The Evil Within...and why you should definitely NOT play this game

[Kaldrak]

A commuter train hangs over an impossible precipice, forming a makeshift bridge between two cliffs. As I stand wearily on one side, contemplating the death defying crossing and the dizzying drop to the rocks below, I ask myself how I got here.

There is no satisfactory answer.

I move forward through the train and without warning a steel girder smashes into the cabin directly in front of me. With a startled curse, I pick myself up and read the single word written on the side of it:

YOU

A message of some sort, but at this point I am almost beyond caring. I push forward tiredly and another girder smashes through the window behind me. I turn around.

This one reads:

WILL

Ok, obviously there's going to be another girder coming at me from somewhere with more of this stupidity. I can't see a source for these things. There's no superhero or supervillain slinging them at me from a construction yard nearby. They are just appearing out of nowhere and slamming into the railcars next to me at high velocity.

Wonderful.

The final girder hits and I read the last word. I begin to laugh, but it's not really funny. The complete message, brought straight to you from the game developers via the primary antagonist in the game is this:

YOU WILL SUFFER.

My only response is a very unhappy, "Haven't I suffered enough already?"

This sequence occurred late in the game. I was almost at the end. Almost there. Almost finished with this horrible, horrible game. It was a long road. Long and filled with rage and frustration.
Let me take you aside and tell you all about it. Don't make the same mistake I did.

Don't play this game.

So what is The Evil Within?

I have to admit I was excited when I first heard about it. A game by Shinji Mikami, the so called 'Father of Survival Horror?' I was stoked. Sure he hasn't made a scary Resident Evil title since the early 2000's, but I figured that was because the games are selling much better as action titles than survival horror titles. I didn't think it was because he had lost his touch.

I watched the trailer for the game and thought it looked pretty good. Nice, slick looking graphics, a bizarre premise, and some ugly monster things to defeat. Sure I had no idea what was going on, but figuring out a compelling mystery is part of the fun of playing survival horror games.

The key word here is compelling.

So what went wrong, exactly? What soured me on the game? Well, to be perfectly honest with you, I knew after five minutes of playing that I was not going to be a happy camper if things continued in the direction they were going.

To begin with, the game stars a one Sebastian Castellanos, who is so stereotypical and bland it's almost painful to play as him. He's a detective who's lost his family, but enough about that. This game isn't about Seb, really. The man can fight, shoot, sneak, run, and apparently has a PHD in disarming deathtraps of all shapes and sizes.

He's a grizzled detective who's seen it all. Also an alcoholic, though you only see him take one drink in the entire game, and it never impacted his detective work anyway.

Go on game, tell me some more about him without really showing any of this stuff during the game. I'm listening. I mean, isn't that how this works? Tell, not show? Hold on, I don't think that's quite right.

The main problem I have with Seb is that he barely reacts to anything. The first scene in the game has Sebastian and his partner, plus a junior detective who is apparently shadowing them to learn the ropes, get called in to the scene of a multiple homicide. They show up at Beacon Hospital, where there are cop cars and emergency vehicles all over the place, but strangely no one there to watch the vehicles. You expect me to believe standard police procedure is to send every single person into a crime scene and leave tens of thousands of dollars of equipment sitting in the parking lot with no one to watch out for it?

Bullshit.

This was the first sign to me that something was clearly wrong. If there's no one out with the cars, maybe there's no one left, or every single person they had was needed inside. Either way, baaad news. You'd think a senior detective like Sebastian would say something about this, or even notice it, but nope.

You walk slowly around all the parked cop cars with their doors open and you can notice the rain dripping on the camera and the characters. Visually, things are pretty impressive. I like the city and the graphics are decent, even if not really all that jaw dropping or inspiring.

We open the hospital front doors and...holy jeeze that's a lot of dead bodies.

Patients and nurses and doctors lay in pools of blood all over the place inside. There must be around fifteen or sixteen dead bodies in the front entrance area, but does anyone on Sebastian's team even bat an eye at this? Nope. Just how grizzled are these detectives? No one even reacts to the smell and you know that many dead folks in one place are probably going to put up some kind of bloody stink. Even the junior detective is an emotionless hard case.

How many multiple murders are there in this strange little town? Everyone reacts with a resounding 'meh' to all this death. Sebastian's partner Joseph is the only one who even pulls his gun out and again, not one person remarks on the fact that lots and lots of cops and emergency personal have mysteriously vanished somewhere. They aren't in the lobby with all the dead people, so where are they and why does no one bring up how odd it is for them to not be at the crime scene?

