Caramba, esse jogo calou minha boca e me surpreendeu de uma forma inexplicável! Quando fui jogar esse game, estava na vibe de jogar jogos de terror, como tinha ouvido falar muito bem dele, fui de cabeça com uma expectativa muito alta. Logo de cara o jogo me impressionou com os gráficos, pois mesmo sendo de 2014 são lindos. Após um certo tempo de jogo, fiquei meio confuso, pois eu não estava sentindo aquele frio na barriga, medo ou levando sustos. Cheguei até a pensar em deixar para joga-lo outra hora, mas depois de pensar um pouco decidi seguir e prestar muita atenção na história. Logo me caiu a ficha e percebi que estava cometendo um erro enorme em querer abandonar essa maravilha. Avançando no jogo percebi que ele consegue misturar os gêneros de terror, ação e história de uma forma maravilhosa. Fiquei maravilhado desde então e me diverti muito, tentando aproveitar o máximo. Também percebi que ele não é pra brincadeira, o nível de dificuldade me surpreendeu bastante até o fim do jogo. Passei por altos e baixos até completar o jogo, oque tornou minha experiencia ainda melhor. Ele ainda possui uma gameplay única e um estilo que mais nenhum jogo consegue fazer igual. Consegui me apegar aos personagens e entrar na história de uma forma que quase nenhum jogo conseguiu fazer igual. Amei o jogo, se tornou um dos meus jogos favoritos sem dúvida nenhuma. Super recomendo!

So many times have I tried to get into The Evil Within. I clawed my way through it on PS3 and I clawed my way through it on PC. This time I was determined to finish this for Halloween, I was confident that Ill do it. I hate this game. Its 15 mediocre Horror Games rolled into one. Theres so many instant kills. I think they want you to improvise and use your tools to fight the enemies in clever ways but there are so few combat rooms to do that. Most of the time you spend in long linear corridors your expected to sneak through with horrible stealth or you have a crash bandicoot style chase scene or you get to train your late stage arthritis with horrible quicktime events. Sure love mashing A to turn that wheel 50 times. I appreaciat how it wants to be unapologetic weird but actually playing it fucking sucks.

Evil Within, albeit having some very questionable design choices and glitchy mechanics with subpar execution, was a great survival horror experience. However, some glitches are still persistent and can screw your run extremely, i.e. the matches you drop disappear and you pretty much wasted valuable utility, especially on harder difficulties. No wonder why it was patched to death on PC back when it came out. Some set pieces are great, others - downright horrible. Gotta love the Spencer Mansion throwback level. Definitely worth a play, but on Casual if you're looking for a narrative experience because Survival is definitely a hardcore difficulty that can catch you off guard quite often.

i was basically gaslighted into playing this game since bioshock was the favorite series of a friend of mine so i was like why not just marathon it and after finishing that one this friend went umh ok actually so the evil within also is one of my favorite game ever so me being a people pleaser a i was like yes maam ,,,,,,, onto it

and here we are

now ive been looking for a horror game that could really make me want to tear my heart out due to the scary shit that happens but im still unable to find it so did the evil within make me shit my pants ??????? no !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! im so tired of people saying “horror game” when in reality its just an action game with horror aesthetic like youre telling me resident evil is scary as fuck and i completely lose interest in your argument (resident evil village has some haunting segments tho will give you that)

so yeah yet again i gotta say this game isnt a good “horror” game the atmosphere isnt the most claustrophobic or thick one and the focus on action elements make it really clear that the direction the game is gonna go its just an action game with some degree of horror elements and even there its more of a gore aesthetic than a horror one apart from some really specific enemies that are genuinely some really disgusting degree of body horror

so actually talking about the game itself the evil within is something that i wasnt expecting to like as much as i did im not a huge fan of these kinds of games unless theyre resident evil so when i also heard the director of this one is shinji mikami who famously also directed resident evil 4 i was sure this was gonna lend a lot of narrative and gameplay elements from that game for better or for worse and sure this did not reach the higher highs of re4 but its sure a good experience nonetheless

