Surviving The Evil Within, Chapter "Resident Evil" 4

In the words of Shakespeare's MacBeth himself: Exeunt stealth. Here in Chapter 4 of The Evil Within we complete the transition from pure stealth to pure action, confronted with arena combat scenarios conquerable only by chopping down all foes and seeing that "GO-->" arrow appear. The particular combat scenarios on hand are almost impossibly reminiscent of Resident Evil 4 and my skills have made the transition surprisingly well.

So we pick up on our way out of Death Village, Population: 0. Dr. Nonsequitur keeps up his run by pointing to the building ahead and assuring me it's his long-lost brother's clinic, so we pop inside for a chat and hopefully a couple dogs grilled up real nice. I'd barely tied the strings on my Paul Stanley "KISS: The Cook" apron when the doc started insisting we find his brother. I said okay we save the dogs for later let's go. The brother, it turns out, is the kind of nerd that pulls out a dweeby Zombie Teddy Roosevelt every Halloween. He was also elbow-deep in some kinda hellish surgery even The Great Compromiser couldn't have approved. Something about itching. The guy had a nasty skin condition, to tell the truth. 

Upon discovering a Junior Mint in the surgical cavity, the bad doctor came at me with arms outstretched, sure I was the culprit. Fat Mama Joes like him take a lot of ammo to put down, so that little scripted encounter fully drained my handgun reserves (moral of the story - I need to be quicker to draw my shotgun when appropriate, otherwise I'm gonna end up relying on shells for easy encounters after wasting handgun rounds on tough ones). What really gets my goat is that after absorbing all those bullets, Teddy didn't even have the courtesy to stay down! Like a bad VCR, he glitched out and skipped back 30 seconds to his peaceful evil surgery observance. You know, this isn't the first time Evil Within's used video tracking as a scary effect. I'm starting to wonder if the whole game doesn't take place inside a VHS - a Video Haunted System. 

After TDR vanished into blue smoke, I noticed an x-ray on the table next to the surgery showing that his cadaver, perhaps a former star of the Saw film series, had partially digested a set of keys. So I let my puppet Sebastian plunge his hands into the corpse (which of course did a scary thing) to find them. I'll talk about keys next chapter.

Moving on through the poor man's halfway house I bumped into another creeper and took 'im out, but it was quickly time to move on. That's when I came to the clearing outside, where a zombie was carrying what looked like a kicking screaming woman toward a bonfire. In my ammo conservation panic, I didn't manage to get off a shot until the woman had been torched - to be honest, I do feel kinda bad. But I'm not gonna waste two bullets to save a stranger's life, come on. That'd be insane!

Anyway, I escorted the regular doctor, still in search of Leslie Nielsen, into another old-fashioned home. As soon as we found lil' baby Les (whose annoying ass needs to die already), things got surreal. Stuck at a dead end, the lights went out and were replaced by a red glow. That's when cordyceps-face phased in two inches from my face and grabbed hold. As soon as I struggled free, my attacker inviso'd out again, and a shotgun blast at the air where he should've been hit nothing. I stumbled around the room for a bit, fending off grabs and trying to counter-shoot, but to no avail. I grabbed a bottle and threw it across the room, hoping to draw him out with a decoy, but that didn't work either. 

That's when I glimpsed a porcelain bowl unnaturally spin across the floor and keyed in on the trick - he's invisible, not immaterial. Keeping tabs on environmental clues, I finished my unsightly pursuer with a couple shells and an explosive bolt. As far as I can tell, these guys warp as soon as they vanish, so they're only vulnerable on the approach. I'm not sure how I could've won this fight without shooting - the door didn't unlock until my attacker was down.

After looking it up, I guess these guys don't look that much like Last of Us zomgis, but they did call it to mind

Now's as good a time as any to talk about the crossbow. The crossbow feels almost like it was meant to be the sole weapon of the game, with at least four types of ammo, its own upgrade menu, and bolts craftable on the fly. If I haven't mentioned yet, disarming traps nets Sebastian the creatively named "trap parts". Trap parts can be converted into crossbow bolts from the regular inventory menu. A spear-like harpoon bolt or a blinding flash bolt will require 2 parts a piece, explosive "proximity mine" bolts cost 3, and wide-radius electric trap bolts demand a whopping 4. The only way to have a new bolt type added to the selection is to encounter it in the wild. Sebastian can only carry a couple of each - only 2 to start - so it isn't realistic to stockpile on a single favorite type (crafting on the fly is prohibited by a non-pause inventory). The main catch to the crossbow in the fray is that it has a very short (5m?) arcing range - it's more like aiming a grenade than a gun*.

