My Incredibly Cursed Time Playing The Evil Within (1).

Ten years ago, in 2014, a certain survival horror game released. Directed by Shinji Mikami, at the then new Tango Gameworks, The Evil Within looked cool. Almost like it was somewhere between the more “campy” zombie fighting Resident Evil, and the more “cerebral” and “can't tell what is and isn't real” Silent Hill. I say never having played a Silent Hill, other than PT. Anyway, it looked neat in the trailers, but I was pretty trepidatious about actually playing it. My previous attempts to play the older Resident Evil games all ended with me losing interest, or getting stuck, and the Resident Evils I did like were basically just action games. RE4 was a groundbreaking and excellent game, but it was an action game with a spooky aesthetic, and the occasional puzzle to solve. And RE5, outside of the obvious problems with its setting, gave up entirely on even pretending to be survival horror, and was just a shooter.

I'd never really played a proper, gotta manage your inventory super closely survival horror game and actually enjoyed it, is the point. Which, from the outside looking in, was certainly what The Evil Within appeared to be, but I was still open to trying it. Unfortunately, when it released it had some pretty significant technical issues, especially on console. The joke at the time was the letterboxing was there in a futile attempt to salvage the framerate, it was so bad. Though, considering it was later patched with an option to remove the letterboxing, which revealed it was actually rendering everything behind there all along, it became evident that really was for artistic reasons.

Between the bad framerate, and other issues, I was really put off from playing it. The final nail in the coffin was that, outside of a small subset of sickos out there, it didn't even sound like it was that great of a game when working as intended, so I skipped it. Time moved on, and I continued to shy away from survival horror as a genre, even as it was starting to make a genuine comeback with Resident Evil VII in early 2017. The “hillbilly horror” aesthetic, and shift to first person put me off from trying it at the time.

In late 2017, however, we saw the release of The Evil Within 2. Normally I'm not the sort of person to want to skip an earlier entry in a series, particularly when they are directly connected, and telling an ongoing story. But a perusal of the plot synopsis of the first game on Wikipedia told me everything I needed to know, so I decided to give the series a shot. TEW 2 sounded like it was not only not a technical mess, but ran well and was very technically competent on consoles!

And I loved it. Its combination of the spooky aesthetic and inventory management of survival horror with stealth game fundamentals really spoke to me. I enjoy sneaking around and trying to avoid detection in games anyway, so one where you're encouraged to do that because of limited resources is about perfect for me. Its larger, more open ended environments with little hidden goodies to find, and small side “quests” to complete felt great too. Just a great game all around, not perfect, but one that I not only enjoyed a lot, but opened me up to a “new” genre I'd come to adore.

I'd never enjoyed the old fashioned Resident Evils, but I was in for a treat because the modern era of RE has been fantastic. The Resident Evil 2 remake in 2019 is about as perfect a game in this genre can be. Still has some issues, like the parts where you play as anyone other than Leon or Claire, but on the whole it's incredible. Tightly focused experience that really keeps you on your toes, especially once Mr. X is stalking your every move. So good that the moment I finished it, I started it again with the other character, not just to see what was different, but to experience it all over again.

Outside of the RE3 remake, all the recent Resident Evils have been tremendous. Even VII, when I finally got around to it, was so good I not only liked it despite the “hillbilly horror,” I actually enjoyed the setting too. Village and RE4 are absolutely fantastic too, and playing RE4 on Hardcore turned me into a true sicko that wants to play survival horror games on hard now. That's how I played Alan Wake II last year, after all.

But, all this time, even after I replayed The Evil Within 2 on its fifth anniversary, I'd still never actually tried to play the first game. Playing it on my PS5 would address the framerate problem, to an extent, though I felt that maybe after playing TEW 2 at 60 FPS on PS5, going back to 30 in the first game might not feel good, but the more time that passed, the more I wanted to give it a shot.

What really pushed me over the edge was everything that happened with Tango Gameworks this year. The studio closing hit me harder, emotionally than any other I can think of, even if it wasn't the highest number of people who lost their jobs. I've written about it before, so I won't go over it all again, but it made me want to play the only game of theirs I hadn't. Of course, since then, we've gotten the news that Tango is being saved after all, and I'm cautiously hopeful for their future. I have no idea how much of the staff stayed on (I saw Hi-Fi Rush and The Evil Within 2 director John Johanas on social media seeming happy about it), but hopefully good things are in the future for those people. They've made some great games and deserve to be able to keep making the stuff they want to make (under good work conditions with good pay too!).