something that really struck me as interesting in this one is how much care was put into the themes and general aesthetic of the game to the point that even though youre gonna traverse a wide variety of environments (something that i really liked lets be real theres a hospital a cemetery a collapsing city a forest some sewers a castle a haunted house a laboratory theres some serious attention to detail in every single one of them) theres sure some sense of cohesion altogether and that really sold the game for me i was a huge fan of the cinematographic black bars during the game but after a while i genuinely needed a good amount of time to really use the limited amount of screen so whatever

that being said yeah im a huge fucking fan of this games entire art direction and while i think the characters are bland both in a character design standpoint and also a character development standpoint the enemies are really such a great fucking compromise and somehow get more and more similar to silent hill fiends than resident evil ones with all the body horror i told you about youre gonna feast your eyes on countless limbs lots of mucus and blood and a wide variety and definitely too much decomposed skin the zombies you find at the beginning are the the most safe designs since theyre sure gonna get freaky real quick like the multi hands black hair gal is a highlight and the box heads are really a statement of how much men with heavy metal on their heads are super hot and fuckable im looking at you pyramid head

the gamefllow is nice i was not a huge fan of the stealth elements since i usually suck at them but when you get in the meat of the gameplay which plays a lot like resident evil 4 its really interesting you get a lot of weapons and you can upgrade your stats and the weapons through the use of some loot you get all around and after defeating enemies now this is pretty interesting and again in general fucking these bitches up is always a treat but there were some points here and there in the game so tricky just for the point of being annoying like segments with a lot of traps ot scenes that will always result in a game over the first time you play them because you dont know what you have to do or some enemies that can oneshot you its not always a tranquil descent into madness i gotta say but its still fun to play i cant really lie to you some deaths are irritating but quite fun nonetheless

bosses are also pretty great which is something that i cant really say for many other action horror games sure they also have some weird gimmicks sometimes but its not too bad anyway and they got some bomb designs that final boss was such a treat i had so much fun

so apart from sebastian being kinda hot but this is not the right time to thirst on him since here hes kind of ugly but who wasnt in the ps3 times so yeah hes still an interesting protagonist doesnt have as much of a psychological insight as much as i wanted to even though the game allegedly dabbles into psychological territory but it was more of an external kind of psychological type of narrative than character study which is fine by me maybe the evil within 2 apart from making sebastian super hot and breedable (we are gonna get there in that games review) it will also give me some more insight into his person

that being said i still like what i see hes serious and funny and hes already done with the whole zombie apocalypse after 10 minutes from the beginning of the game and honestly ? can relate

last but not least the story SPOILER TERRITORY YALL

i was not a huge fan of the story in the beginning i knew it was gonna get into psychological type of horror but still the pacing was kind of slow and i was not that interested in the characters if im being honest kidman is barely there joseph is schizophrenic and confusing a character the doctor sucks as a person and as a narrative point and leslie is mentally ill what do you want me to say

ruvik was a weird case because one thing that i really hate in horror stuff is the superpowers it make the entire point of building tension and dread absolutely useless like i was getting invested in the story and this guy would just show up and do some star wars ass moves come on is this the best you can do now i understand he can do the stuff that he does because its all a simulation and hes like the god of the simulation but still if you just give some characters superpowers i already lost half the interest like what happened to physically overpowered monsters or psychologically haunting disorders you can do better

so yeah the entire premise was kind of shit for me but the more i went on the more i liked how the story unfolded they really gave it a nice twist and the entire realization that i was all a simulation in their minds retrospectively explains a lot of stuff that happens throughout the campaign so i really cannot complain about it and anyway i still had a good time all the way through so i guess i can excuse some kamehameha typa plotpoint

good shit i dont know if im gonna play the DLCs for this game but im definitely gonna check out the second game to get a piece of that castellanos ass in tight trousers

A unique, experimental approach to the genre that serves to severely limit the player and their capabilities In order to push a different method of play, gone are the often superhuman capabilities of your average Survival Horror protagonist that juxtaposes what the genre wants to be, you can’t QTE suplex zombos to their death, hold Immense amounts of resources, or even sprint for long. Your character Is a run-down, alcoholic detective who can (Initially) only hold 10 bullets at once, sprint for 4 seconds and has messed up aim. So obviously you can’t shoot everything to death and have to think up of alternative methods of dealing with enemies to progress, though sadly the game Isn’t that In-depth so you always rely on the same approaches, It’s either the crossbow mines or burning up multiple enemies together with matches, trap’s don’t make much of an appearance for enemy encounters outside the first couple of chapters and that’s because Instead of doing more tight, tense big playground levels where you’re allowed a lot of approaches like the village, the game opts for more generic RE style enemy rushes and the level design accommodates them too. I found them decent to play but It’s a shame that the game doesn’t stick to what works best for It because Mikami has the RE blues.

