Hey so there’s a trailer for The Evil Within 2 at E3 2017 (that’s now) this
year. Here’s a link to that trailer:
I JUST got The Evil Within 1. It’s probably the first horror game I have really ever seriously attempted to play in years. Years!
Look: horror games used to give me anxiety. The idea of playing something intentionally scary freaked me out deeply and intrigued at the same time.
Now though, I’m a Big Mechanics Boy and anything in The Evil Within meant to scare me (I know it’s not that scary) I don’t keep track of because I’m just trying to think about Thos Mechanics.
Tall grass meant to obscure the camera while sneaking so you can’t see enemies, only hear them? An obvious decision that I celebrate and find neat + cool. Not scary at all.
it’s about 14 bucks right now on PSN if you have it, maybe a little cheaper with PS+
Not entirely sure if it’s totally worth it! So far the opening areas are set up more like puzzles with very clear and obvious set “correct” solutions for solving areas without using ammo. I can no longer separate out if this is clever design to get me used to it, or the developer not having confidence in the player.
Maybe I play too many bad JRPG’s and it has poisoned the well of my soul & character
i’ve been waiting for <£10 and have a handful of things to still play through so willing to wait it out. it always felt like something that was more interested in developing the ideas from RE4 into something other than what the 5 and 6 became (fwiw i love RE6) rather than making a particularly good game.
i guess by that it’s just a game that is trying to see what survival horror can be after the genre largely disappearing post ps2 era.
Chapters being dispersed through giant open areas that enemies can chase you through, having to manage resources that enable you to permanently kill enemies and being able to use stealth and traps to get the drop on enemies are all ideas that were played with at various points through the entire Resident Evil Series.
The fact that RE4 came along and did what it did meant that maybe reviewers and critics imagined that this would be a game that broke as much ground as that had in comparison to other survival horror games at the time.
Really, Evil Within plays with a lot of traditional survival horror ideas and uses them to great effect. Nothing in it so far strikes me as being super bad and there’s some relatively kitschy and very Japanese design choices that I like.
I was eager for the first game’s release, but waited until it finally had a price drop around mid 2015 to pick it up.
Not quite the re-invention of survival horror action that was hyped, but it had some really good segments. I remember loving a few of the boss battles and enemy designs. IIRC pop-in and loading could be pretty clunky. It handled pretty well…as for mechanics I’m not sure anything stuck out to me that hadn’t already been tread before. I thought of playing it again, but didn’t expect a sequel right now. Can’t remember what was left from the plot/ending.
The premise is cool, I really want to like it and there’s a lot of cool to note here but by mid chapter 6 I don’t know that I like t all that much! Every time a set piece rolls around it leaves me feeling like I’ve been playing the game wrong. The game clearly wants me to take advantage of stealth mechanics by overzealously limiting my resources and making me as durable as wet cardboard, but levels only seem half-designed to accommodate that playstyle. By the time I’m expected to gun an entire room or a boss down I’m frequently holding like, one shotgun shell a flash arrow two handgun bullets and a handful of matches and I’m basically instadead if I let anything touch me. At certain points I feel so, so little room for error that it just becomes tiresome to die so much. Even though I haven’t yet run into an unwinnable situation, I always feel like I’m about to. Missing a headshot on a popcorn enemy at any given time is so consequential that it stresses me out.
i appreciate the ways in which this game lets you improvise. Mid chapter 6 you’re tasked with sniping these harpoon machine gunners on a tower. Directly before this you’ve been run through a close quarters combat gauntlet and you’ve probably spent everything you have except your five or so rifle rounds. There are not-zombies everywhere that force you to stay on the move and your partner only has a Fuck You Fire Axe to use. After a half hour of beating my head against the pavement I succeeded by training my very large fan club into the firing range of the harpoon gunners I’m meant to take out. Felt pretty nice to figure that one out.
Matches are super cool but it’s not communicated clearly enough how you’re supposed to use them as a combat resource and the game baldly encourages you to waste them on random corpses just in case so that you don’t have them when you actually need them in a firefight which is some bullshit
As mentioned before I think the premise is pretty great and will probably go over way better in the sequel. I wish ruvik was a bit better fleshed out earlier - the environments more inviting to pay attention to if there was a little more reason to do so - maybe it gets better, it’s only chapter six. I also think Ruvik has a dumb name and looks like a total Bisho turd. Who the heck wears a white hoodie. Sebastian is chill af and it’s p funny, but he’s so unreactive to the insanity of what’s happening around him that it dulls the horror a bit. i do appreciate his wtf delivery though.
I’m early enough in that I’m tempted to start over just to give myself a little room to breathe in terms of resources and better upgrade choices. I’ll prolly finish this. It’s flawed but not fatally so.
I agree with this, especially the way they limit resource like they’re trying to get back to survival horror but then throw tons of combat at you. I found it exhausting to play without being scary, but it’s not bad.
Actually, there’s something to be said for being unmoored in any frame of reality in the story; I appreciate the underlying anxiety of not being able to track how ‘surfaced’ I am; it feels like they’re trying to simulate psychosis and it’s definitely coming across.
In The Evil Within, I don’t think I’ve really felt any of the tension or fear stuff get at it me yet. My brain keeps going: Oh hey, these are neat systems making this experience function. This is a cool story that the game is getting at.
Sometimes though, that doesn’t happen! Something about The Evil Within really makes it though.
I actually liked how frustrating the game was. Lot of “fuck you” moments from the devs that catch inattentive players offguard, especially many of the traps. Plus there are situations where you can find yourself in no-win point because you simply have no ammo left.
I guess early on I figured the traps were actually there to take advantage of. My scheme so far seems to be slowly creeping around a level and finding the best way to kill guys with traps.
Do you have the expansions? They’re pretty good. I’m surprised the stealth focused one didn’t feel like an exacerbation of the frustrating start to the game.