Character reactions: FAIL

Chance to generate atmosphere through having onscreen characters actually possess relatable revulsion to supposedly horrific scene filled with dead bodies: FAIL

Believability in plausibility of characters being detectives: LOW

Character intelligence assessment: LOW

Overall rating of onscreen characters at this time: Horror movie extras.

I do not care about any of these non-people even remotely and the so called 'gruesome' scene in the beginning would resonate far more with me if the game didn't star a bunch of thoroughly desensitized detective stereotypes who don't notice any of the strange things they should be noticing. I was kind of under the assumption that detectives were supposed to be observant.

Silly me.

I mean hell, some kind of comment along the lines of, "Jesus, I've never seen so many at once." or, "Where are all the other cops?" would have been better than bored disinterest. I'm not saying they have to lose their lunch at all the carnage or anything, but how often do you roll up on over fifteen dead bodies at once as a cop? And what the heck is up with the junior detective? She's like a robot. Her voice is flat and emotionless and just like everyone else, she barely reacts to anything.

Her name is Julie Kidman.

Also she kind of dresses like an urban fashion model, wearing a white blouse, impractically tight jeans, and equally impractical high heels I didn't notice at first.

Yeesh.

So it's here that things begin to go seriously sideways. Joseph finds a survivor, apparently one of the doctors, and Sebastian and I go to check out the security monitors. Now, before you can even begin to say the word investigating, there are cops shooting at someone on one of the screens. Someone who zips around at super high speeds, almost like he's teleporting. Three stabs of a knife later and the cops are dead and mister hooded ghost dude is staring up at the security camera with a burned face. He flickers and vanishes, only to reappear right behind Sebastian, driving that knife directly at his face.

I think I just died...apparently? I'm not really sure.

Oh wait, I'm waking up now, hanging upside down in a butcher shop while a very large masked man lumbers around doing grisly work.
Mission one: escape from the Leatherface knockoff.

So I swing back and forth and manage to grab a knife sticking out of a nearby corpse while he's off doing something in the other room. Something that involves a whole lot of chopping. I hack myself free and drop to the floor, trying to get a good look around.

Now a sensible, normal person might start freaking out a little bit at least, finding themselves suddenly in the den of a serial killer and his victims' bodies hanging all over the place like so many sides of beef, but not Seb. Oh no, he just drops to the floor, quietly sneaks around and gets a look at a bunch of keys in the other room.

Bah, more dead bodies. Who cares? If nobody within the game world cares about all of the death everywhere, why should I? It just comes off as fake and over the top.

I spent the next several minutes of the game alternatively running from, hiding from, and attempting to outmaneuver large chainsaw man. Oh and he got me once in the leg with the chainsaw early on, right before I had to escape, limping from a room full of spinning blades instead of walls that were slowly closing in on me. And then the game dumped me into what looked like a large drainage system from a slaughterhouse. You literally stand up covered in gooey, congealed blood that you wipe off.

Y'know, I think this game illustrates something very interesting that I would like to point out. Gore is not scary. Hell, if you have piles and piles of bodies everywhere and you are literally slogging through rivers of blood, you start to not care about any of it very quickly...or you turn it off and play something that doesn't make you queasy. Oh look, another pile of intestines wrapped around spikes. That was gross the first time I saw it, but the impact is kind of lost on me by the fourth or fifth. This game is just stupidly gory.

You might as well call it: "The Evil Within, Guts, N' Gore Edition, Welcome to the Sloshy Splatterhouse of BLOOD." Sounds ridiculous, doesn't it?

If I were a vampire or a cannibal, this game would just make me hungry. Since I am neither of those things I had a somewhat different reaction. If you pile guts and bodies around every corner, all you do is desensitize your audience. I know you're trying for shock value, but if not even the characters onscreen are shocked by any of it, you have what amounts to a gigantic atmosphere fail.

I felt like this:

"Ho hum, slogging through the fields of corpses again. I wonder what's on TV right now."

And I really, really shouldn't feel like that.

It's not that you can't use gore to shock people, oh goodness me no, but it's a selective tool that should be used sparingly to create an unsettling, horrific atmosphere. Otherwise all of that blood you're flinging all over the place might as well be paint for all I care about it. Death should be horrifying, damn it, not mundane.

