The Evil Within

The Evil Within is one of the most uneven games I have played in quite some time. Despite being one of the few games I had been looking forward to near the the end of last year, due to my job it then sat on my shelf wasting away for a few months before I finally got around to it. I went into it expecting a game akin to Resident Evil 4 and what I ended up with was that and so much more, though not in a good way.

The Evil Within follows Sebastion Castellanos, a blander-than-bread detective sent to investigate a mass murder at a mental hospital. Upon arriving and attempting to view the security footage, he is captured by a seemingly escaped patient named Ruvik. He wakes up in a meat locker with a big guy with a chainsaw and attempts to escape. From here on out, the game makes absolutely no sense,

The Evil Within‘s biggest problem is that it has no idea what it wants to be. The game ranges from tense action setpieces to dull shoot-em-up setpieces. The game begins off as a stealth game but does absolutely nothing to propagate that form of gameplay. For the first few chapters, sneaking is the name of the game. The level design complements it, it helps quell the enemy numbers in the instance you do get caught, and the game tends to reward you for it by providing more ammunition and trap parts. I can easily say that the first five chapters of the game — and one chapter later on — are the best chapters in the game.

The problems come in with the game’s sense of progression. During the first few chapters, players will pick up a pistol, a shotgun, and the Agony Crossbow, a weapon around which the game’s combat seems to have been designed. The Agony Crossbow can equip different kinds of bolts that apply different effects. Flash bolts act like flash grenades, stunning enemies, freeze bolts freeze enemies in place, exploding bolts explode, etc. By disarming traps in stages you will be rewarded with trap parts which can be used to construct additional bolts of each of this type. More on the crossbow in a moment, but the point is the first few chapters are spent being relatively short on supplies.

By halfway through the game, however, you will have a pistol, a shotgun, a rifle, grenades, and more trap parts than Macaulay Culkin. At this point Sebastion is walking artillery and every problem can be solved with bullets and explosions. This is only exacerbated by the game’s upgrade system, which allows you to spend this green goo to improve certain aspects of Sebastion. Many of them are useless, like decreasing the reload time of a weapon or the time needed to draw the crossbow. Some of them are stuff you’d expect, like increasing your health total or number of bullets you can carry. On the other hand, some make you an even more over-the-op killing machine, like increasing the damage of your weapons or improving the rate at which you land critical hits, which kill enemies in one hit.

Notably absent from the upgradable skill are any involving stealth. While part of that is nice in that there aren’t certain gameplay elements being tied behind an arbitrary upgrade system, the use of stealth never improves over the course of the game while your ability to shoot things only gets better. Another wrench thrown into the stealth system is that the game eventually introduces enemies that are immune to it, making it entirely impossible during certain segments.

Not that the game not being stealth is inherently a bad thing, my expectations aside. Sometimes stealth fails regardless and you have to fight and a lot of the time it works, again, particularly in the early game. But even the combat is iffy. From the images, you’ll notice the game has letterboxing on the top and bottom of the screen. This affects the field of view in a negative way that can be ignored most of the time but can rear its ugly head when you need it least. When zoomed in to aim, Sebastion’s head takes up half the screen. With certain weapons, three fourths of the screen can be obscured by the player character, Melee is almost completely useless in combat except to push enemies away as the damage is almost nonexistent.

Most of the boss battles in the game are awful as well. Most are incredibly unclear if there is a trick to them or if you are just supposed to keep shooting until they fall down, but the only advice I can give is don’t overthink it. Only two of the bosses require anything other than just being shot a ton. Most of their design are very cool looking though, which does help.

The game makes little use or gives little context to any of its monsters, however. Ruvik proves the progenitor of the designs, but Ruvik is such an unknown quantity that many of the designs just end up being spooky for the sake of being spooky. Lip service is paid to some of the more interesting designs but the story jumps around to much to make any coherent sense. This may be an intentional choice on behalf of Mikami, but it doesn’t work toward building a compelling narrative. The flow between levels is so chaotic and inconsistent it feels as though the game planner was rolling dice at which level would appear next. The first level starts in the asylum, goes to an impossible meat factory thing, and ends back at the asylum. Some chapters will start outside before transporting without warning or reason into new levels. Both the game flow and script have no rhyme or reason.

The Evil Within also has one of the most disappointing non-endings and final boss fights ever. Previous gameplay is thrown out the window in favor of a setpiece-heavy final encounter and the ending of the game answers nothing and may as well read BUY THE SEASON PASS in the big black spaces where the game used to be. I actually find what is planned to be included in the season pass to be interesting, I just can’t help but feel that a decade ago it would have come with the game.