*Sure it's a valid gameplay mechanic, but boy is this a face-palming portrayal of crossbows. If my history / Age of Empires education serves me, even medieval crossbows could shoot hundreds of feet away. In fact I just looked it up: modern hunting crossbows are accurate up to about 60m. That means it should be equally, if not more effective at range than Sebastian's revolver (which could rate 25-200m depending on many factors).

Moving on with Lessy in tow, Sebastian tripped down a hallway across space and time and fell face-first into another Bloodpool. Maybe this game's about wormholes, just like Event Horizon. I hope Sam Neill bursts out of someone's chest. Until then, I was left exploring a big garbage-disposal-y room with catwalks, ladders, a pool of blood, a sub-room, some tripwire traps, a couple switches that seemed to do nothing, a puddle of oil, and some explosive canisters. Maybe it's just me and RE4 (that's what I call my subconscious), but the obvious placement of the traps around a complex but empty room told me "enemies are on the way". When I made my way to the one and only exit, I could only pretend to be surprised that the villain materialized to summon a swarm of blood-nanites to summon more zombie men from the bloody depths. Blood, zombies, blood, zombies. Yeah. Oh, and he locked the door. With blood.

There were a LOT of creatures emerging from the blood lagoon, so I hop-skip-jumped my way through the traps I'd picked out, incinerating swaths of them with the oil patch (ignitable with matches) and the fuel cans (ignitable with bullets). After pulling a few of the standard RE4 tricks (funnel 'em with ladders, corral and grenade 'em), I was through the swarm and the door re-opened. Important new trick in The Evil Within that draws from the same well but balances things out quite nicely: any downed enemy can be torched and will alight nearby foes. It's possible to convert a knee-shot and matches into a lot of kills this way, essentially taking the place of RE4's headshot-then-roundhouse group-clearing combo. It's also more dangerous to pull off (no invincibility frames and the context-sensitive match toss is super-short range) and is doubly resource-intensive (matches are equally as rare as bullets), so it feels appropriate to the increased tension of Within.

After the door unbloodlocks we head down another hallway and hey there's a locked door on my right so let's keep going to that brightly lit room oh neat some handgun ammo what's that in the corner BALAGAGHAGFEHRERHG BLOOD MONSTER! Yes, with no cutscene to relieve the tension, a horrible six-armed girl-hair thing spewed forth from a puddle of blood and started phasing toward me. Zig-zag phasing. But she's still shootable and hey, this is a Resident Evil game, so as long as I run by quickly, it doesn't matter how close I am - she won't grab me! So I dragged her for a few loops around the room until I eventually fouled up and got my head smashed down to a one-hit KO.

While mentally prepping for round 2, the loading screen told me the kind of thing that a loading screen should never, ever tell. I am pretty dumbfounded that the loading screen had the audacity to say what it did. More on that in a second.

I died again, but I took away an important observation: the door out of blood girl's surgical boudoir was still open even after the fight started. So for round three I set up a string of traps in the corridor before allowing her to spawn. I kited her straight through two explosive bolts (which didn't even phase her) and into a shock trap, whereupon I let the grenades fly. This is where I made another shocking observation: the door that had initially led me into the hallway (from the blood pool) was gone and the previously locked side door was swinging open. I ducked through and, just about completely out of ammo, I speared her with a harpoon bolt for the big kill. Back down to a paltry 8 handgun rounds, I picked up the 8000 upgrade goos and headed on toward the end of the stage.

As I made my way through the remaining corridors, I couldn't help but notice the ready-made traps on hand. A door to slam here, an explosive tank there, and at the very end, an elevator to take me away. That's when it occurred to me that I was meant to discover the open door sooner, conserve ammo, and play this one like a Verdugo - draw the boss into delaying traps and make a run for the elevator.

