The Evil Within

The Evil Within is a return to classic third-person survival horror as defined long ago by the earlier Resident Evil games, made under the direction of Shinji Mikami. Detective Sebastian Castellanos goes out to investigate a massacre at a city hospital and soon plunges into a world where the environment reshapes itself before your eyes, corridors lead somewhere different than a moment ago, and reality dissolves into bloody visions. The storytelling is deliberately fragmented and leaves plenty of questions open, something some players held against it and others considered its greatest strength.

Gameplay is deliberately uncomfortable: ammo is scarce, the hero quickly runs out of breath, many enemies are better avoided than killed, and fallen foes must be burned with a match or they'll get back up. A crossbow with special bolts lets you electrify, blind or freeze groups of enemies, turning encounters into small puzzles about using the environment, traps and mines. Character and weapon upgrades are bought with green gel at a safe haven the player regularly returns to. The Xbox One version runs in a persistent cinematic aspect ratio with black bars top and bottom, giving the game a specific edge, though this became a target of criticism.

The atmosphere is dense, grimy and full of unsettling imagery, the music works with silence and sudden bursts, and the main grim motif lingers in the memory for a long time. Contemporary reviews were more mixed than the studio expected, praising the tension and inventiveness while criticism targeted the controls and inconsistency. The title nevertheless helped revive interest in classic survival horror at a time when the genre leaned mainly on action. Today it's appreciated as a tough, distinctive game for patient players. Anyone willing to accept that the title deliberately withholds comfort and certainty gets one of the last great representatives of the classic survival horror school. The boss fights are inventive and force you to look for a weakness instead of burning through supplies, ranking among the very best the game has to offer.