So I played The Evil Within last month. It’s been sitting on my shelf unplayed since, like, January, when I got it at some kind of crazy dirt-cheap price. Seriously, if you go out (on onto your console’s online store) and look for it now, it’s still way more than I paid for it back then.
But honestly, I would have been just fine with paying full price for this bad boy. I loved pretty much every minute of it, aside from one or two mildly frustrating bits. It’s the most recent game by Resident Evil creator Shinji Mikami, and if you have any sort of appreciation for the RE series, it’s made very clear where this games roots lie.
To put it bluntly, it’s Resident Evil 4, but with the same scribbled out in sharpie. The Evil Within is astonishingly similar to that game in so many ways, and I think that it’s all the better for it. Resident Evil 5 was a joy through and through, but this is the true follow-up to RE4 that I’ve been waiting for.
The story obviously is its own standalone fare, but still manages to hit many of the same beats as RE4. You’re a grizzled old detective, and somehow your investigation into a mass-murder at a mental institution has you wind up in the middle of a rural village full of homicidal monster-people. Of course, there’s one big guy who takes forever to kill and has a big ol’ chainsaw. It does branch off here and there, but it owes a little more than inspiration to RE4.
At one point, your partner is driving a bus through a city and occasionally you have to stop to shoot some guys, or to get off and shoot some guys to grab thing. Also the bus ends up careening through a wall at the end. Sound familiar?
The story is even more wacky than something you’d see in the RE series, but it’s got its charms. At least, once you understand it. I’m not sure if it wasn’t explained clearly enough or it’s just that I’m stupid, but I didn’t catch a few plot bits until after the end when I was coming through the character bios. There were more than a few “Oooooh. That’s what happened” moments.
I probably should do a full review of the game, but I’m just not feeling the writing juices flow, you know? The important thing is that I haven’t so thoroughly enjoyed a third-person shooter (or maybe a shooter of any description) like this since RE4. I’m actually really looking forward to diving in deeper and playing again, maybe even several times more. Will this be the new Silent Hill, where I put in the effort to completely master it? Not likely. But it is definitely one of the most enjoyable games I’ve played this year.
Also noteworthy is that I knew basically nothing about it before going in. I had only watched the teaser trailer embedded below, which, to be quite frank, almost seems to be trying to sell you a completely different game.