Or, that's when it would've occurred to me, had the loading screen after losing to the boss not explicitly told me: "It's unwise to fight blood girl head to head. You can kill her, but maybe you should just run for it." DON'T TELL ME THAT ON A LOADING SCREEN! You've ruined the entire tension of the fight, spoiling both the risk of spending ammo on a perhaps-invincible foe and the urge to find a secondary means to victory. I ignored the tip and played how I would've anyway because 1.) I was being honorable and 2.) I always fought Verdugo to the death anyway. In fact, I think I didn't know he could be waited out until a friend pointed it out to me. That's just too scary for me. I'd rather fight.

The monetary (here goo) reward for defeating the boss makes it worth it anyway - I may have spent 3x as many bullets as I needed, but I was able to upgrade my guns til they were 3x (or something) more effective, thus conserving ammo in the long run. That's another RE4 trick for ya. Even ignoring that, it gives me a payoff for being smart with ammo earlier and resets my position so I'll need to be again, so it's good game design all around. That loading screen is just ass though. I can only hope that was put in by some dumbass publisher/localization goons.

So before things came to a close I bumped into Ruvik on a staircase. When I tried to run by he insta-killed me (this game likes insta-kills - it's encouraging the player to play safe with the unknown), so the second time I turned and ran as soon as he appeared. Cutscene, end chap.

I gotta be honest, I think Ruvik is the dumbest looking element in a game with otherwise great art design. Even if they didn't mean for him to look like Assassin's Creed, the resemblance is too hard to ignore. At a certain point you just have to be honest with yourself and admit your design is too close to an existent (and extremely popular) one and give it up.

Here's a plot theory. Leslie is an albino. The main villain, Ruvik, is hard to make out under his Assassin's Creed hood, but I'm pretty sure he's an albino too. Leslie is only around in the forest stages and Ruvy seems to be more a mental hospital guy. Are the hospital and the forest parallel worlds cohabitated by parallel versions of Ruvik (which, unsurprisingly, is an anagram of "Leslie")? Or is Lessy some kind of gate? Because as soon as he showed up we were back in the hospital. This merely reinforces my gut feeling that Sebastian needs to kill this annoying babbling weirdo. I mean, if the world was falling down would you really waste your time dragging around an mindless loon? Unless the world was his mind!!!!

What I'm Playing, October '14

In this feature, we commemorate games I have for the first time started and finished in the last few highly variable time units.

Well my initial push to finish games is looking pretty good.

Special Recognition for Starting and Finishing:

Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance (Xbox 360)

That took all of five days. It's not the 8-hour playtime that makes Revengeance feel short, it's the swift pull-up halfway through where the earlier multi-tiered levels give way to reused environments, redundant stealth encounters, and sorta insulting stage numbering (one short stage doesn't have a boss, then the next is just a boss, etc.). You basically get 3 full and 4 quarter-stages. Still, I love the action here - it's a Japanese assimilation of the stealth alternating counter-driven style of popular Western games like Arkham Asylum and Assassin's Creed. The weird pacing just makes higher difficulty replays awkward, with the shockingly early climax leaving little to challenge your skills on the back end.

This is the peak of the game's difficulty. It is the Stage 3 boss. In a 7-stage game.

Kid Klown in Crazy Chase (SNES)

This one was done for the already-published Platformer of the Month Club, enjoy.

Games Finished:

Bayonetta (Xbox 360)

Speaking of weird endgame pacing. Bayonetta becomes wildly indulgent in the final act, giving too much time to variety stages (both Space Harrier and Motorcycle Madness), redundant boss reduxes, and fake-out endings. The main thing I like about this game is the bread and butter combat, but for the last two to three hours there basically isn't any. It doesn't help that (at least in Normal mode) bosses are excruciatingly easy, but still tediously long. Recently I've been starting action games on hard mode because why fuck around, but Bayonetta sadly does not permit that and is far, far too easy for any but the most novice players (professional reviewers) on Normal.

In also hurts that the game is a bit churlish with rewarding performance, as the only thing holding me back from platinum level rankings was that I didn't seek out the hidden sub-stages and thus had a bunch of zeroes in my overall score. Here's a bit of personal philosophy: action games should not have hidden sub-stages. Ever. That is explicitly, shamefully bad design.

