The Evil Within
I would be lying if I said that The Evil Within wasn’t the biggest reason for me to go to E3 this year. Between TEW and Murdered I could have left fulfilled early. Even though I didn’t get my hands on the game, I was overly impressed with what we were shown during the closed door demo. Here’s a bit more on what got my jaw to drop and people screaming in the room.
If you are a fan of Resident Evil 4 then you might as well already through your money at TEW. All of the game play mechanics, camera tricks, and scenarios that made RE4 and amazing game look to be what was used as the base for this game. At least that is how everything seemed to play out for me on the screen. The only real big difference was the fact Tango Gameworks took all of those amazing aspects and greatly improved them, if you can even imagine that. Like I said, my jaw dropped at how fluid and amazing the game moved on screen.
One of the other big bullet points shown is that The Evil Within is not an action survival horror game but a pure survival horror. In fact for the first ten minutes of what we were shown the main character gets his leg cut by a chainsaw and has to hobble, hide, and distract his way to get out of the building. Even that didn’t seem to work all the time either as the chainsaw wielding enemy just began cutting everything apart, even prospective hiding places. It looks like we are going to have to be always on the move or planning well in advance to make it though as having limited weapons and ammo seemed to be one driving goal.
Mind you, that doesn’t mean that there won’t be a point in the game where we get to actually fight back. During the demo they jumped ahead to another location in the game that played just like the cabin fight in RE4. The main character was better equipped for the fight, including make-shift claymore mines, and everything was used to keep the rush of non-zombie zombies at bay. Or at least survive until he was able to get out the back of the door. What was an interesting note is that the AI is claimed to change up each time so the same strategies won’t always work in these kinds of situations.
Speaking of AI, even though we didn’t get to see an example of it in our demo, the AI is built to also add to the paranoia and fear as some enemies will feint being shot and drop in an attempt to play possum. When you add this into the fact that head shots are not always fatal for the enemies, you could quickly find yourself in a scary situation. There is an option to try and set fire to all of the “killed” enemies, but that also requires you to get in a bit close so you never know what could jump.
Lastly, and this is kind of where things got weird because there was no explanation, apparently you don’t get to know what is real and following the “correct” path isn’t always the correct path. At one point we were running down a hall to get away from a group of enemies and in the blink of an eye the whole hallway shifts from an underground passage to an industrial hall filled with pipes and steam. Then just as quick you are running toward the enemies even though we never changed course. Blink again and we were running in a sewer looking location and a wave of water came rushing down from where the enemies were moments ago.
Seeing as the Japanese title for the game translates Psychobreak, I have a feeling that all of this is in the main character’s head and that will be the “twist.” I’m kind of hoping that will not be the case because that seems too simple of a twist to figure out from the demo game play and title. I guess we’ll see sometime next year when The Evil Within hits our game collections.
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