Visually the game Is nothing short of exhilarating, It Is easily up there as one of the best looking 7th gen games and I was fond of how It transitions you from one level to the next without any explanation whatsoever, like being rushed by a sea of blood then waking up In another place, I found that enhances the mystery and makes It so the game Is free to do whatever It wants visually and the result Is quite captivating.

Man, 16 hours sure feels a lot, especially for a horror game that for the first half keeps dropping more and more mystery on top of more mystery. It’s no wonder that I finished several other games in between starting and finishing this (including R&C: Rift Apart and Gravity Rush Remastered)

There are enough reasons for the game to deserve some attention though. From the very first moment, it looks great, with darkly graded atmospheric asylums, cityscapes, and the periphery of a broken city. Even the sewer level is noteworthy for its gooey dark malaise.

The action feels nicely heavy, especially when Sebastian, the player character, tries throwing anything, moving his whole body forward with the inertia, making handling grenades a tricky affair and bottles for stealth perhaps even trickier (though once I managed to figure out the timing and placement of the body, stealth became something I looked forward to).

The shooting has a similar weight to it, which I found to be enjoyable. The weapon selection is limited and mostly ordinary (you’ve got your pistol, your shotgun, your sniper rifle, and, if you’re replaying it, even some assault rifle), with the exception of the crossbow that you can craft different arrows for, but unlike some of the more boring shooters I’ve recently tried, the way the weapons handle here and the natural threat the game instils in every action sequence make up for what they might lack in originality. Perhaps regular weapons even add to the verisimilitude that helps a horror game to be more effective.

They have also managed to strike a good balance in how much ammunition they provide you with, managing to make it always feel as if you have just a bit too little and yet always enough. The ability to craft arrows helps, though considering how difficult and dangerous it is to get the crafting components (often gotten from disarmed traps that sometimes blow up in your face if you disarmed them badly) you always feel like you have to be careful about not wasting them.

The story, concerning mental hospitals and impossible events, made me fear at first the most that it would become another boring “oh, it was all in his mind!”, and while it ultimately certainly has touches of it, it’s done in a way that is somewhat unique and more interesting for it. What’s more, there are no real twists in the narrative, just the slow reveal of the true nature of this nightmarish world. I even became genuinely interested in the story, once the game started providing some answers. Even Sebastian’s backstory which I had scoffed at with the lightly-sexist first note, had me running with glee whenever I saw the tell-tale reddish aura of another note about his past. There were entries in it that as a parent really touched me and made me care more for this one-note character.

Another reason I had to take breaks from the game though is how thoroughly unnerving it can be. It doesn’t spend much time scaring the viewer through disgusting sights or jumpscares (though there are certainly both, especially the first, with some truly impeccable body horror), but there’s a constant sense of dread drenching the whole game. Part of it is due to how vulnerable Sebastian feels. Sure, he’s a strong-bodied hard-jawed macho man who’s pretty damn good with a gun, and yet that’s nothing compared to the army of weird creatures, the way danger can come from anywhere, the simple oppressive atmosphere of the game, or his almost utter impotence when confronted with the uncontrollable nature of his world, even further emphasising his emasculated role. The few times that you feel powerful or safe, for example the mounted gun sequences, are all the more enjoyable for how rare they are.

My biggest problem with the game though is its infatuation with one-hit deaths. Many sequences filled with traps or monsters require you to execute them to near perfection or be sent back to the beginning with an instant death, however much health you might have had. While I might understand the aim (though I’m not sure I do), moments like this quickly become infuriating and, what’s more, they eat away at the sense of dread. If you’re repeating the same moment over and over again, whatever horror you might have felt at first evaporates and it just becomes a mechanical exercise in patterns. A horror sequence repeated is rarely a horror sequence that is effective.