I suppose if I had never seen this type of thing before anywhere, I would probably find it unbearably disgusting, but the game is aimed at veteran survival horror gamers like myself, so...bleah. I am not a gore hound. I do not play these things for that reason. If I was new to this sort of thing I would probably just stop playing due to it. I'm not sure what you were trying to do here, but I think you failed at it.

But enough about that.

Let's talk about the deathtraps.

They are everywhere. This game hates you. It wants you to die. There are proximity bombs that only go off on you and you alone. The enemies don't trigger them for...some reason. There are tripwires that trigger other explosives and spikes...oh so many spikes. There are pressure plates and acid traps and spinning blades and leg traps and crushing spike platforms and spear traps and crossbow bolts that shoot continuously at you from holes in the walls. Some areas are full of poison gas, while others have thick, goopy liquid that significantly slows down your speed, leaving you at the mercy of whatever creatures are attempting to kill you at any given moment. There are these annoying little glowy green spinning blade robots on the floor that don't kill you but they hurt you and knock you into other traps that most definitely will. There are flame geysers that shoot randomly and big rolling things with even more spikes that crush you if you don't escape from them.

Oh and the puzzles? If you can even call them that? I encountered multiple 'puzzles' where there were two options. Pick option A and you live. Pick option B and you get impaled by spikes. There are no clues as to which you should pick, so it's essentially trial and error. Oooh, frightening. Last time I picked wrong and got killed, so this time I'll pick right and move on. Tell me, what is the point of that other than to slow down player progression? It's not intuitive. There wasn't anything I had to solve and the checkpoints eliminate the consequences of failure. I was just guessing.
It's like oops, you picked wrong. Try again. I guess it's supposed to create a sense of tension? Mostly it just made me irritated.

The majority of my deaths in this game were so frigging cheap it's not even funny.

You want to know how to make your players want to stay away from your in game enemies without actually making them scary? Make them instantly kill the player. Yep, that'll scare em. Sure will. Why bother making truly terrifying enemies when you can just make em butt-ugly and wrap em in barbed wire for no reason? Slap an instant kill move on that sucker and make it a bullet sponge and you're all set! Not enough? Just make em respawn over and over to punish the player for trying to fight em. Oh and make some random enemies have an instant kill move that only happens when you damage em a certain way. The player won't be expecting it cause all of the other times they encountered this enemy its attack just did damage instead of insta-killing them.

HATE...SO...MUCH.

And it doesn't end there.

The game had a horrible habit of locking me in cage matches with insta-kill bosses and giving me no indication as to when I should be running from or attempting to fight said boss. Since I wasn't afraid of it and the run/fight BS was so arbitrary, I had no idea what I was supposed to be doing until I expended large amounts of resources defeating the boss only to have it sink into the floor or simply respawn right on top of me. Oh, silly me. It's not time for the final confrontation with this thing yet. I guess I'll just look around and...ah, I see. Little valves I need to shoot to shut off the flames blocking the door. Yep, sure was obvious. And then I spend a large chunk of time running around the arena area where I'm supposed to kill the boss looking for the exit and nope. Oh goody, it's time to fight now that I've already shot most of my ammo at this thing earlier and wasted most of my health items.

You know what this is? Poor game design. It's an artificial and lazy way to make difficult to defeat enemies without bothering to put much work into their AI or presentation. And the AI was bad too. I watched one boss get stuck on a gurney and run in place while I shot it to death. Another will just stare at you and swing his chainsaw futilely at nothing if you climb on top of a certain ledge.

Pathetic.

None of this was scary in the least. I know fear is subjective, but come on. This is terrible. Mostly it just made me terribly angry and frustrated. I wasn't scared of all of these things. I was pissed off at them. This game is seriously rage inducing.

To make matters worse, The Evil Within does not have a single original bone in its entire body. It's just one big bag of horror tropes. Ghosts? Check. Chainsaw guy? Check. Zombies? Check. People turning into said zombies? Check. Wondering whether any of this is real? Check. Big spooky mansion? Check. Large dog monster? Check. Eerie Hospital? Check. Long haired creepy Grudge type girl? Check. Box Head man who is clearly a Pyramid Head knockoff from the Silent Hill series? Check. Fighting waves of peasants in a medieval village ala Resident Evil 4? Check. Giant monsters of various types? Check. SAW-like deathtraps? HUUUUGE check-a-roonie there, buddy.

Here's the recipe that makes up this poorly stitched together Frankenstein's monster of a game:

Liberally take elements from Silent Hill, Resident Evil, Clocktower, Outlast, The Last of Us, The Grudge, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, SAW, and Inception. Mix together with very little regard for what actually made those things good, into a chaotic, disconnected, amorphous 'plot' that makes no damn sense until the very end of the game.