Both The Evil Within games have been on PlayStation Plus Extra for quite a while (this will become relevant later), so as a subscriber, I had access to the game. It's been installed on my PS5 for what felt like a long time...I just kept waiting for the right moment. That moment came in August of this year, which due to an in joke amongst my friend group, was the start of Spooky Season. You know, the lead up to Halloween. I already had plans for a “Remedy three-peat” this Halloween, where I'd replay Alan Wake, Control, and Alan Wake II, in that order. Just playing the remaster of 1 (haven't played that game since the 360 version over a decade ago), and the “It's not a loop, it's a spiral” version of II. But, with Spooky Season now “officially” starting in August, I thought I'd get a head start on it, and work some other spooky games in too.

Starting with none other than The Evil Within. The time was now, the stars had aligned, and while it was still a couple months before its actual tenth anniversary, it was close enough. I was finally going to give it a shot, and hopefully come away having had a good time.

That was not, alas, what was to come, as I eventually found myself believing this install was genuinely cursed to do everything in its power to prevent me from playing this game.

When I start a new game, there's a couple things I always do before really getting into it. The first is going through all the options menus, to do things like invert my right stick, look at the controls, etc. That was fine, no problems there. The other, is that once I start the game, I like to hit the Options button during the intro cutscene to learn if I can pause cutscenes or not. I'd rather find out I can't early on, than later when I actually need to pause because real life is getting in the way. If by chance that button just instantly skips the cutscene, I can simply restart the game, and not have missed anything. That's pretty rare these days, usually it either pauses like I want it to, or nothing happens.

So, once the opening cutscene started, I hit the Options button, and...well...the game did pause, technically. It paused so well it refused to start again, as the game completely hard-locked. Technically it didn't crash the game, so I couldn't even submit a bug report (though who knows who, if anyone would actually see it for a ten year old game from a publisher that's since been eaten by Xbox). At least it didn't hard-lock the console, so I was able to close it, and restart the game.

Hey, it was just seconds into the game, so not a big waste, right? I'd heard the game had issues, so I wasn't too surprised, at least not yet. Anyway, I restarted the game, and this time just sat through the cutscene. Once I attained control of the fabulously named Sebastian Castellanos, I decided to try something else out. I mentioned the letterboxing earlier, and while I wanted to try to play the game as artistically intended, since they patched in the option to change, I also wanted to give both a shot, and see how it felt both ways.

So I hit the Options button and...the game hard-locked.

I was starting to worry at this point.

I'll fast forward over the following four or five hard-locks and get to the furthest I made it, which is right after Sebastian gets himself loose from a meat hook. At this point, I felt sure the game had checkpointed and I wouldn't need to go through the opening cutscene again (you can skip them, thankfully), or the opening walk up to the mental hospital. My hope was that this pause bug was only an issue in that opening, but alas, even here in what I thought was the proper beginning of playing the game...it hard-locked.

And upon restarting it once again, and seeing that opening cutscene...I quit the game and moved on to the next spooky game on my list. The Resident Evil 3make, which I hadn't played yet. Emboldened by RE4, I played it on Hardcore, which I think helped me enjoy it more than I would have otherwise. It was brutal, but made it at least a little interesting. It's by far the weakest of the modern Resident Evils, largely because Nemesis is mainly relegated to scripted setpiece moments, but on the whole it's not a bad game. Just disappointing relative to the others, and kinda forgettable.

Thing is, about halfway through RE3, I got thinking, there's no way a game from a large publisher like Bethesda could have been that broken. Not without other people having experienced it, so I went to the internet, to see if there was a solution. Turns out, not only was there a solution, but people seemed to know what the cause of the problem was. Something about how both the PS4 and PS5 “databases” work, after enough time they get kinda wonky, and it can cause some weird issues in a very few rare games.

For example, just last week a friend was having a strange issue with Persona 3 Reload on PS4. I happened to remember my troubles with The Evil Within, and I suggested the same solution I found online, as maybe it would help her out. That being to boot the console into Safe Mode, and rebuild the database from there. Doing that doesn't lose any saves, or delete any installs, I guess it just reorganizes the database or something? Okay, I don't really understand it, but the point is it helped my friend with Persona, and it helped me with The Evil Within.

To be honest, to avoid things like this is one of the reasons why I'm still a console gaymer (the other being it's still way cheaper to buy a console for the generation than to build a PC or even just buy a graphics card or whatever). Normally, the games just work. No muss, no fuss. Or, if there are technical issues, then they're going to be the same for everyone. Don't need to update drivers, don't need to ever worry about downloading fan patches or mods for older or obscure games. It's simple, maybe limited compared to the PC, but usually it just works. Usually I don't need to learn how to boot my console into safe mode and rebuild the database to avoid a game breaking bug.

