The Evil Within 2 was a sequel that seemed conceptually out of order. All the first game tried to be was a pastiche of B-movie horror, but it would be followed up by a game that actually established the characters. Sebastian Castellanos was originally just meant to be a basic horror protagonist, and while he had a backstory and some details to pick up on, his only real job was to be sympathetic enough for the story to function. Then, the second game starts and immediately throws on the emotional baggage: he was living a troubled family life and trying to raise his daughter when tragedy struck, resulting in the loss of his wife and his child being taken from him. It’s a decent enough way to motivate a character to go put his life on the line against terrible monsters overrunning a small town, but after playing an entire game where he was a blank slate, is there really a reason for people to care? Shouldn’t the character-heavy stuff have been introduced in the first game instead, so we could enjoy a more action-packed followup without all the introductions?

Somehow though, it pulled it off. While our hero’s goal is to rescue a daughter you have no personal attachment to, she isn’t just used as an object to chase, so she doesn’t drag down the plot as a human macguffin. Instead, the weight of the plot falls on the protagonist himself, and it’s his character that receives the most attention. While it may have been nice to get more details in the first game, his characterization here is complete enough to make up for the lost time. The villains are all designed to reflect on the hero, or highlight some aspect of his personality or past, which makes his journey feel that much more personal. It’s another case where it would have been incredibly easy to just rely on the strength of the tried-and-true horror tropes, but instead, they’re used thoughtfully to enhance the themes of the narrative. They aren’t the equivalent of robot masters in Mega Man, leading you through themed areas before a predictable showdown, they build on each other to form a cohesive adventure, and a complete characterisation as a result.

In the downtime between fighting the big bads though is one of the other big additions to the sequel, being a small town that serves as a hub between major areas. While this could easily become repetitious, the atmosphere never lets up with how constantly the hub keeps evolving. You don’t just clear it out in the first half then use it as a glorified level-select menu, the ambience changes, the roster of enemies changes, it’s a fleshed-out centerpiece that ends up feeling like a character unto itself. The shift from the previous game’s linearity to this one’s comparative openness didn’t end up creating the sort of empty downtime of collecting baubles one might expect to pad out a linear formula, but instead rewarded players with a respectable amount of real side content.

Side content in a survival horror game may seem like an odd inclusion, when a key part of strategy is minimizing risks to maximize effectiveness with your limited supplies. However, the core gameplay here really isn’t about survival in that way. It works more like an action game, where you’re encouraged to seek out challenges in order to gain rewards that further increase your capabilities. You gain new tools that can change how you play, and enemies have a suitable level of variety that make them fun targets, so you're not stuck with an incredibly basic shooter for the entire duration. Neither you nor the enemies are stuck with the usual slow movement that’s found in horror games, so combat is about constantly moving around and switching weapons instead of backpedaling and mindlessly popping headshots.

When you put all these elements together, you get an action-horror game that avoids all the normal pitfalls. It doesn’t lazily try to motivate you with personal stakes you have no reason to care about, it doesn’t rely on tropes to characterize its villains, the combat is deep, the progression is more than tweaking damage numbers, and through all that effort, it pulls you into its world in every possible way. By the end, players are absorbed in the conflict, even if they didn’t originally care about this protagonist, since so much effort went into establishing the challenges of the journey both personally and physically. It wrapped up at the perfect moment, letting the hard-earned payoff of its conclusion have its moment, and I’m glad it didn’t end on a huge cliffhanger for the sake of paid DLC, or cheapen the resolution by introducing the conflict for a future sequel. I’m happy it’s been recognized as a horror game that did things right, and hasn’t been passed up in favor of many of today’s horror games, which may have excellent style, but very little substance.