The stage is set. The room is crowded and the air conditioner is set way too high, as it’s already forcing chills down my spine. After a brief explanation of the different demos we can choose from, we’re ushered into another equally freezing room where we’re given the option to choose between demoing on Xbox One and PS4, and much to my displeasure, all the XO booths are filled. I’ll settle for the PlayStation.
There are two levels that are on show today, and between the two of us, Jessey and I decide to each play separate levels, just to make sure we see all there is too see. I find myself playing on Chapter 8, the larger and more puzzle-oriented section. It is worth noting that Chapter 4 was the recommended demo – by Shinji Mikami himself nevertheless – but for the sake of covering all our bases, I went with the unlikely choice.
When the demo starts, I find myself spawned in the middle of a deliberately eerie forest path, wandering my way towards the mansion from the trailers. There are the snapping of twigs and the rustling of leaves on either side of the path, but aside from these looping sound effects, nothing transpired between my starting the demo and my reaching the abandoned home.
Upon entering the building, I’m greeted with a brief cinematic of two apparently crucial characters running down a massive hallway, only to have the entrance to said passage immediately be sealed behind a massive locking contraption. Here’s where the puzzles begin.
With no understanding of where I am or how I’m supposed to remedy this situation, I immediately find myself committing the go-to gaming sin of unashamedly wandering up to every door and spamming the A X button, trying to go anywhere that the game will let me. Eventually, after finding a door that wasn’t locked, I wonder into a dining room that had once been dressed for a feast, but now sees furniture and table-dressings strewn about the area. I fumble my way through the mess, and continue pressing forward from one room to the next, encountering hoards of jump-scare sound effects along the way.
Eventually I find myself looking into a room where two… I’ll call them zombies, are hunching over a corpse for a never-ending midnight snack. Upon entering the room, a quick shotgun to the face deals with these two, so I can continue on my merry way. Looking back, that shotgun was probably the most satisfying part of the demo.
After popping some more heads, I find myself in a small study closet, where it seems as though someone had interrupted while performing a brain biopsy. Interacting with this scene sent me into a “solve the puzzle” scene, where I had to insert a nail into the appropriate lobe in order to proceed. Missing my target the first time, one of the on-hand presenters then directed my attention to a separate portion of the room where instructions on where to place the nail were displayed. Completing this point-and-click adventure kicked me out of the puzzle interface and I was backtracking my merry way through this practically-abandoned building in order to find the other two ‘keys’ to the hallway I initially saw upon entering the house.
I backtrack my way to the main hall, where I now find that some of the previously-inaccessable doors are now conveniently unlocked, so I proceed onward towards the next predictable puzzle. I pass through empty room after empty hallway until I eventually come to a library, where there’s one ‘zombie’ pacing back and forth in a very strict pattern. Using the sneak/crouch feature, I evade her gaze and find myself on the other end of the library. There’s nothing here, and I’m getting bored, so I decide to stand up and engage her. To get a better view of the gore, I let her get to where she’s only a few feet away before pulling the trigger.
Fuck.
I’m out of ammo, and the hammer’s empty “clicking” sends this message home to not only me, but the heaping pile of previously-slow-moving flesh that’s now only about 12 inches from the barrel of my worthless shotgun. She dashes for me, lunging and screeching a noise I neither knew could be made nor want to ever hear again. Whether it was a convenient and frantic mashing of buttons or a expertly planned escape route, I manage to distance myself enough to equip my pistole and I put a few rounds in her forehead, silencing the screams and the flailing of limbs. I hastily proceed to the other end of the library, scooping up all sorts of I-don’t-know-what items along the way, and complete the second puzzle.
With only one “key” left for me to puzzle my way through, I hastily return to the main hall, where I head upstairs to a new magically-unlocked door. Carefully I proceed, taking no chances and immediately dropping any undead I come across, burning their body afterwards just to be sure. I traverse my way through the halls and rooms, eventually making my way to a dead end. There’s a glowing collectable on a bench, so I’ll scoop that up before backtracking my way out to the main room.
Once out of this room, I, like all the times before, find a door that is now conveniently accessible, and proceed through the passages that lay behind it. Eventually I find my way to a dead end, where I decide to head back. On my way out of the room, I find a blank space on the wall that prompts me to interact with it. I do so, only to find that the glowing collectable – turns out it was a safe dial – I picked up earlier was part one of a set of two. Time for more backtracking!
At this point, all the enemies have been dealt with and I’m jaded to the jump-scare soundtrack, and more than anything, I’m getting tired of the animation the player is forced to sit through when opening doors. An annoyed button mash reviles that double-tapping the action button bashes the door open. I proceed in this fashion for the remainder of the demo.
Eventually, I find the second dial tucked inside a chest along a walkway on the second story of the library. I fetch it, and quickly return to the safe. Interacting with it automatically fills in the combination and opens a secret passageway inside the bookcase (who would’ve guessed?) and leads to the third and final puzzle. As quickly as the previous two, I insert the nail into the proper lobe, then return to the main hallway.
My arrival initiates the “unlock the door” cinematic, where solving the three puzzles somehow managed to unlock this massive contraption that has been scaling these double-doors. They open, and I navigate my player down the hallway, only to have the screen start to rapidly flash to black. After a few flashes, a pale figure begins to appear in each new frame, getting closer and closer as he appears. With my character now stuck in his walking cycle, I have no choice but to collide with this figure. Upon doing so, the demo concludes, and the logo fades onto screen.
Initial Impressions:
The Evil Within does several things right. Its sense of atmosphere is believable. Its gunplay is solid. The gore and violence, while somewhat over the top, feels appropriate and adds to the experience. The graphics are much nicer than the trailers lead me to believe. The level design was great in a select few spots, okay or ‘meh’ in almost all the others. The sneak (crouch) feature is used only to avoid hight-detecting bombs that have seemingly no reason to be there other than to slow you down. The character’s movement was clunky and seemed almost reactionary when navigating the rooms – god help you if those rooms involve a staircase.
The demo was solid, but there was something… I’m not quite sure what it was, but something just felt off. Maybe it was the slice I was shown – after all, Mikami did suggest that we demo Chapter 4 – or maybe it was the past survival-horror expectations that I brought along with me, but whatever it was, I don’t think that The Evil Within is a game for me.
General Take-Away:
“Okay.” That’s the word I’d use to describe my time with The Evil Within. It’s definitely not bad, and it’s certainly not the best survival-horror title I’ve ever played, but it does what it tries to well. Unlike my time with other games, the very small sliver that I demoed didn’t leave me needing, or really even wanting, more. I came. I saw. I moved on.