And it’s made even worse by the trial-and-error nature of these moments. The simplest example is not knowing when you’re supposed to fight and when you’re supposed to run, ending with moments where I tried fighting when I was supposed to run (and died a few times, before I understood that this time the insta-death was supposed to be a lesson and not just part of the fight) or spent a long time looking for a way out that didn’t exist. But it’s even more aggravating during puzzles (or boss fights that act as puzzles) where every time you try something new, you might be punished by instant death and the need to repeat everything up to this point in order to try something new.

Oh, and the game has some awful film-style black bars beneath and above the image that I instantly turned off and never regretted.

If there wasn’t as much of insta-death, this could be up there amongst my favourite games. But I was as often annoyed with the game as I was enjoying it (though the idea of enjoying this consistently intentionally dreadful experience made me wonder why it is that we do this to ourselves, those of us who love horror). Perhaps time will be kinder to it as the negative aspects slowly fade from memory and in a year I might be updating my favourites list with what I consider fondly as one of the best horror game experiences I’ve had.

Or perhaps the sequel will help me make a decision. Because whatever my annoyance, as soon as I was done with this game, I put the next one on download. How about that for a recommendation.

It's not a bad game exactly, but come on if you're playing this it's probably for the story more than the gameplay. It's no Resident Evil, no matter how much it wants or claims to be, and while there's plenty of good imagery and interesting boss designs, the only real reason to pick this up if you're not in the weirdly active fandom is if you've burnt through every Resident Evil and most of Shinji Mikami's other games.
It's kind of to RE4 what Shadows of the Damned is to Killer7, even if it is objectively more fun to play and artistically deeper than SotD. There are better games to spend your time on before playing this, and from what I've heard it's really kind of just a stepping stone to get to TEW2, which is evidently much more of it's own thing and thus much more worth your time.

In more specifics, the AI is poor, especially for companions - the gunplay can be fun but aiming feels slightly off and enemies will often move erratically and then get too close after you've missed a headshot and interrupt your melee counter even if you started the animation before them - the letterboxing is so restrictive it quickly stops feeling cluastrophobic and artistic and becomes a hindrance to just moving around casually, much more towards legibility of your goals and actions - the camera, even with letterboxing turned off, feels too tight and makes it hard to navigate space sometimes - the walk cycle animation is frustratingly, almost comedically exaggerated

WIKTOBER LOG #0026 - THE EVIL WITHIN

Rumor has it that after seeing the action-movie style his Resident Evil series was taking, Shinji Mikami dropped ship to make something more authentic. Something more soulful. Something more... Dishonored (2012)

I quite liked the first couple of chapters and being stealthy. I like how the game looks and I think if you disabled letterbox aspect ratio your gaming license should be taken away. Then chapters got longer and longer and nothing else happened - it's just a third person shooter and I'm walking through hallways. There's no moments worth remembering in my past 3 hours of playtime. I don't remember my partner's name, I just know the game suddenly became Army of Two. I feel like I'm playing every other PS3 TPS ever, jank and shitty PC port included. It's fine as a game. There's some cool visuals. I could probably finish it. I won't.

6.5/10
I was excited to finally play TEW, I love horror/horror themed games, Alan Wake 2, TLoU 1 and 2, the og re4, re2r, SH2 and SH3 are all games I liked playing through. i was very burnt-out in the couple last chapters of TEW. Why? Very random difficulty spikes, the story kept stalling a lot, some sections are tedious to go through.
In the beginning of the game it seems like stealth will be VERY important throughout the game but there were very few moments where I could actually stealth around. There are even a couple of sections where there are LOTS of enemies you have to fight and imo it takes away some of the tension you were feeling in the previous chapters. RE4 has lots of combat but there was always some tension, even if it was just a little, sometimes there was absolutely no tension here, just boredom until I was done killing tons of enemies. I feel like they wanted stealth to be important but then it's basically tossed away, even when you can stealth around it feels clunky. The action was also dialed up too much sometimes, like I said. The story and the voice acting are okay. There's some very interesting enemy designs here. Graphically it holds up quite nicely for an almost 10 year old game! The gameplay is nice, the stealth is meh, but the gunplay is nice. The soundtrack and sound design are good too! There's a design choice here that feels so random, when you crouch the audio basically is lowered and gets a bit muffled. The level design is good, there are some pretty cool setpieces! The game doesn't feel very fun to play after 9/10 chapters because the story kept stalling and there were also those difficulty spikes I mentioned. The game also crashed out of nowhere a couple times, sometimes in the middle of a cutscene, sometimes in the inicial logos when booting the game. It got annoying because sometimes I lost 10/15 mins of progress.
Overall I still liked this game even though it drags quit a bit and is tedious in some parts.