Bayonetta had some uniquely paced combat, getting almost turn-based with its reliance on time-slowing dodges, so I could see myself playing it again. Still, it's very sandboxy and I think you'd have to be an idiot to rank it with the good stuff like Ninja Gaiden Black and Double Dragon 2.

Crashmo (Nintendo 3DS eShop)

I kinda can't believe I beat this. Technically there are still 20 or so bonus stages to go, but I got the all-important credit roll so I'm happy to call it done. The thing that kept Crashmo alive late-game was the introduction of gigantic puzzles with dozens of pieces that allowed free-form solutions. They probably rank as much easier than the more rigid challenges (at least for me they were), but they were a lot more rewarding to play, allowing me to prove I had learned and could reapply the many specific techniques developed through the game's course.

Street Fighter 2010 (NES / 3DS VC)

Okay, the last level here was insane. Most stages in this game give you 120 seconds to kill one boss. With the same time limit, this level featured three reused (but now harder) bosses and two totally new ones. That's 20 seconds a boss, and these guys have strict patterns that only leave them vulnerable in certain windows. I really had no choice but to cheese it with save states. Oh well. Lotta good bosses here, you can see the Capcom house-style that permeates Mega Man X and Gargoyle's Quest as well.

Super Mario 64 (N64 / Wii VC)

I have a bit of an OCD problem with Super Mario 64. I am really uncomfortable with leaving stars behind, so I end up 100%ing every world before moving on, which leads to a lot of time wasted on levels I don't really like. Still, this game is goddamn genius no matter which way you slice. Level greats include Whomp's Fortress, Lava Lava Lake, Hazy Hazy Maze Cave, Dire Dire Docks, Pirate Bay's Cavern, and Tock Tock Clock. Anti-favorites include: Shifting Shifting Sand Land, Snowman Blowman Land, Tiny Tiny Big World, and Boo House.

The improved resolution Virtual Console port proves that SM64 still looks fantastic

God of War (PS2)

Even back when it was the second or third modern melee action game I'd ever played, I really did not care for God of War. It has these insanely unwelcome "adventure" parts that usually involve mandatory backtracking or puzzles, the camera angles are very annoying (namely because the movement controls are camera-relative), and the combat is soooo repetitive. Sure, it feels nice and squishy, but that only gets you so far after battle #1000 with the same three enemy types and the same two combos that always defeat them. The game sorta tries to find some identity by spreading battles across different arena types (moving floors, small platforms, tiers) but it makes annoying choices that tend to backfire.

Games Started:

The Evil Within (Xbox 360)

Check up on my chapterly coverage for which I am being paid by Capcom to make as many Resident Evil 4 comparisons as humanly possible. In my defense, I see every game through the lens of Resident Evil 4. Or Mega Man X or Ogre Battle 64, as genre applies.

Wave Race 64 (N64 / Wii VC)

The international Commune Podcast game du jour for November, Wave Race is heavy on the waves and light on the races. I enjoy the wave-handling mechanics a lot, it's just that the sparse course selection and 1v1 limitation pretty heavily restrict this as a multiplayer alternative. Compared to this, it's no surprise that the de facto party racer for the eternally ripe N64 has become Star Wars Episode I Racer.

One and Done:

Hyrule Warriors (Wii U)

Just got this for the sake of it, it feels insanely well-polished - at least compared to the "budget" feel common to Dynasty Warrior games. I'll come back and play it for real sometime in the future.

The Firemen (SNES)

Another podcaster, this is a pretty easy top-down shooter that mixes in a little exploration and a timer. It's fun but it is hard to count it as a game-in-progress when the only thing holding me back from beating it is I just haven't played it a second time.

Surviving The Evil Within, Chapter 3: What was that noise?

So, if it hasn't occurred to you yet, things might get kinda spoily from here. Probably not plot-wise, but it's impossible for me to narrate the gameplay without revealing monsters and their locations. It's been a pain just finding screenshots without seeing every last twisted boss. At least it's made me confident that chainsaw guys and zombies are just the tip of the iceberg.

At the onset of "Clause of the Horde" Sebastian and I pulled ourselves out of the muck and started working our way into the village on the other side of Chapter 2's stone bridge. Approaching through the mist, the town square seemed quiet. Nothing was amiss - nothing except the bodies hung upside down below a wooden walkway. I busted through the window of the nearest house and was startled by a loud beeping - that's when Sebastian exploded into a dozen pieces.

