The Evil Within 1 Ranking: C
I want to start by saying The Evil Within isn’t a bad game, per se. It’s a deeply flawed game, but that doesn’t mean it’s bad. Despite this, I wouldn’t recommend this game.
Reason number one: bugs. Specifically, I encountered a bug where the game randomly generated a save file dated 1969 which then led to all my save data being deleted. ~20 hours and circa 850,000 green gel grinded out, all just gone. I guess it all time traveled to 1969. Fuck you, game.
Even if we ignore this, I stand by my verdict. You see, The Evil Within is a game with one core design goal – to kill the player character as many times as possible. Now you might be thinking that all survival horror or action games do this, but no, there’s a distinction here. A game like, say, Resident Evil 4, is like your friend who’s also your intense rival at tennis. You meet up and play a match where your friend’s doing his absolute best to kick your ass, but it’s all sportsmanlike and after the match, regardless of the victor, you two congratulate one another on a good game.
The Evil Within, on the other hand, is the guy who will sneak into your stuff prior to the match to sabotage your racquet, slip drugs into your drink, and put itching powder into your clothes. He’ll insist on playing at a time and place in which the sun’s in your eyes, and if he wins, he’ll gloat about how great he is (because clearly he’s great at tennis; he beat you, after all). In both these instances, you’re competing against someone endeavoring to beat you, but they’re vastly different situations.
A great example of this is Chapter 9, where the game randomly spawns an invulnerable enemy who does nothing except get close to you for a one-shot kill. You can run, but he may or may not just teleport to you and kill you. You can hide, but he may or may not psychically know where you are and pull you out to kill you. This guy’s behavior is so random that I haven’t found any consensus on him as of today, eight years after the game’s release. And in case you missed it, he’s invulnerable and one-shots you. He’s the game saying, “we decided you’re just going to die now, kthxbai.”
Besides the design philosophy, The Evil Within has stupidly clunky controls. Something as simple as activating a prompt in front of you could take some maneuvering as you watch Sebastian turn right and left and not face forward. The camera will zoom in unnecessarily close when you’re aiming or crouching through a tunnel, so if there’s an enemy near you, have fun not being able to see it. One of the game’s unique mechanics, dropping a match to burn a downed enemy, is frustratingly unreliable. Sometimes the prompt just won’t come up and you’re wide open to the enemy getting up and sucker-punching you. Sometimes it does, you activate it, and Sebastian goes through the entire match-dropping animation (and the game deducts a match from your inventory), but no match comes out of the animation, nobody gets burned, and you’re wide open to the enemy getting up and sucker-punching you. The game’s melee button prioritizes kicking random nearby corpses over doing an actual melee attack on the enemy in front of you trying to kill you. And all this would be annoying at best, except this game has a mega-boner for one-shot kill attacks, so enemies will happily cut your head off/eat you/bash your face in/explode while you’re struggling to move and see properly.
After you slog through this sea of bullshit, the game shows you a death counter and, well, the game must be challenging, right? That number’s high. Isn’t that all that’s needed for a challenging game? If the player dies a lot? That’s the game’s core design goal in a nutshell. This isn’t a game designed to pose challenges to the player to overcome. This is a game that just wants to kill the player repeatedly.
Oh, and despite how many people on the Internet will tell you that the plot is absolutely fantastic but you just need a big brain to understand it (you know, the big brains that those people have), no, the plot falls apart the instant you start asking basic questions. The game takes place in a Matrix-esque dream world, but the game’s explanation for how the main characters enter it contradicts itself in several ways. The game’s explanation for what this dream world does is inconsistent with what the game actually shows the player. The game’s explanation for why the creator of this dream world made it in the first place makes circa no sense.
Again, the game isn’t bad, per se. The main villain Ruvik manages to garner sympathy and horror at the same time. Laura and the Keeper are memorable bosses. The upgrade mechanics allow different players to customize their playstyles. Juli Kidman kicks ass. I for some reason love Tatiana Gutierrez’s deadpan demeanor. I just don’t recommend the game due to its hostile design goals and backwards gameplay.
Here’s how I did in the main game and in the Juli Kidman DLCs, for what it’s worth.