Tenho muito carinho pelo primeiro Evil Within, mas sempre que jogo ele de novo, sinto a mesma sensação de "poderia ter sido muito melhor". Parece que é um jogo que precisava de mais alguns meses no forno porque ele tem vários problemas pequenos de balanceamento e polimento que se acumulam e acabam deixando a experiência menos prazerosa.

Isso e o fato de que o jogo se promoveu como sendo "um retorno ao verdadeiro survivla horror" e acabou lançando exatamente igual a todos daquela geração: Com ação demais e terror/puzzles de menos (o que não me incomodaria tanto se não fossem os problemas pequenos que eu mencionei).

Sabe aquele meme do homem minerando por diamantes e desistindo faltando apenas alguns centímetros pra achar? É mais ou menos o quão perto Evil Within esteve de ser um dos melhores jogos daquela geração.

Enfim, descanse em paz, Tango Gameworks!

Honestly surprised that this game is divisive at all, this was easily one of the best survival horror games I’ve played. It effectively borrows from the greatest games in the genre while still maintaining its own identity. The action combat is excellent, with satisfying, tight skillful aiming and movement combined with very well-balanced difficulty that keeps you on your toes but rarely, if ever, feels unfair. I died nearly 100 times in my playthrough and yet almost never felt frustrated at the game itself, which is quite the accomplishment in game design.

While I was a bit concerned about the environment diversity after the first hour or so, hoping it wouldn’t be just a continuous lineup of dark, bland horror-cliche areas, The Evil Within gradually eased my worry with a variety of interesting and oddly pretty aesthetics that effectively use the game’s gritty art style, which itself I am a big fan of. The level design is great, backing the pleasing aesthetics with a wide variety of things to meaningfully interact with, enemies to defeat, secrets to find and unpleasant horrors to take in, with rarely a dull moment in between. I found the pacing of this game to be phenomenal, pushing me to complete the 14 or so hour story in a string of a few days, fully engaged from beginning to end.

While I do think Resident Evil 4 is the better game still, The Evil Within feels like a successful spiritual successor to it, and scratched a similar itch for me. While not my favorite part of the game and far from the best within the genre, the story was strong enough to be a positive as well, and felt like another solid piece of the game, if not a slight bit rushed. Regardless, this was a great experience that I feel like I could easily recommend to any horror fan on the fence about trying out this franchise.

9/10

Enjoyment - 6/10
Difficulty - 9.5/10

I was let down by this game when I first played it on XBOX 360. I can remember it running really poorly on the hardware and it soured my first impression. Now, I fully completed it on PS4. Its not much better in performance but it was bearable.

My expectations got the best of me because I believed The Evil Within would have been on the same prestige as Resident Evil 4 or Dead Space, and it just wasn't.

The platinum trophy is very difficult because you have to complete the game on the One Hit, You Die mode called AKUMU.

A rough start, but maybe the sequel is better?
🏆

Quando falamos de morfologia, estamos sendo bem explícitos no debate das suas formas; em um jogo, creio eu, o ponto de partida sempre vai ser como a gameplay proporciona a imersão ao mundo. Podemos pensar em coisas como: movimentação, armas, vida etc, e tudo isso entra em xeque com a sintaxe, ou seja, como esses conjuntos pequenos geram um sentido dentro do contexto maior. Em outras palavras, como pequenas unidades, criam ideias e sentimentos.