Restarting from the checkpoint I returned to the same window and this time ran into a corner as soon as I'd hopped through. The beeping died out as I moved away from the entry point, and turning around I got a look at a new type of exploding trap: the exploding trap. A quick tutorial window told me I could sneak up to exploding traps to disarm them, so I gave it a try and was snapped into a QTE minigame. Not ready for what was happening (other traps are automatically disarmed when you press A), I failed Sebastian and he exploded again. Returning a third time, I timed a button-press for when the rotating dial crossed a safe zone and the trap was safely disarmed. I moved past another one, dropped by a safe house, and made my way through the upstairs until a cut-scene was triggered.

Here Sebastian joins up with Dr. Dave and some very confusing dialogue. The doc points out a heavily guarded gate as the only escape from the village and suggests one of us should create a distraction so the other can make a run for it. Then he says "you're the one with the gun..." and gameplay restarts. Now, maybe I'm stupid, but I could not figure out from that line who he was suggesting should be the diversion. I kinda assumed he meant me, since gunshots would grab the zombies' attention. Before I had a second to think it over, I heard zombies breathing down my neck and he streaked off across the square yelling "HEY, LOOK OVER HERE!!!".

So he meant he would be the one getting their attention. Whatever. I made a run for the gate and got immediately swarmed and killed by zombies. So... did the diversion not work? Did I not understand what was happening? When I retried I went with a different route, this time going behind the houses, but there were still zombies everywhere and I couldn't open the gate - not to mention my diversion had locked himself in one of the houses. Still confused, I decided to ignore the "make a run for it" plan and just hid in a closet while Dr. Retardo did his thing.

From the closet I could hear loud rasping zombie mouth-sounds, so I knew I wasn't alone. After a minute or two it looked like no one was going to waltz by and invite a stealth kill, so I wandered out and headed down the hallway. That's when I heard footsteps on the roof or a ladder thudding against the wall and two baddies splashed through the window right on top of me (RE4). With exactly two bullets to my name I dished out a couple swats and made a run for the basement. On the way I took out one of my pursuers by ducking below a trip-wire that he blindly triggered. The other went down with an ax to the head (the occasional expendable ax provides a one-hit kill identical to the torch). There was one more zombie waiting in the basement, so I carefully lined up a headshot and splattered an unreasonable amount of blood across the room.

It definitely felt nice (heart-pounding, but nice) to get some fast-paced spontaneous gameplay going. There were enough bullets in the basement (four) to take out my attackers, but the pressure was so high that I was taking the immediate reflex solutions which let me continue to conserve ammo. That said, I took a lot of hits and used up all my healing items in all that fumbling around. Maybe the smartest thing would've been to run and re-hide after I had been spotted, but I was alive and armed, so I kept going.

Though there were no other monsters in sight, I was still surrounded by wheezing, gurgling sounds that reminded me they could be anywhere. Let me tell you, the moans these things make are so much creepier than your run-of-the-mill "braiiiiiiiiiiiiins"ing. They sounds like demonic cats trying to hock up barbed wire hairballs. I'm desperate to kill enemies just to clear the air of that awful fucking noise.

After sneaking out of the first house I shot my way through two more zombies into a barn that looked mostly empty. Again, it didn't sound particularly empty, stirred by metallic scraping sounds, more groaning, and even some pig squeals. I collected some supplies in the rafters and moved on.

On my way to the next house I got a good view of a zombie's back and tiptoed up for a stealth kill... except a goddamn bear trap latched onto my leg and ruined that plan, causing me to waste another two bullets. When I got inside and took out another three foes head-to-head (with the help of a torch and some matches), I had two exciting discoveries back to back: an attache case (RE4) holding a shotgun, and a crossbow leaning against a barrel. The crossbow is a little unusual, but I'll talk about how that works in a later chapter. As a veritable walking arsenal (I had also picked up some grenades by this point), I was feeling pretty confident and plowed through another two houses, mostly relying on stealth kills and crossbow bolts.

