Dear video game bad guys:
You’re never going to take over the world if you keep leaving ammunition everywhere. You’re especially going to fail if you compliment the baskets of bullets on countertops with equally plentiful vials of health potions behind bushes.
That’s the situation with The Evil Within, Shinji Mikami and Tango Gameworks’ upcoming new horror game. The game is genuinely scary, it’s full of terror-inducing moments, and I openly shrieked during my time with the game’s demo at E3. The game is HELLLLLA scary, and I already know that playing it at midnight on a Friday night with the lights out in the house will be an amazingly frightful experience.
But all of that is superseded by the excess action tropes that don’t need to be there and don’t feel like they fit in. Evil Within is much more action-y than I thought it was going to be, and definitely more than I wanted it to be.
“You’re only given ten bullets, so conserve and use them wisely,” I’m told as I begin a later Chapter of the game set in a huge mansion. (Yes, I KNOW. Another mansion!) I’m hopeful that this lack of ammo will keep things tense and make me carefully choose how I react to my situations, but that hope is shattered when upon walking through the gates of the manse’s courtyard I find ammo sitting on a park bench on the right, under the tree behind it, and against the windows to the abode.
Maybe I only had “ten bullets” to start the demo, but that also didn’t include the other weapons at my disposal. Within my item ring (the pause/menu screen in game gives us access to our weapons, tools and items) I also had a shotgun, which would be perfect for those close-range attacks, especially since it was nearly stocked as well. I’m playing the demo in the Normal difficulty setting, so perhaps at higher levels the ammo drops are much more difficult to find, but definitely not now.
As I move around the mansion discovering its clues and horrors and such, I’m also running and shooting (even when extremely injured) and refilling my health as if I was never injured in the first place. For a detective that’s seen his fair share of death and morbidity, the lead character sure gets jumped often, hides often, and freaks out more than a 7 yr old watching Aliens. All of this is a bit out of place in a survival horror game, and seems to mutter of tired game design tropes.
Oh, bad guys. You’ll never learn.
At least the rest of the experience is spot-on. The levels of horror are at a high pitch. A ghostly spirit in a hood chases me at seemingly random intervals, just when I think it’s as calm as Christmas Eve. Throughout the exploration I hear floor boards creak and doors open and close, causing me to turn around as fast as possible or run without thinking. The added ambiance of the mansion’s rotting wood, decaying floors and furniture, and ghostly lights only seem to make things that much more freaky.
It feels almost like an homage to classic psycho horror films of the Seventies like The Last House on the Left and The Wicker Man, and it’s mindful of what those brought to the forefront stylistically: the chase, the adversary, and the grizzly end.
The Evil Within doesn’t feel like survival horror, at least not in the way we are hoping it would. There’s still a lot of tenseness and fear — it’s a smorgasbord of 70’s horror — but the amount of action game tropes that appear set it back from a full-on terror experience.
Although as I say all of this, I’m reminded of my own terror-filled shrieks again. Maybe they’re onto something.
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