Oh and I know this is intentional. There are even movie poster mockeries of some of the said inspirations the game drew from. If the intention was to make me want to play and watch other things, well Shinji, you succeeded. Most of the source material you drew from is far better than this game, including your own previous body of work.

And the gameplay! Ye gods.

A third of the time this game plays like a shoddy copy of The Last of Us. You crouch behind cover, watch enemy patrol routes and sneak up behind em and take em out. There are even bottles you can throw for distractions or use as improvised weaponry. It says something about this type of gameplay and my enjoyment thereof that these segments were just about the only thing that kept me playing and they were too few and too far between to really make the game enjoyable for me. I really like doing this stuff, though I questioned the effectiveness of a knife to the back of the head of a glowing eyed zombie when it's already got a large piece of pipe stuck through its brain, but whatever. Oh and zombies? They are pretty much the stupidest and easiest to sneak up on things ever, so...these parts are not all that challenging unless you go charging around like crazy.

Annoyingly, you can only stealth kill enemies while crouching, even if you can sneak up on them while standing, making it a two button combo to kill things rather than a simple button press. Trust me when I say that the game doesn't need this added aggravation on top of everything else.

Now, there are some who may question my comparison to the Last of Us here. I mean, there are a lot of stealth based third person sneaking games out there, but I tell you, it's the presentation that makes the comparison inevitable. If I'm playing a Metal Gear Solid game and I'm sneaking around ghosting dudes in the tall grass, it's going to look and feel different from playing something like Tenchu, where you sneak around and assassinate people who get in your way. So trust me when I say that these segments look, feel, and play very similarly to the sneaking parts of the Last of Us, only worse. I wasn't kidding about the zombies being really stupid and easy to sneak up on.

The second third of the game plays like Resident Evil 4. It's even been described by some reviewers as RE4 on speed, but that's bupkiss. Those reviewers haven't played that game in a while, I figure. RE4 is way more action packed than TEW. Also it has the very important distinction of actually being fun to play, so there's that I guess. Basically, you shoot glowing eyed villager zombies while they attack you with anything and everything they've got. Unlike RE4, you'll eventually run out of enemies to kill in these segments, which is a good thing due to how resource intensive some of them are to take down. But yeah, it looks and plays very much the same. You can even do the ladder trick from RE4 where you climb on a ladder and enemies can't follow you up or down it till you get off. Oh, and you'll fight the Chainsaw guy more than once during these segments, so....

Look, I like RE4. I played through it multiple times. I still have my copy of it. I could go play it right now. All you're really showcasing here is how good an older game you made is in comparison to this one.

The last third of the game is spent mostly fighting or running from bosses and sometimes other lesser monsters. Here you'll find the largest concentration of deathtraps and instant kill enemies. If you could simply remove this part from TEW in its entirety, the game would be much more playable. Instead, we wildly shift from stealth to action to "Aww snap, y'all gonna die now if ya don't run, son." with no real rhyme or reason or warning beforehand. It makes it very difficult to play. Sometimes you'll be the cold, merciless badass wiping the floor with your enemies and other times you'll be running for your life from insta-kill dudes everywhere. If it was all one thing or another, I would be so much happier. Instead, it's a mixed bag of chaotic elements that suffers from a major identity crisis.

TEW doesn't really know what it is and this lack of coherent gameplay direction or even a coherent narrative makes the resulting game a big goopy mess. It wants to be survival horror, but it's too action oriented for that. It wants to be a good action game, but it randomly throws you against invincible enemies that can instantly kill you with no warning that you must run from.
It wants to be scary, but it just isn't.

Even knowing what I know about the ending, I still have no idea why I went to most of the places I went to or what the significance of most of my actions was. I get that Sebastian is trying to survive against powerful otherworldly forces, but most of the game is just one big WTF??

"Why am I playing this?" I asked myself on more than one occasion. More often though, I would say this: "This guy's life is Hell."

Does any of this sound like something you would want to play?

I suppose I should mention the leveling system. Throughout the game you collect green gel. This stuff has a picture of a brain on it and you can upgrade your abilities through a uh...well, it's a rather unique method, we'll say. You see, in order to save the game, you must travel through mirrors or glass that pleasant music plays from, letting you know where they are. On the other side is a small hospital wing, complete with a nurse who says cryptic things and sometimes will tell you that you look terrible when you're injured or that you should use your green gel if you've got a lot of it. She sighs a lot and spends most of her time behind the front desk filing her nails. One time she showed me where a whole bunch of lockers containing much needed supplies was. You unlock the lockers with keys you find hidden throughout the game.

