The Evil Within review – now with The Consequence DLC

As the man responsible for unleashing Resident Evil on gamers, Shinji Mikami is one of the undisputed masters of horror games. Capcom’s zombie series eventually went on to focus more on action than scares, and Mikami went his own way to return to the roots of the genre. The result is The Evil Within, a brutal psychological scare-fest for PC, Xbox One and PS4 that doesn’t pull any punches when it comes to blood and gore but has the capacity to spook you to your core as well.

When a routine police investigation dissolves into chaos, detective Sebastian Castellanos wakes up in a world that appears to have been ripped straight from gamers’ nightmares: Reanimated corpses stalk you, many-limbed creatures hide in the shadows and sentient barbed wire grows like ivy across the tortured landscape. It’s bleak stuff, beautifully and sparsely lit, with the opening levels creating a real sense of foreboding and doom.

A 2.35:1 aspect ratio creates a cinematic atmosphere from the get-go, while the liberal use of film grain effect makes it feel as though you’re playing a 1980’s video nasty. Combined with the dank, filthy locations that look like you’d contract tetanus if you so much as touched the walls, and a muted colour palette, The Evil Within creates a sense of deep foreboding every time you pick up the controller.

The big black bars at the top and bottom of the screen certainly take some getting used to, eating up nearly a third of available screen space, but this also creates a real sense of claustrophobia and vulnerability. The third person, over-the-shoulder viewpoint makes it difficult to see enemies approaching from the sides or behind, so even though you can move freely with a gun raised you never feel truly safe.

Let a creature get too close and you’re unlikely to survive; beyond the basic monsters, most enemies can kill you in a single attack, and when they do it’s never pretty. The Evil Within can be brutally punishing at times, as Sebastian gets crushed, decapitated, blown apart or dismembered in unflinching splashes of crimson and body parts, either by enemy hands or all manner of traps and environmental hazards.

Most of real scares come at the beginning of the game, when you have no weapons and enemies can finish you in one or two hits. Sebastian can throw a punch or two, but it will merely stagger weaker enemies and the larger ones won’t be affected at all; one-hit kills are possible on unsuspecting opponents, but get spotted by one reanimated villager and he’ll alert the rest – bringing down the horde and ensuring a swift and gory death.

The game gradually shifts from suspense and jump scares to body horror and gore as you acquire weapons and ammunition, although one or two beautifully atmospheric stealth sections towards the end of the game prove The Evil Within can ramp up the tension when it wants to. It’s telling that these highlights only occur when you aren’t able to use your weapons though.

Frequent trips to the decaying Beacon Hill mental hospital are the only respite from the carnage. A haunting rendition of Debussy’s Claire de Lune signals one of the broken mirror portals that transport you to the central hub, where you can upgrade your abilities and save the game, safe from attack.

Both Sebastian’s arsenal and skills can be given a boost using the jars of green gel strewn throughout each level. Mikami favourites including a shotgun, magnum revolver and bolt-action sniper rifle, complete with satisfying animations as you chamber another bullet all make an appearance, with subsequent upgrades increasing their damage potential or speeding up reloads – when you’re at your most vulnerable.

The standout addition is the Agony crossbow. Depending on the bolts you load it with, it can blind, freeze, electrocute or even explode attackers, as well as pin them to walls. The freeze bolts are most effective during boss encounters, giving you much-needed breathing space and time to put some distance between Sebastian and his aggressors, but the others are equally useful too. New bolts can be crafted out of items you find strewn throughout each level, or salvaged from the traps that block your progress.

Many of the enemies you’ll be using them on feel so familiar, showing clear influence from Mikami’s past works – most notably Resident Evil 4. The chainsaw-wielding sadists, torch-carrying priests wearing black robes, and hulking brutes equipped with rake-like claws all hit a little too close to home for a director looking to distance himself from the past. There are plenty of unique monsters later in the game that prove the developer is capable of standing out from the crowd, so it’s a shame to see rehashed versions of things we’ve seen before.

The Evil Within’s cast also lack the charisma of Resident Evil’s Leon, Chris and Jill. Sebastian in particular is a rather generic lead, oddly unfazed by the various monsters and mutants he encounters, while his somewhat predictable backstory is never fully explained – leaving questions about his troubled past that go unanswered when the credits roll.

Having a limited supply of matches to burn bodies and stop them reanimating is still a fantastic piece of game design though, even if it too was borrowed from a past Resident Evil game – it means you’re not completely safe even when you’ve cleared an area, as any monster could get back up while you’re scavenging for ammunition or upgrade points.

Even once the plot takes a turn for the bizarre in the game’s final third, and you’ve battled through a few out-of-place on rails sequences, The Evil Within is an enjoyable descent into madness filled with plenty of memorable moments. It doesn’t redefine survival horror, but adds a few new variations on the genre while otherwise retreading familiar ground. It won’t scare you senseless, but horror fans will still find plenty to enjoy.

THE ASSIGNMENT DLC

The Evil Within left a lot of questions unanswered at its conclusion, not least those surrounding Sebastian’s teammate Julie Kidman, who vanishes and emerges mysteriously several times throughout the plot. The first set of DLC, the Assignment, puts players in control of Kidman, which we hoped would fill in a few of the gaps.