Considering this is literally the only time I've had this happen in my life, that's not bad. Though, funny that it happened to me, and then something happened with a friend about a month later, so I dunno!

Unlike the “several hours” the console warned me it might take, it only took about thirty minutes to rebuild the database, and the only thing I lost was the PS5 forgot what games I had played recently, so it was an odd assortment of stuff on the main menu. Not a big deal. So, once I finished RE3 (a very short game), I went back, feeling hopeful I could actually play The Evil Within now.

And...

It worked!

Pausing the game brought up the pause menu, which I could then close at my leisure without anything locking up. So, now that the game functioned, was my curse over, and was I able to enjoy the game?

Well, no, there was still some curse lurking in there, and as for enjoying it... That's not a simple yes or no. Now that I've finished the game (mind you, I started this in late August and finished this under fifteen hours long game on September 18^th), I can say I'm glad I finally played it, and did finish it. Mostly to sate my curiosity, both about it as its own game from 2014, but also to see the groundwork it laid for the sequel. It's certainly an interesting game, and often a baffling one.

Something I do like about it, is the mood it sets. It's thick with atmosphere (a truly grimy film grain not like anything I've seen in another game), and has a lot of striking visuals in it. Now, that's not to say I think the game looks good. Definitely not technically, and honestly maybe not even artistically. I just got through replaying the Uncharted remasters, and maybe this isn't a fair comparison but I feel like it's not a good sign when remasters of PS3 games look better technically than a game built for the PS4 generation.

As for the artistic/stylistic side of it... There's something gnarly and oppressive about this game that I sort of appreciate, but a lot of the time it just feels gross for the sake of being gross. Not gross to be scary, or gross to be tense like a survival horror game, just a lot of gross brain stuff. Like there's one part where, multiple times, Sebastian needs to pinpoint the exact spot on an exposed human brain with a giant needle, and if you miss, it damages him, for some inane reason. On top of my still not knowing how you were supposed to figure out the right spots without just guessing (I think there were some clues in those rooms, and probably something comically obvious that I missed, but I dunno), it's just gross. Not even fun gross, just gross.

And the game leans pretty hard on the “spooky hospital/mental asylum stuff,” which is just tiring. I'm not going to sit here and try to say the game is or isn't problematic, I don't know. I do know I found Leslie, a teen(?) with some sort of mental health issue that's important to the plot (both him and his mental health), to be pretty annoying. Problematic representation of whatever was going on with him? I have no idea. I do know he wasn't a compelling character, and honestly no one in this game was.

The villain, Ruben Ruvik, is just an evil guy who wants to do evil experiments and monotonously drone on about them in audio logs. He has a tragic backstory, I guess, but “villains who are evil because something bad happened to them” have gotten kinda boring to me too. If you're going to do that, it needs to be closer to someone like a Magneto, who is also arguably right about a lot of things, and even when he isn't, he's just a compelling character. There was another scientist, slightly less evil but still evil, who actually tried to put some emotion into his lines, which I appreciate since almost no one else in this game did.

Yuri Lowenthal is there too, I guess. Not his best performance, but by the standards of the mannequins he was acting against, he did great.

That brings me to something I didn't realize until playing this game, but Sebastian was recast in the sequel. The two actors have pretty different takes on the character, with Marqus Bobesich in TEW 2 making the bold decision to actually act, and emote, rather than woodenly reading the lines off the page and calling it a day like Anson Mount did in the first one.

If it sounds like I'm being harsh, it's because I am. I don't feel like my standards for video game voice acting are that high, and honestly I like a lot of bad voice acting in older games. That was my favorite part of the original Resident Evil, and still the most endearing thing about the Shenmue games to me. I just want the actors to, you know, actually act! TEW 1 Sebastian is genuinely one of the stiffest, most wooden performances in any game I've ever heard. Like, I get they were probably trying to have him sound stoic, and not be a particularly emotional guy, but this doesn't feel like that. It feels like they got someone who didn't care, and just phoned it in. Heck, even the robot self-parody of Sebastian in Hi-Fi Rush has more emotion in his lines, and he's literally a robot!

But hey, at least the guy they cast for the sequel actually put in some effort, which helped make that Sebastian a much more endearing, and entertaining character to inhabit.