Anyway, the nurse is unimportant. The game would like you to think that she's important, but she really isn't. You can grab missing person posters off the billboard and newspapers off the rack when you come here, so if you care at all about the archives, you should check every time.

To level up your skills you go to a back room and sit down in a chair. A nice skull cap with electrodes clamps down onto Sebastian's cranium and your wrists are restrained. Every time you expend green gel to upgrade your skills, a huge jolt of electricity goes through Sebastian and he writhes in pain.

You could say this is a rather shocking experience.

Seriously though. You upgrade your skills through electroshock therapy in an electric chair? The hell is this? I'd like to nominate this for worst idea for a leveling mechanic ever. I mean good grief, what am I, a sadist?

There are a variety of weapons to use, some of which are even fairly effective against the annoying repeat bosses you'll find dogging your steps. Didn't like that boss? Don't worry, you'll probably meet it again later. I mean, isn't that the best way to do boss fights? Just repeat the damn thing two or three or even four times with little to no variation in strategy for how you beat it.

There's a revolver, a shotgun, a rifle, a crossbow with bolts you can construct from scavenged trap parts, and a few others. The crossbow bolts come in different flavors of usefulness. The freeze bolts and the electric bolts can halt most bosses for a bit, which make them a godsend in boss fights. You can attach explosive bolts and electric bolts to the floor to make traps for enemies to walk into. The default bolts cost the least to create and you can pin normal enemies to the wall with them if you aim for center mass instead of their head. There are also flash bolts which can stun groups of normal enemies, allowing you to stealth kill them while they are staggering about, but those rarely work on bosses. Oh, and there are also flame arrows for those of you who preordered the game. The rest of us don't get these and for good reason. If you can catch a certain boss on fire whenever you want to, it would make certain incredibly aggravating sections of the game a cakewalk.

So the combat system functions much like the one in RE4. You have somewhat tank-like controls, but you can move while aiming, which is good. If you're stupid enough to try hitting enemies with your fists, or if you've unfortunately run out of ammo, you will be punching at the weakest of enemies in the game for a long time. Fisticuffs work terribly against most things. A zombie will take something upwards of six to ten repeated head bashings in order to go down on the mid level difficulty and they counterattack in the middle of your attacks, making this one of the more painful ways of killing things in the game. Oh and if there's more than one? Just forget it. Run away or lure them into a tripwire or something.

Know what I-frames are? These are invincibility frames. Basically, you or an enemy goes into an animation of some kind and is practically invulnerable from any kind of attack during this period. There are no I-frames for the player except maybe hopping over things, I'm not sure and I didn't test it. However, the zombies are practically invulnerable after you shoot them in the head for a few seconds. They stagger back and then straighten up if you haven't killed them with the first shot. If you continue firing during this period, you are just wasting precious ammo. Oh and this is one of the first games of this type I've played where enemies can stop me from stealth killing their friends. I'll start the animation and if another one nearby one notices me before I finish, they'll just knock me away. Kudos to that. It really should work that way most of the time, however if you're going to give the enemies invincibility frames while I'm attacking them, then it would be nice if I got some as well...somewhere.

Honestly I don't see what's so wrong about just letting me shoot them to death. That's how bullets work, right? Here's how this plays out currently: *Bang!* Pause, wait wait wait. Ok are you ready for me to shoot you again and actually let me do damage? Great, here goes. *Bang!*

That is just stupid. I shouldn't have to wait until my opponents are ready for me to shoot them. Once again this is a lazy and artificial way of increasing the difficulty.

It's not all bad though. The game lets you carry around a supply of matches and enemies go up like roman candles once lit...IF they are on the ground. You can only burn things that are lying or have been knocked down. Or you could whack someone in the face with a torch. If you're smart, you can use bodies on the ground like firetraps. Just lure enemies towards you and drop a match and fwoosh! Oh, but your match dropping animation has no priority and you can be hit or killed while doing it, or you can 'miss' whatever you're trying to catch on fire, which happens randomly and costs you your match.

Sometimes when you knock enemies down they aren't dead, so catching them on fire before they get back up is a great way to get rid of tougher enemies without using much in the way of resources. In fact, there are lots of things to burn in this game other than enemies. You can catch hay bales on fire and wagons and puddles of oil and random bodies lying around and obstacles blocking your path.