Kidman’s chapters take place mid-way through the game and explain some of her backstory, as well as going into more detail about the Organisation’s aims. This means the majority of the DLC takes place in office buildings and hospital corridors, rather than the more obscure and nightmare-inducing locations seen in the main game. There’s a small amount of crossover, but for the most part the areas are all new – it’s just a shame that they are mostly linear, with few options for exploration beyond the occasional optional puzzle room.

The Assignment almost exclusively concentrates on stealth rather than action, which unfortunately means it loses much of what made the main game fun. Sebastian might have given up after a few hits, but Electric crossbow bolts and high powered sniper rifle bullets made you feel powerful, if only for a brief moment until you ran out of the very limited supplies of ammunition and your enemies chased you down. Kidman’s melee attacks are virtually useless, meaning you have no way of fighting back at all once an enemy spots you. As a result, you spend the majority of the DLC hidden under tables and waiting for enemies to complete their patrol route before moving onwards.

There are a few action set-pieces where you finally get your hands on a pistol, but these are over quickly and little more than on-rails duck shoots. Otherwise, enemies are best avoided, distracted by broken bottles or locked in rooms so they can’t chase you.

You can’t upgrade Kidman’s skills like you could with Sebastian either, meaning you’re incredibly vulnerable; your stamina runs out after only a few paces when running, you only have enough health to survive two enemy encounters before being forced back to a checkpoint, and you have no weapons for a significant portion of the Episode. It’s understandable that this was done to raise the level of tension, as getting spotted just once means a high chance of dying, but this feels like a rapid change of pace after the action-oriented main game.

With no need to travel back to the Asylum through broken mirrors to upgrade your abilities, you now save the game by taking a seat on a comfy sofa and stroking a cat (no, really). These are at least sensibly spaced out across the two chapters, meaning a minimal amount of back-tracking should you die, but overall there’s very little peril at any point in the campaign.

The whole thing is over in less than two hours and fails to answer many of the questions we had at the outset. Of course, a second DLC chapter due later this year has already been teased to fill in some of the blanks, and there are plenty of optional collectibles for completionists to find, but if your favourite parts of the main game were the gun battle and action sequences, this DLC is probably best avoided.

The Consequence DLC

The second part of The Evil Within’s three-part DLC season pass arrived in April, finishing off Julie Kidman’s story and going some way to explain the Mobius Corporation’s intentions with Leslie and the STEM device. We weren’t exactly blown away by the Assignment’s prolonged stealth sections and limited exposition, so we were worried the short turnaround between DLC releases would mean the developers wouldn’t have taken these criticisms on board.

Thankfully, the Consequence delivers – at least for the most part. There’s a lot more action than there was in the Assignment, with Kidman finally getting her hands on some weaponry, although these sections never live up to the highs of the castle battles in Chapter 6 of the main game. You still can’t increase your skills, either, meaning you have to battle a swaying aim reticule and slow reload times compared to a fully levelled-up Sebastian.

That being said, the majority of the DLC is still spent in stealth mode, sneaking past enemies rather than taking them on directly. Kidman doesn’t have any weapons for much of the opening chapter, meaning you’re once again forced to hide in air vents and lockers to avoid detection. It’s often more trouble than it’s worth to try and lose a pursuer, so we ended up putting the controller down and waiting for Kidman to die, just so we could restart from our last checkpoint.

A new light mechanic adds to the tension, temporarily replacing your flashlight with emergency glow sticks as you make your way through a series of rooms in complete darkness. It’s a great demonstration of ID Tech 5’s lighting systems, with glow sticks illuminating your surroundings as you throw them in front of you. If you hit an enemy with one, however, they will chase you down. The dead ends and bottomless pits make it rather frustrating, however, and the whole section fails to live up to the suspense we saw in the main game’s mannequin warehouse.

These new areas soon give way to more familiar locations, which is perhaps unsurprising given Kidman’s presence in the main storyline, but thankfully the developers have given us new angles and perspectives rather than merely retreading the same hallways. More annoying is the re-use of boss battles from the first DLC. The first Spotlight monster fight in particular is an almost beat-for-beat repeat, which just feels unnecessary.

Our biggest gripe, however, is quite how many plot holes remain at the end of the DLC’s two-three hour play time. The Consequence was supposed to fill in some of the gaps left at the end of the main game, and again at the cliffhanger that was the end of The Assignment, but the ‘revelations’ revealed throughout the course of the two chapters will come as no surprise to players that bothered to collect even a few of the collectible case notes as Sebastian. Kidman’s past is left in the dark, and with the third (as yet unnamed) DLC pack set to focus on the sadistic Keeper enemy, we might not ever find out.

The Consequence is more of the same, then, which may or may not be a good thing based on your opinion of The Evil Within’s story and stealth mechanics. It’s really only worth your time if you finished the first DLC, or if you’re desperate to eke out every possible bit of lore and backstory from the game – and even then only if you previously invested in the season pass.