As for the game itself, what I think is the most frustrating part of The Evil Within is that there are sections where it actually is pretty good. When the game lets you creep, and sneak, and stealth through and around enemies, when it slows down and lets that really thick atmosphere creep into your every pore, it's engaging. Not as refined as its sequel later would be, but of course the sequel should play better. In an ideal world, game devs learn from their previous games, and use those lessons to improve in the future.

Even if it's not as refined as the sequel later would be, these are the parts of The Evil Within that I liked. The parts where I'm so resource strapped that I really don't want to openly fight, so I'm using what I have, the environment, and my own smarts to deal with the enemies. Whether it's a simple stealth kill, or the rare time I managed to actually use a trap against an enemy, that's when I was having fun. The atmosphere in the game is so thick that often just creeping slowly through these areas was gripping, feeling the tension of not knowing where the next enemy would be, and worrying about if I had enough ammo to deal with them should I screw up, or a syringe to heal.

The problem is these parts are too few and far between. A lot of survival horror games, even some great ones, fall into the trap of focusing too much on action. I get it, there are more people out there that like action than they do stealth, or survival horror. A big action sequence in a game like this can be a good change of pace, but crucially, the act of fighting needs to be fun.

It simply isn't here.

Yes, I'm sure it would feel better if I was playing this on a PC at a high framerate. “You should have simply played this on a better platform at a higher framerate” is not a good argument, not when there are plenty of games that feel way better than this one, and were also 30 FPS. You can only get so far by blaming the framerate when a game is just clunky. And again, being a little clunky isn't the end of the world, if the most enemies you ever had to deal with at a time was two or three, it wouldn't be a big deal. But when the game really likes to put Sebastian into arenas with upwards of seven or ten enemies at a time, the game just isn't up to it. Especially not when the crowd control options like the freezing bolts for the crossbow, or the grenades aren't prevalent enough to let you rely on just them.

Being resource strapped, that's fine. I like that sort of tension, it's what makes the best survival horror games really sing. Riding that line between life and death, needing to scramble and use everything at my disposal to just barely survive by the skin of my teeth? That's what it's all about.

I really wish I liked this game more, but it just leans way too heavily on clunky combat. Ghostwire Tokyo, another Tango game, felt pretty clunky to control too. But that game at least had enough charm and personality to keep me interested, and had some interesting ideas that made the combat fun enough, even if I wish it felt better. This, though? I frequently found myself thinking, “Well, at least I never have to go through that again” after the big encounters. To me, that's about the worst thing I can think about a video game. I replay plenty of games, not for rewards, not for any unlocks, but just for the fun of it, so the idea of never wanting to do something again is just...sad. Certainly not new, this is far from the first game to make me feel like that, but that doesn't make it any better.

But, that isn't all there is to this tale, or to my curse. All my frustrations and complaints aside, I was enjoying parts of it, and I was committed to seeing it through to the end. So, I was playing it, for a few days, until one day I turned on my PS5 and saw a strange thing. A timer saying the game was going to expire in eight hours? Now, I know games regularly rotate in and out of PS+ Extra, but they've gotten better about clarifying what games are leaving, and doing so about a month in advance, so people have time to get to them. This was the end of August, and I had seen the list of games leaving next. Not only was The Evil Within not on this list, but those games were leaving on September 17^th.

So, I sloughed it off, figured it was a glitch, and probably nothing would happen. But...I also looked at how far I was in the game, and used the Trophies to guess there were probably only fourteen chapters in the game. (I was close, it's fifteen). I thought I was close enough that if I rushed, and spent less time obsessively searching for hidden goodies, maybe I could finish the game that afternoon.

This, it turned out, was a mistake. Both because I underestimated how much I had left by a few hours, and also because it made the game even worse for me. It turns out that if a game is at its best when you're being slow and methodical, that trying to rush only brings out the worst in it. So I gave up on rushing, and just tried to keep playing it normally. Still ran into issues with some baffling parts (why is there a SWIMMING SECTION???), but I kept trucking.

I got pretty far into Chapter 13, but was exhausted. So I stopped playing at the time I usually stop to eat dinner. Later that night a friend wanted to play some Fortnite or something, so when I turned my PS5 on, I decided to look at The Evil Within, and saw the timer wasn't there any more. I launched the game for a laugh, and it still worked! So, I guess that timer was just a glitch after all, right?