In the attic of the final house (which didn't have to be the final house, it just happened to be thanks to my approach), I bumped into The Doctor. This triggered some more confusing dialogue, starting with "How did you open the door so quickly?" I assume he meant the gate out of town, but I hadn't even opened it yet, and even Sebastian's line (something like "Gimme some time, doc") acknowledged that. It just... is this bad translation or what? The dialogue doesn't connect. It's not like it's mysterious, it's just non sequitur after non sequitur. Like someone cut-and-paste rearranged the script.

Once I had the town cleared I checked out the gate, which of course was locked tight. Sebastian suggested we find a chainsaw to cut through the chain holding it in place, but I had pretty thoroughly cleaned out the place already, so I was a bit perplexed. Combing through a second time, I noticed the barn was still ringing with that metal noise and moaning. I took a closer look around the ground floor... and that's when the Chapter 1 chainsaw guy Kool-aid Man'd his way through a wall and sawed off Sebastian's head.

Something unusual about this chapter, which was set in a single free-range area, is that after every four or five kills I would see the game saving a checkpoint. Whenever I died, I was reset to the center of the area and I guess all the kills/pick-ups up to the checkpoint were remembered. It was hard to tell since the zombies would never be found where I remembered killing them, and my location got reset pretty far from where the checkpoint was recorded or where I died. In this case, when the chainsaw guy killed me, I didn't remember when the last save had been so I had to retrace my steps for a while, making sure I still had all my supplies, and even found a few zombies in new locations. I guess in theory it revives the tension that threatens to disappear on a replay, but realistically it was disorienting in a tedious way. Hopefully other areas don't suffer from this problem.

Since I now knew where Mr. C. Saw was hiding, I was ready for round two. I used my crossbow to place a couple proximity mines and got my grenades at the ready before triggering his appearance. It wasn't hard to drag him into the traps, but he was too fast to easily peg with grenades. My shotgun didn't seem to slow his pursuit, but thankfully two mines, a grenade, and ~3 shells were enough to put him in the dirt. Chainsaw in hand (sadly as a key item rather than a weapon), I cut open the gate and completed the chapter.

The thing that worries me about Chapter 3 is I have no clue how I would've beaten the chainsaw guy had I missed the crossbow or the shotgun, or even if there had been zombies still wandering around. If there's no other way to kill this guy than to clear out everyone leading up to him, that's action, not survival. It worked with my current approach, but I'm not sure what I would've done - except die a lot - had I stumbled across him when I was in the barn that first time.

Actually, I just looked it up, and there are a bunch of other ways to kill him. Still seems like it'd be hard if you haven't mopped up the zombies, but there is an alternate crossbow way and a complete no-weapon way (similar to Verdugo, U3 and most of the RE4 bosses). I also learned I missed a whole bunch of items :-(

Overall, the pacing of this area felt a little off. Going through houses became methodical and that whole intro with the doctor was just bizarre and confusing (I still don't know what the plan was and feel like the game was telling me to do something I extremely was not supposed to do). Also, three new weapons at once is a lot, as I suddenly went from completely outgunned to teeming with firepower. As a stage of RE5 this would be great, but Chapter 2 had such a perfect balance that by comparison this hits as overblown. I think realistically I don't have a problem with Chapter 3 so much as I just don't want the remainder of The Evil Within to be this. The game could definitely work if it continues to oscillate between the super-stealth of Chapter 1, the Goldilocks balance of 2, and the heavy action of 3.

Surviving The Evil Within, Chapter 2: Deep forests with deep gameplay

Maybe I'll do a daily journal of Evil Within chapters. We'll see how long they get. I know there are 16 and the game is said to be about 15 hours, so they might be just the right length to play one a night. Depends on how much I die.

So Chappy 1, as mentioned yesterday, is an uninspiring Mental Hospital Chainsaw Massacre. The gameplay is purely run-and-hide of the Clock Tower variety; however, the environment is complex enough to provide numerous avenues of sneaking. Crowded rooms with boxes, curtains, and lockers all over - not to mention bottles that can be thrown for distraction - allowed me to at least experiment as I repeatedly died and retried.

The player character is called Sebastian Castellanos. I just felt like getting that out of the way instead of trying to work it into a sentence.

