we give Kojima and Naughty Dog a lot of grief for making "cinematic" videogames, but for my money the letterboxes of The Evil Within are the most egregiously criminal case of this trend. it's stupid, and the game gets 10x better when you take off the damn thing.

this was interesting. a lot of resident evil vibes, with some psychological horror sprinkled through. on paper, it's rad as hell, but for me it never really coalesced into something truly special. mostly uninteresting characters in a very thin plot that's way too easy to guess. game runs on pure vibes, but the vibes are great, though. incredible visual design.