I want to start by saying The Evil Within isn’t a bad game, per se. It’s a deeply flawed game, but that doesn’t mean it’s bad. Despite this, I wouldn’t recommend this game.
Reason number one: bugs. Specifically, I encountered a bug where the game randomly generated a save file dated 1969 which then led to all my save data being deleted. ~20 hours and circa 850,000 green gel grinded out, all just gone. I guess it all time traveled to 1969. Fuck you, game.
Even if we ignore this, I stand by my verdict. You see, The Evil Within is a game with one core design goal – to kill the player character as many times as possible. Now you might be thinking that all survival horror or action games do this, but no, there’s a distinction here. A game like, say, Resident Evil 4, is like your friend who’s also your intense rival at tennis. You meet up and play a match where your friend’s doing his absolute best to kick your ass, but it’s all sportsmanlike and after the match, regardless of the victor, you two congratulate one another on a good game.
The Evil Within, on the other hand, is the guy who will sneak into your stuff prior to the match to sabotage your racquet, slip drugs into your drink, and put itching powder into your clothes. He’ll insist on playing at a time and place in which the sun’s in your eyes, and if he wins, he’ll gloat about how great he is (because clearly he’s great at tennis; he beat you, after all). In both these instances, you’re competing against someone endeavoring to beat you, but they’re vastly different situations.
A great example of this is Chapter 9, where the game randomly spawns an invulnerable enemy who does nothing except get close to you for a one-shot kill. You can run, but he may or may not just teleport to you and kill you. You can hide, but he may or may not psychically know where you are and pull you out to kill you. This guy’s behavior is so random that I haven’t found any consensus on him as of today, eight years after the game’s release. And in case you missed it, he’s invulnerable and one-shots you. He’s the game saying, “we decided you’re just going to die now, kthxbai.”
Besides the design philosophy, The Evil Within has stupidly clunky controls. Something as simple as activating a prompt in front of you could take some maneuvering as you watch Sebastian turn right and left and not face forward. The camera will zoom in unnecessarily close when you’re aiming or crouching through a tunnel, so if there’s an enemy near you, have fun not being able to see it. One of the game’s unique mechanics, dropping a match to burn a downed enemy, is frustratingly unreliable. Sometimes the prompt just won’t come up and you’re wide open to the enemy getting up and sucker-punching you. Sometimes it does, you activate it, and Sebastian goes through the entire match-dropping animation (and the game deducts a match from your inventory), but no match comes out of the animation, nobody gets burned, and you’re wide open to the enemy getting up and sucker-punching you. The game’s melee button prioritizes kicking random nearby corpses over doing an actual melee attack on the enemy in front of you trying to kill you. And all this would be annoying at best, except this game has a mega-boner for one-shot kill attacks, so enemies will happily cut your head off/eat you/bash your face in/explode while you’re struggling to move and see properly.
After you slog through this sea of bullshit, the game shows you a death counter and, well, the game must be challenging, right? That number’s high. Isn’t that all that’s needed for a challenging game? If the player dies a lot? That’s the game’s core design goal in a nutshell. This isn’t a game designed to pose challenges to the player to overcome. This is a game that just wants to kill the player repeatedly.
Oh, and despite how many people on the Internet will tell you that the plot is absolutely fantastic but you just need a big brain to understand it (you know, the big brains that those people have), no, the plot falls apart the instant you start asking basic questions. The game takes place in a Matrix-esque dream world, but the game’s explanation for how the main characters enter it contradicts itself in several ways. The game’s explanation for what this dream world does is inconsistent with what the game actually shows the player. The game’s explanation for why the creator of this dream world made it in the first place makes circa no sense.
Again, the game isn’t bad, per se. The main villain Ruvik manages to garner sympathy and horror at the same time. Laura and the Keeper are memorable bosses. The upgrade mechanics allow different players to customize their playstyles. Juli Kidman kicks ass. I for some reason love Tatiana Gutierrez’s deadpan demeanor. I just don’t recommend the game due to its hostile design goals and backwards gameplay.
Here’s how I did in the main game and in the Juli Kidman DLCs, for what it’s worth.