Chapter 2 provides the tutorial that's missing from the dramatically hard intro. Sebastian is back to walking/running at normal speed - a bit faster than the standard enemies - and he's got a loaded revolver in hand. After an introduction to the save/upgrade safe-house accessible through mirrors, it's - as the saying goes - out of the hospital and into a nighttime forest encircling decaying cottages.

I know what you're saying. "First a chainsaw, now a forest? What is this, RE4?" Trust me, we haven't even scratched the surface of the RE4ness of this game, including bear traps, trip wires, not-a-zombies, the part where you use binoculars to look ahead at a villager gathering (just weird that that minor moment would be reused), and the being chased across a stone bridge by a torch-waving mob. Yes, from what I can tell, The Evil Within is Resident Evil 4. That is to say, the tagline should've been "Within this game resides an evil. That evil... is Resident Evil. Fooouurr.". Still, the open forest is a much cooler and scarier setting than a mental hospital and it doesn't look much like RE4 - the palette uses deep greens, blues, and greys rather than dusty reds and browns - so I'm not complaining.

Sorry, I wish I could use my own images for this coverage but I don't have any way to screen-cap from a 360 game

Shortly after I set off through the trees, I was forced into a showdown with a standard enemy. Three misses and a headshot later, I was down to two bullets and had a good idea that these sorta-zombies were faster than actually-zombies, liked to charge straight at me, and were soft in the skull. Against the next guy I wasn't so lucky - quickly wasting my remaining bullets, I had the choice to run or swing my fists. With a dead end behind me and no clue what was ahead, I thought it would be safest to test out the melee combat. It took about a dozen pistol whips and some stomping to put my foe down, not to mention almost my entire health bar, so it became apparent that melee was not to be relied upon.

Some dimly fire-lit houses lay ahead and I could make out a few zombies standing guard or walking in rigid patrol routes. In my ammo-less state and still not confident in my ability to run, I decided to go with a stealth approach. The first couple foes were easy to take down - just sneak up behind them and press A for a knifing - and I was cued onto others from their groaning sounds. Gradually clearing out the opposition gave me space to disarm traps that I would've tripped straight into had I been running.

The map at this point had really opened up and enemies were spaced far enough that it was easy both to manipulate angle/order of attack and to accidentally expose myself. Without an in-game map I was constructing a mental one instead - in an open, dark space with irregular geometry, that quickly became disorienting. There were a lot of houses to investigate and I occasionally came across ammo and healing items that I would've missed had I been taking a more rigid path to avoid/flee enemies. Then again, those extra items may not have been necessary if I wasn't relying on close encounters. Essentially the game was rewarding my style by facilitating it, encouraging thinking ahead and commitment. That's solid survival design.

At one point I picked up a torch from a fallen foe to help disperse the overwhelming blackness. Unfortunately it quickly gave away my position and I ended up with two zombonis bearing down on me. I swung the torch at one for an instantaneous - but single-use - kill, and blew through all the bullets I'd just found taking out his friend. Here the game kicked my ass for screwing up my own strategy, but it was fairly balanced - the bullets I had spent time collecting got me out of a sticky situation.

When an enemy went down its corpse remained, giving me a chance to torch it. The game doesn't explain why that's necessary, but matches are limited so I opted to conserve them during most of Chapter 2. That set up the best scare of the night: when I found some spare matches in one of the houses, I went back to torch some bodies I had left behind. But I couldn't find the bodies! At first I thought I was just lost, then I found the bloodstains where they had lain and realized they were actually gone. I don't know if this was a glitch, if they rose up and wandered off, or if they'll come back to haunt me later. Regardless, considering the implications was freaky.

After I made it through the cottages I came across a big zombie gathering. Before Sebastian had time to finish his cautious "I should leave them be" I had walked too close and drawn their attention. With what felt like a dozen enemies coming at me there was no way I could fight, so I made a run for it. It was pretty worrisome at first - I had no clue where I was going - but after I hit a wall and managed to loop around while still keeping the mob behind me, a lot of the tension dissolved. It was a little too easy in the open space to outrun the zombies, even slowing down every few seconds to let my stamina recharge. When I reached a bridge, a cutscene took over and I was home free.