Burn it allll. Fire is so preeetty.

Erhm. Where was I?

Ah, right. So when you check reviews on the PC version of the game, most of the reviews are super salty about the fact that it's supposedly a cruddy port of a console game. Chief complaints are about the aspect ratio being off, which I never noticed and I have a widescreen monitor, and the fact that the game was locked at 30 frames per second on release. When I played it the fps issue was patched, so I maxed out the in-game graphics and let fly.

The game plays super smoothly on my rig, but if you do ignore my advice and check it out, you'll immediately notice the two inch black bars at the top and bottom of the screen while playing. This is apparently called 'letterboxing' and it supposedly makes the game look more like a movie or something. What it actually does is restrict your ability to see and you should immediately turn off that setting in the menu. You'll still have the letterboxing during movie sequences and in the menu itself, but that doesn't bother me nearly as much as not having access to true full screen while I'm actually playing.

You may also want to reduce the film grain because it makes the game look ugly.

Honestly, there's just so much wrong here that I could go on for a whole lot longer than I already have. The game is derivative as all hell and not in a good 'homage' type of way. When I'm fighting a boss fight against two Box Head's that is reminiscent of a fight at the end of Silent Hill 2 against two Pyramid Heads, all it does is throw me forcibly out of the experience and annoy the crap out of me. I sound like a hipster but, other people did this stuff before you and they did it better. If you absolutely can't be original, I'd settle for merely being good.

The pacing is all shot to hell anyway.

If you go take a look at Alien Isolation you'll see that the game gradually builds up suspense until the big reveal of the Alien itself. The game is tense and frightening as you move from place to place trying to avoid the relentless xenomorph stalking you throughout the space station you're on.

In Silent Hill 2 you take a nice fifteen minute walk by the lakeside in the fog while it sounds like someone or something is following you and vague shapes move in the distance that you can't quite make out until you get closer. By the end of it you're jumpy as all get out and you haven't even seen anything yet.

In the very first Resident Evil, you encounter one zombie, one, not an entire village of them. It's very hard to stop and then you're alone trying to explore the first floor of the iconic RE mansion while creepy music plays in the background and you have no idea when or where the next enemy is going to come at you.

I wasn't playing The Evil Within for five minutes before I was surrounded by corpses and thrown headfirst into chainsaw Mcbutcherworld full o' deathtraps. Fifteen minutes into the game I'm in an ambulance fleeing from the hospital and the buildings are falling on us and half of the city is shifting around in a scene that reminds me of the dream world sequences in Inception.

This...is not how you effectively build tension.

It's just bad and you should feel bad.

I honestly think what happened is that someone challenged Shinji to do this. Maybe the conversation went a little like this:

"So people are saying that there hasn't been a scary Resident Evil game since before 2004. In fact, they don't think you can make a scary game anymore."

"What?? I'll show them! I'll show you all! I'll make a game and it will have so many scary things. You'll see! It'll have it ALL."

And then he made a game where he tried to combine all of the horror things together and the result was a big schizophrenic mess.

Well, that's just my theory anyway.

Anyway, steer clear of this unless you, uh...like these sorts of things. In that case, have at it, but don't say I didn't warn you.

I am sooo done with it.

[Anastasia]

Wowzers.

Parts of it do sound promising, but you're right. It's like the whole is far less than the sum of the parts. Understanding why things work is the hard part, I suppose.

Points for the electro-shock leveling up. That's original if nothing else.

Edit: Awesome review by the way.

[Kaldrak]

Thank you. ^_^

It's always nice getting feedback.

[thepanda]

"If you pile guts and bodies around every corner, all you do is desensitize your audience."

THIS! So much this!

[Kaldrak]

Well, it's that time again. What time is that you ask? It's time for SPOILERS.

Spoiler: ShowHide

Now that I've had some time to cool off after my long, ranting review of this game, I'll take a stab at deconstructing the plot. This is rather difficult to do, due to the disjointed, chaotic representation of events in the game itself. Also the writing is...okay at best. You could argue that plot really isn't the focus here and you would be correct, but too many things just make no damn sense, even when held under the light of the revelations at the end of the game.

Welcome to amateur hour folks.

First, the good.

