Evil inside game review6/3/2023 ![]() ![]() “I sure as hell don’t want to go back in that water anytime soon”, he quips after escaping some underwater monstrosity, never fully affected by the horror he witnesses. He moves with a quick stepping skip that seems at odd for a man so frequently mauled, and so often stalked. At first it does feel problematic that Sebastian is never fully scared, never faltering in his running or walking animation. The lens through which we approach The Evil Within is already too diffuse with the unrealistic expectation of terror, to enable the game to succeed on its thematic horror alone. Maybe that’s just me, but oftentimes, at least aesthetically, The Evil Within can suffer from this fatigue of fright. When giving lobotomies to seemingly conscious decapitated heads in Chapter 9, I was more fascinated by the intricate design of the level and its experiment than I was appalled or nauseated by the spectacle. The freakish now becomes familiar as we become desensitised to the way games handle gore. ![]() The rusted blood soaked meat hooks, the swarms of cockroaches, and the exposure of viscera, blood, brain and bone. These are old ideas and we have become inured against their terror. Occasionally the game borrows too heavily from existing horror franchises, relying on the lazy overegging of torture porn, or the off-key carnival music that plays as a theme to innocence lost. It feels like you’re moving through the game by way of turning the pages of an illustrated book, so detailed is the artistic style, and so slowly and precariously do you make progress. The artistic elegance sits alongside the game’s oppressive themes and claustrophobic level design to culminate in a game that looks as beautiful as only horror can become: that point of impression before decay, where death becomes art, before awe gives way to repulsion. The art direction is a subtle application of grainy film stock, high contrast lighting, and diverse camera angles that incorporate tilts and zooms reminiscent of noir films, early Twilight Zone episodes and British Hammer Horror. The game’s influences are clear from the start. We are inundated with the irreconcilable pairing of metal and flesh (Hellraiser), the faceless horror of deadly machines (Saw), and the freakish corruption of childhood (Japanese horror). You play as said detective, one Sebastian Castellanos, and traverse through horror filled locales that act as allegory to your enslaved and tormented mind.Īll the regular stylistic horror stereotypes are articulated competently enough the tortured origin story, the haunted mansion, the dark foreboding family portraits, the grunting heavyset chainsaw wielding pyscho, the abandoned barn, the bloodied pitchforks etc. That detective then awakes in temporally shifting ‘anti-world’ where creatures called ‘The Haunted’ are enslaved in murderous pursuit by an omnipotent demonic force. A detective arrives at scene of mass slaughter in mental asylum, whereupon he and his team are ambushed by a malignant spirit. The story is ubiquitous enough in horror gaming. ![]()
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