The next day, the game had a locked icon on it, and I couldn't launch it without buying it. Since paying twenty dollars to play the final few hours of a game I wasn't enjoying didn't sound appealing, I instead decided to play The Evil Within 2 for the third time. This time on hard! Since the game doesn't let you turn the difficulty up on new game plus, I had to start fresh, and let me tell you, that game is hard on hard. Fun, though! Extremely resource limited, and plenty of times where I really did have to just run away in the open areas, but I liked it. I'd say the normal difficulty is probably still the ideal balance, but I'm glad I played it on hard. Though I have no intention of ever playing the even harder, more gimmicky difficulties. No upgrades for Sebastian or his weapons? No thank you!

And, time went on. I unistalled The Evil Within, as it was pretty clear it wasn't going to work, and I didn't want to spend that money. So I played some other stuff. Started catching up on Warframe story quests, played through Astro Bot. Decided to revisit the Uncharted series, and got halfway through the third one when I saw a curious tweet from one Wario 64.

As the last batch of games leaving PS+ Extra had left, the ones leaving in the back half of October were known, and among them...

The Evil Within????

So, I go to the PlayStation store, and sure enough, The Evil Within is listed as being available on PS+ Extra, despite it previously showing as just for sale via money. I had to redeem it again, but it worked, so...the curse still lingered...

I downloaded it again, and knew my troubles weren't over when I turned on my PS5 and saw one of my notifications was an error about the game not installing, despite appearing like it was installed on the main menu. So, I decided to just ignore that, and go finish a game I do actually like a lot, Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception. I know a lot of people didn't like it as much as 2 back in the day, but of the two, I still prefer it. It just has a better mix of quiet moments and puzzle solving to go along with the action. And I like the story better. For the record, Uncharted 4 and Lost Legacy are my two favorites overall. 4 I think has the best story, and overall mix of action to quiet moments, and Lost Legacy is just a masterclass of “all killer no filler” pacing.

Anyway, as I was getting into the final set pieces of Uncharted 3, I get another notification, because the PS5 was resuming the download for The Evil Within. Sure! I guess! I just let it do its thing, and finished Uncharted 3. Then I put the PS5 into rest mode, and went on with my night.

The next day, I did some gayming earlier than usual, as a couple friends were going to play Space Marine II (one of them just starting the game), so I accompanied them. Very fun game, that I still haven't finished yet, because one of the friends I've been playing with was sick for a week, but hopefully we can get back to the campaign where we were soon.

Anyway, after my friends hopped off, I figured I might as well get back to the curse, and try to finish The Evil Within. Despite that download the day before, upon starting it, it still had something left to download, along with a new warning message about the game possibly not behaving properly on PS5. It didn't have that warning the last time I played it! The only other game I've seen that in was Flinthook, which did have a pretty obvious audio bug in one spot, but otherwise seemed fine.

So, I closed The Evil Within, let it finish installing or whatever it was doing, then relaunched the game, and finally picked up where I left off in August. Turned out I was right before the end of Chapter 13, but 14 was pretty lengthy so it still took me a few hours to finish. Sadly, this game not only doesn't finish strong, it doubles down on most of the stuff I don't like. Big action sequences that aren't fun, its weird attempts at almost Uncharted style set pieces, and just baffling decisions. The final boss is a turret sequence. One so poorly telegraphed they needed to put glowing red circles over parts of it to let you know where to shoot. Then the final moment is supposed to be a gimme, a slow motion just shoot the guy, but it's bizarrely finicky about where you need to shoot. The head? No, why on Earth would you think that? Obviously the abdomen is the part you need to hit.

I don't want to say The Evil Within is a bad game, because I think it's an interesting game, and one that built the foundation for a great game I really love. But if I'm being honest with myself...it's...not...good. Now, would I have liked it more in 2014? Almost certainly not, because I would've been dealing with an even worse framerate, and I don't know that 2014 me was ready yet for this sort of intense resource management. I think I might have hated it, maybe even enough that I wouldn't have given the sequel a shot. At least not initially, maybe later on. Plus, I wouldn't have been able to turn the letterboxing off, because even if it was an artistic choice, sometimes artistic choices are bad.

That was my cursed time with The Evil Within. At least I managed to finish it, and I've now uninstalled it for good.

“At least I never have to go through that again.”

I always try to be positive, and find the interesting parts of games to write about, but honestly the only reason I wrote about this one was because I wanted to chronicle the trials and tribulations I went through. And me being me, I wrote a long preamble and had to gripe about the game too.

Sorry about that, and to anyone out there who does like this game, I'm happy you were able to see something in it I couldn't.

I just hope that next time, I'm compelled to write about a game for good reasons. I need more Astro Bots in my life, and fewer games like this. Still, thanks for reading! <3