There are a series of journals written by a younger version of Sebastian, our stoic protagonist. Younger Sebastian is a far more interesting character. He falls in love with his partner and eventually asks her to marry him. She accepts and he gets a new partner. The two of them get married and have a little girl who years later ends up dying in a fire under mysterious circumstances. This is apparently where Sebastian started to drink. His alcoholism drove a wedge between himself and his wife and when she ends up going missing, most everyone else believes that she left him. Sebastian is convinced there is more going on and that he will find out the truth, no matter what he has to do.

Younger Sebastian is relatable. His journal entries are full of that most human of things, actual emotion, which current Sebastian simply does not have. The guy emotes like a brick wall. He's worse than Judge Dredd in his most recent movie and that's really saying something because Dredd is a sociopath.

Anyway, the journals are the best writing in the game. Everything else is just stupidly convoluted or bland and cliché, with an occasional line or two of dialogue that really shines on its own.
Now that Sebastian is out of the way, I may as well dig into the other two main characters.

There's Joseph Oda, Sebastian's current partner. Joseph is impeccably dressed and wears black leather gloves and glasses.
I know almost nothing about him other than the fact that he might be infatuated with Kidman.

Joseph accompanies Sebastian through a few different areas of the game. He's actually fairly useful in a gameplay sense, due to the fact that he never runs out of ammo when he has his gun and when he doesn't he uses an axe which can one-shot weaker enemies.

Oh and Kidman shoots him towards the end of the game for getting in her way.

I just plain don't understand Kidman's character all that well. She plays the 'mysterious beauty' stereotype to a T, but she's so emotionless that it makes her really unpleasant to interact with. Oh and I got her name wrong when I first did my review. Her first name is Julie and as near as I can tell, she is a member of some secret, sinister organization who works with Beacon Hospital. She might be brainwashed, due to a missing child poster of her I found that shows her reported missing when she was a little girl. That might explain the lack of emotions, I suppose.

What she's doing is...I have no real idea. I know she tries to kill a mental patient named Leslie and Sebastian tries to stop her from doing it. The resulting confrontation ends with her shooting Joseph.

Leslie is a patient at the hospital and you spend much of the game chasing after him. He rarely talks and when he does, he repeats stuff that other people say and gives off these...waves of energy, which give the impression of him being powerful, but unstable.

If this seems a little complicated, don't worry, it's about to get worse.

So...ugh. Alright, let's get straight to it then.

The primary antagonist of the game is Ruben Victoriano, aka Ruvik. Here you have a simple concept, taken to its logical extreme. Ruvik hates everyone. He wants to kill every character in the game except one. He is a psychopath. He is a sadist. He is obsessed with deathtraps and torture. The guy is about as painfully one-dimensional as you can get, but hey, at least he has some kind of backstory to sort of explain how he got this way.

At a young age, Ruben tortured animals in the name of science. He was taken under the wing of Dr. Jimenez, a member of the same never-mentioned-anywhere-but-still-present secret organization that Julie works for. They apparently wanted to cultivate Ruben's genius and straight up ignored his psychopathic tendencies.

The Victoriano family was apparently wealthy and Ruben lived in a mansion with his older sister Laura. There was some kind of...uprising? Violent disagreement with the common folk? I have no frigging idea, but it resulted in a group of villagers burning down a large barn that Ruben and Laura were playing in when they were little kids. Laura sacrificed herself to save Ruben and it is here that he got his horrible burns all over his body.

It is very difficult to explain this stuff in any sort of linear fashion, because the game presented these things to me randomly and completely lacking in context. It repeatedly flung me from scene to scene with no logical progression or any sort of apparent connection between them. Looking back, I can barely pick up the pieces and try to arrange them into something that makes any sort of sense.

Apparently Ruben killed his parents after this? I'm not really sure. His sister's death completely unhinged him and he somehow struck a deal with Dr. Jimenez and the hospital. He would provide them with the results of his research and they would provide him with test subjects to mutilate and torture in his mansion that he filled with deathtraps.

Nice.

What was he researching? It had something to do with the human psyche, but it was horrible. You can listen to his psychopathic ramblings about his experiments on recordings scattered throughout the game if you wish. They're rather creepy.

So the end result of his experimentation is a machine that is supposed to link human minds together into a sort of shared dream state. Oh and some idiot set the range on the psychic projector way too high so it can ensnare anyone in a wide radius around the machine itself while broadcasting.

The hospital attempted to build the machine before Ruvik actually completed his, but theirs just kills anyone who they plug into it. So they get the bright idea to grab Ruvik himself and hook him into the machine. They grab him and burn his mansion to the ground to cover his disappearance.