The Evil Within, é um jogo que não sabe lidar com sua forma. O tempo todo, existe um significativo que tenta gerar um terror ou horror, mas nos proporciona, em sua morfologia, aspectos que, inevitavelmente, acabam com esse sentimento, gerando uma nova emoção, que me soa como algo não previsto. Pois veja só, do que adianta criar uma câmera que se fecha no jogador, dando pouca visibilidade, estamina horrível e pouca liberdade de movimento, que são aspectos morfológicos de um terror/horror clássico, se logo em seguida me dá armamento o suficiente para nada disso ser relevante. Perceba, então, que existe sim uma falha entre sintaxe e forma.

E antes fosse só isso, o próprio jogo cria situações onde são puramente sobre se armar e matar todos os inimigos, como um jogo de ação, mesmo não se montando nesse sentido. O que facilmente pode ser associado aos action horror da vida, mas vejamos, nesse subgênero, existe a constante sensação de uma força muito maior, que possivelmente não podemos vencer, aqui não sinto nada disso. Eu sinto apenas ação. Resident Evil 4, cria momentos que sabem equilibrar ação + horror, Evil Within não.

O que soa engraçado esse paralelo com Resident Evil 4, pois até no sentido morfológico, ele é bem mais equilibrado do que esse jogo, que tem toda sua forma baseada em um terror falso.

Dito tudo isso, acho interessante comentar que, o jogo realmente não sabe como finalizar seus capítulos, perdi a conta de quantas vezes senti que já devia ter acabado, mas ele se estende. E o pior disso, é que mata totalmente o clímax e o gancho pra seguir a jogatina.

Mesmo não gostando da forma vs sentido, aqui imposto, não vejo como algo horrível, quando você aceita que é um game de ação e que qualquer veia de terror, não existira além do macabro que cobre esse mundo, se torna até divertidinho. Definitivamente não é um dos melhores, muito menos algo memorável, mas não é torturante jogá-lo como poderia ter sido, caso tivessem errado a mão em alguns pontos. No fim, é uma obra que é o melhor que ela consegue, dentro do que ela sabe fazer.

Um jogo de horror feito por quem entende e muito do gênero. É o Shinji Mikami fazendo uma versão de resident evil muito mais não convencional, mesclando muito bem o survival horror com uma pegada mais ação sem perder a essência do gênero. A liberdade criativa em The Evil Within faz dele umas experiências mais únicas que tu vai ter em videogame, me fascina o jeito que o jogo nunca parece estar preso numa fórmula, os capítulos não são estruturados sempre da mesma forma, o lobby nunca vai ser a mesma coisa da última vez que tu visitou, é uma constante fuga, quase não se tem tempo para respirar, uma verdadeira tentativa de sobreviver, e tu se sente encapsulado ali junto ao Sebastian. O design de áudio é incrível, é perturbador, assim como a direção de todas as cenas, o terror psicológico está sempre presente, toda a ambientação e a atmosfera é sensacional. Pena que quase nada disso se aplica aos últimos 4 capítulos, em que não souberam como manter o mesmo ritmo e o jogo basicamente se torna Resident Evil 6. A gameplay apesar de divertida na maior parte do tempo tem seus problemas, é bem prejudicada por uma hitbox mal feita, os controles são estranhos e não tão responsivos, pior ainda com a performance horrível de 5 FPS

The Evil Within is a brutal, challenging, and remarkably fun game. Its eerie world and imaginative enemies are genuinely frightening, and the scares are heightened significantly by the scarcity of resources at your disposal. It keeps the odds stacked against you to the point that they often feel insurmountable, yet it’s finely tuned to ensure that they never really are, as long as you can keep a cool head and a steady aim in the face of building panic. While its story ends up buckling under its own ambition, there is little here that takes away from the joy of experiencing survival horror under the steady hand of a master of the craft.

The Evil Within feels like an psychological horror acid trip. It was made by Shinji Mikami and his Tango Gameworks team under the Bethesda umbrella.

It's basically Resident Evil 4 but expanded and surprisingly harder.

Don't miss it if you like horror games. It can get very tense on some sections.

A game that had me on the edge of my seat the entire time.
A really enjoyable survival horror. Another game I played back when it released but I wasn't a fan of horror games back then.
Playing through the chapters and just enjoying the story.
NGL game had some pretty fucked up stuff in it but boy was it awesome.
Highly recommend for all survival horror fans.