In spite of its many flaws, I had some fun with The Evil Within. It’s definitely a game that fails to be consistent in any way and many of the game challenges come from its numerous technical and design flaws, but there are fun moments to be found throughout most of it. But unlike it’s predecessor, Resident Evil 4, it is definitely not a game that will hold up over time.

And now, for your consideration.

Zombi U is a genuinely fun survival game ruined by a horrendously designed final act.

When the time came to man up and finally buy the Wii U I didn’t exactly do it with trepidation. Mario Kart 8 earlier that year had assuaged my fears some and the promise of Bayonetta 2 by the end of the year and the new Smash Bros. soon after made me feel a lot better about the decision. But ignoring the big Mario Kart release and the bundled New Super Mario Bros., there were a few things already released for the Wii U that tickled my fancy. One being the Wonderful 101, which I will get to in good time, and Zombi U, dull sounding game whose very title was a bad pun in the vein of a Nintendo 64 release.

But I remember at the Wii U’s launch the only game I was truly interested in was Zombi U. It was a game designed from the ground up with the Wii U in mind, meant to take advantage of the U’s exclusive features. While a lot of these end up meaningless (even detrimental), the truth is that Zombi U is a solid enough game in it’s own right to completely overcome the worthless gimmicks attached to it.

Zombi U takes place in London just after a recent zombie outbreak. Don’t stop reading just yet, I know zombies were way past their cultural goodwill years before this game’s release, but bear with me here. You play as a random survivor, given nothing but a name and profession, who stumbles upon a safe house and starts taking orders from a man named Prepper, who just wants to help you survive. And from there the game just starts. It’s not quite S.T.A.L.K.E.R. in it’s initial difficulty curve, but it did feel a good to play a game that let’s you figure things out for yourself.

Armed with a cricket bat, you make your way out into a fairly linear but branching enough version of London that invites you to explore, with caution, the wastelands left behind. Sewer holes make for fast travel connecting points and once you get a lay for the land it isn’t too hard to keep track of. You won’t find other survivors wandering the streets, just zombies.

This highlights the greatest use of the game’s setting. When the character you start as dies, they are turned into a zombie. You then respawn as an entirely new person with the same mission but with just the basic starting items. All the gear you’ve collected is still on the now reanimated corpse of your previous character. To get it back, you’ll have to kill that character, who stays near the place you died last time. Much like the Souls series, this adds a high cost to death and makes you extra careful about every action you take. It puts you at just the right level of unease that gives the whole game an unsettling feeling.

But when I say this game is about survival, I mean more in the general sense than in the zombie apocalyptic sense. Supplies are mostly scarce (Apparently the people of London subsist solely off of road flares) and even the act of opening a menu or scavenging a corpse doesn’t pause the game. Much like S.T.A.L.K.E.R., you have to wait until you find a safe place to pull out your backpack or to search a cupboard. This is actually one of the games less annoying gimmicks, as inventory is managed entirely through the Wii U’s gamepad, whereas the real time action never stops on your TV.

It sounds ingenious at first but most of the time it just becomes a minor distraction. The lockpicking minigame? Sure, throw it on the gamepad. Entering the number on a keypad? There have been worse ideas. Tapping the manhole cover of a sewer a few times to open it? Like that one. Tapping a board a few times to remove it from a door? How about I just press a button and it gets removed.

Despite being designed for the Wii U in particular, the developers never really found anything to do with the game pad that couldn’t have been accomplished without it, save for the inventory schtick. But most of these parts of the game are harmless. No, what really kills the game for me is just how badly the finale of the game plays out.

In fairness, the game does warn you: This is the final segment of Zombi U, you will not be able to go back from this point. So I go for it. In short, I have to go run to a specific place, then to another, collect a thing, run to another, run back to the safe house, and then try and escape through one more location. So I run to the first place, no problem. Make it to the second place where this time the number of zombies, which has increased dramatically, finally downs me. Okay, just got to make it back to that point.

I try to fast travel to the nearest location except all my shortcuts had been sealed up. Who the hell did that? Now I have to run my way back through everything I had just gone through, this time without my best suppliers, which are still on my corpse. It turns out I could reopen the shortcuts, but I didn’t even know they had been taken out in the first place.

Needless to say, I died and lost all of my most valuable supplies. I ended up beating the game with the leftovers I had in a stash and sheer gumption. I’ll admit, there is definitely player error at fault here, but what was supposed to be an intense fight for rescue turned into an absolute droll as I repeatedly walked through the same empty areas over and over again until I reached the locations I needed to, at which point the zombie count would be higher than ever before.

The ending definitely put a damper on my spirits for the game, but I had a lot of fun with it overall. I just have second thoughts about replaying it now. Though the game’s hardcore mode is tempting…