So...they hooked a psychopath who seethes with hate and sadism into a machine designed to link human minds together, capable of broadcasting a psychic signal out to people who aren't even plugged into the machine.

This falls under the category of mind numbingly stupid.

As near as I can tell, the beginning of the game comes as a result of Ruvik seizing control of the dream world he's stuck in. The signal is strong enough to drive the staff at the hospital insane and presumably they kill each other, since he can't physically manifest himself in the real world.

When Sebastian and his partners show up, Ruvik has already ensnared all of the previous cops who arrived and is in the process of crushing their minds, one by one. He promptly seizes Sebastian, Joseph, and Kidman as well.

Ruvik immediately attempts to destroy Sebastian's mind, but he can't. Sebastian is simply too stoic to be wiped out so easily. Something about him makes it very difficult for Ruvik to kill him. Maybe it's his almost complete lack of emotion or relatable human traits. Maybe it's his bricklike personality. I have no frigging idea, but whatever the case, Ruvik seems to realize that he can't easily squish Sebastian's mind like he has almost everyone else's. So he does what any supervillain worth his salt would do, he sends minions to do it for him.

All of the monsters in the game are creations of Ruvik's psyche. They are 'symbolic' in the same way that a first grader might try and explain a picture they drew to you. Oh look, it's Mommy and Daddy holding hands with a sunflower. Nice.

See kids, this monster over here represents Ruvik's desire to kill and this one over here represents his undying hatred for all other living things. That one represents his rage while this one represents his twisted desire to torture people and all of the deathtraps are representative of KIIIILLLL KIIIILLLLL RAAAAAR EVIL.

Ok, we get it already.

The symbolism in this game is about as shallow as high diving into a shot glass. You've got less than a foot of water in your pool, people. Deep this aint, so you can stop patting yourselves on the back thinking you're being clever.

This is just bad. It's like you said 'ooh, let's make the enemies all symbolic and stuff like they are in the Silent Hill series.' And then you made them all represent almost the exact same damn thing.
Oh and yes, it was all a dream. As if this game didn't already have enough clichés.

So in a way, it all makes sense now. Each area is a place that exists inside someone's head. You travel from one area to another either under your own volition or through bizarre transition sequences that will leave you disoriented and confused as to why you are there and what you are supposed to be doing.

See? It's supposed to not make any sense, because it all exists in some weird dream world that Ruvik controls. That really doesn't make it very much fun to attempt to play through or rationalize what you're doing, however.

Sebastian's mental refuge is a hospital wing run by a nurse who went missing a while ago apparently. She vanishes after you find her missing persons poster. Somehow, Sebastian's access to that place allows him to successfully resist Ruvik's mind crushing capabilities. Direct confrontations between the two are few and far between.

So what part does Leslie play in all this? Well, apparently Ruvik can use him to escape from the dream world, so he's trying to consume his mind. Kidman is trying to kill Leslie and Sebastian wants to save him.

Sebastian fights his way through everything Ruvik throws at him, until there is a final confrontation with him where Ruvik consumes Leslie and Sebastian destroys both the monstrous form Ruvik makes to try and kill him with and a literal representation of Ruvik's brain.

Sebastian starts to wake up in the real world, only to see Kidman bending over him and making a 'shush' motion. She and her mysterious organization compatriots leave Sebastian and the rest of the now comatose people for braindead and bug out of there. He passes out quietly.

After this, Sebastian wakes up for real this time and leaves the hospital. At the entrance, he meets a storm of police officers who thankfully don't shoot him and he spots a figure leaving the parking lot off in the distance. Could it be? Yep, it's Leslie and he's giving off the same painful sounding psychic signal Ruvik did. He then vanishes and the credits roll.

*Gasp* Oh no! It looks like Ruvik probably copied himself into Leslie's brain before Sebastian killed him. Whatever shall we do?

I have an idea. How about I play something else and try to forget I ever played this game?

DLC? What do you mean there's going to be DLC? You can take your DLC and stick it where the sun don't shine, buddy. I'm through.

[Arakawa]

Y'know, I think this game illustrates something very interesting that I would like to point out. Gore is not scary. Hell, if you have piles and piles of bodies everywhere and you are literally slogging through rivers of blood, you start to not care about any of it very quickly...

Trying to remember, there was a French movie that used this phenomenon to high comedic effect. Whatwasthename...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Magnifique

Yeah. That was cathartic. I think was the word.