies. And while this is true, moviemaking methods don’t always cleanly adapt to video games even with frequent cutscenes. The most irritating part of the black bars is how they obscure items lying on the ground.

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.

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.

Like my previous entry, this post contains sensitive subject matter. Read at your own discretion.