Really solid game that’s kind of hard to get into at first due to several mechanics being poorly explained and the game not doing a very good job at guiding you towards the best way to engage with it. Knowing this is a Shinji Mikami game going in I was either expecting it to be an action horror game in the vein of re4 or a classic survival horror experience in the vein of OG resident evil and the remake of RE2. This game doesn’t fit neatly into either of these categories which was confusing at first and led to some early game frustration. If you stick with it and approach the game and its systems on its own terms and without using other games as a reference point it’s a very fun time with a surprisingly deep and flexible combat system.

This is a somewhat difficult but also very rewarding game to master. There are a lot of things in this game that are very disempowering - Sebastian's incredibly low initial stamina, ammo scarcity, how strong enemies hit, etc. In a lot of horror games this sort of disempowerment would necessitate that the player avoid combat whenever possible, but the Evil Within actually encourages you and often requires you to fight. This works because if you get good enough with Sebastian's load-out and are smart with your upgrades you can become very powerful and rise above these handicaps. This makes progression in this game - both in terms of upgrading as well as just getting better at the games systems - incredibly satisfying

An interesting thing to note about this game - and something i feel a bit conflicted about is that it leans very heavily into horror tropes and established imagery for its character designs and settings. This is something that has been proudly stated by the development team who thought horror imagery that people were at least a bit used to would be scarier and more memorable. One of the clearest examples of this is the mascot monster for this game - the keeper - being very similar to Pyramid Head. I think different people will probably have different reactions to this part of the game. I feel rather ambivalent about it. Would have probably preferred more original settings and monsters but this game does a fantastic job with the tropes and imagery it borrows from other horror media.

This game, however, has a really unique visual aesthetic that - like the game itself - is a bit off putting at first due to how unwelcoming it is. Don’t know exactly how to describe the visual style but best comparison I can give is the opening sequence of Mulholland Drive. Light is blindingly bright, which is contrasted with pitch darkness surrounding it. Visuals also have an unnatural and disorienting feel to them because of this, which is compounded by various visual effects and camera angles the game employs. The game's story is nonsense but that’s actually a positive in this case because it allows for unrestrained freedom when it comes to visual design which is an area where this game excels.

There are also several little easter eggs and references for Resident Evil fans that were fun to see. There's a shot for shot remake of the initial zombie reveal from the first Resident Evil / the REmake at the beginning of the game that I enjoyed a lot.

Really enjoyed this one and feel that it’s a super unique and interesting game despite being uninviting and having some jank at points.

The Evil Within...
I started this game because I love the IP's that proved themselves with their success. Almost every person I saw were saying good things about this game, like it's carrying the spirit of Resident Evil 4. And it is, in a way. And after I played both original RE4 and the remake, I can clearly say that I still love RE4 more.
What I expected from TEW was good boss fights, enjoyable puzzles, fun and satisfying gameplay, quality story and an athmosphere I can find myself in it.
TEW met my expectations... but not mostly. The story is the part where I was very interested. I'm a big fan of mysterious stories, seeing the question marks slowly dissappearing from my head after clearing each episode is a satisfying thing to me.
Combining this with a good gameplay makes you want to see more and more... until it starts to repeat itself.
Especially the last 3-4 chapters of the game really, I mean really pissed me off. This game has some stealth elements but its not even that deep. But the game puts you in situations where you must go stealth in order to survive. Otherwise, you're going to see that there are 5-10 enemies running towards you and destroying your entire health bar with one shot attacks. After those chapters, when I finally reach the 15th episode (final chapter) it dissappointed me again. The game put me in a small area where I have to fight 30 more enemies, like the rest game :D, instead of a special presentation where I fight againts the antogonist. And after the torture, it puts you in a lane full off traps where you must use the boring stealth mechanics in order to reach the end. AND AFTER THAT you finally reach the "final boss".
I was hoping to give it a 4/5 stars but the experience I got is not enough. The gameplay is saving the game but I couldn't find the characters interesing neither. I still do not know the main character, Sebastian or our partners. I can't feel sorry for them when bad things happen. Because I do not know anything! And I'm not going to read documents to understand characters. The documents are always going to be a lazy way to fill the gaps, to tell the story. Sorry.