Ultimately, stealth remains key to offsetting the scarcity of ammo, but the options to shoot or run are now open. There's no requirement to exterminate the enemies, so it's my call whether to run, gun, sneak, or assassinate. As a matter of fact I have half a mind to replay the chapter and see if I can run through, though I think that's better saved for a later play. Circumstances can quickly change to force adaptation - getting spotted forced me to shoot and running out of ammo necessitated melee and later flight. This is definitely starting to feel like classic Resident Evil-style survival horror. 

Surviving The Evil Within, Chapter 1: Rebirth or plain old neo survival horror?

Look at me, playing a current events game. Aren't I proud. With nearly (exactly) six games knocked off my queue in the past month, I had the "allowance" to grab Shinji Mikami's latest just in time for the pumpkining season. Mikami is perhaps the single most relentlessly visionary and effective director in the past 200 years, so I'm always excited to put in one of his games and see what it has to say. The Evil Within was much hyped in regards to a return to survival horror, but where exactly will it fit in the survhor portmandu?

Survival horror has traditionally been a merging point between adventure and action, where key goals are built around exploration and puzzles but accomplishing those goals requires the utilization of limited means to overcome active opposition. The player is driven not by their need to kill enemies, but by their need to open doors, thus they must press on regardless of their ability to fight. Preparation is meant to trump technical skill.

They say street ball leads to street violence

In the most iconic games, namely the Alone in the Dark, Resident Evil, and Silent Hill series, that concept manifests as mazes with ammo limits. There are always going to be zombies between you and that hexagonal key, and every bullet spent is one less available for the rest of the game. Exploration and survival feed into each other: evading enemies and taking shortcuts means ammo saved, finding stashes means greater reserves, and better weapons make for high risk/reward. You can choose your fights, but the imprecise action means that you can rarely rely on technical skill to get you out alive - supplies are a necessary fallback, and supplies can only be replenished through further exploration.

In the last decade or so, the progeny of Resident Evil 4 ran with that model until demanding action standards successfully honed out all the adventure/action exploration/combat interplay that defined 'survival'. Tighter controls, mandatory combat, performance-regulated ammo, and structural linearity dragged mainline horror into the greater action portmandu, largely in the name of "improving" visceral feedback and pacing. While fans of the classics might blame the low-brow demands of the conquering casual gamer, it could also be said that this was simply the natural progression of the style - by the fourth (really the eleventh) Resident Evil game, should it be any surprise that the architecture needed a blast of minty freshness? Whomever you want to blame, Resident Evil 5/6, the Dead Space games, and The Last of Us have more in common with straight-up shooters like Lost Planet and Gears of War than with their own origins.

But there was always a second kind of survival game aside the classic scrimp-and-shoots. Going back to Clock Tower (and before) are combatless games wherein the player must rely solely upon running and hiding to survive. Longevity in games like Fatal Frame falls more to knowing the environment than managing supplies; the style trades player-driven variety for elegant simplicity, creating a more "on rails" - but also more spontaneous - experience. While Resident Evil is all growing dread at increasingly dire circumstances, Clock Tower is a histrionic up-and-down roller coaster. Though sometimes described as "adventure horror", these games generally do rely on action techniques like reflexes and stealth, so ultimately they meet the action/adventure quota that defines a survival challenge. It's just a different approach where preparation comes down to knowing escape routes rather than wagering on excursions.

"Riding scissors" is actually the Japanese equivalent of "riding shotgun", thus imbuing this scene from Clock Tower with a humorous pun-infused tone

While the Resident Evil approach has been blending into action games at large, simultaneously there's been a serious reemergence of the run-and-hide haunted house. Just recently we were graced with the AAA release of Alien: Isolation and shortly before that came the acclaimed Outlast. Thanks to indie hits like Radiohead's Amnesiac and The Slendering, type 2 horror is probably at a peak in popularity, bigger and more accessible now than it's ever been. If anything, the on-rails style has taken over and formed a basis for neo-survival horror, while it's the ammo management games that have lost their significance and assimilated.

So that makes it a bit interesting when The Evil Within entrenches itself in hype about a revival of survival horror. Mikami's been totally off the horror wagon for years, his post-Resident Evil resume being more a who's who of deep technical action, from P.N. 03 to God Hand to Vanquish. And of course the game that spearheaded the trajectory into pure action was his own Resident Evil 4. Even his last horror game, the Suda 51 co-created shoot-em-up Shadows of the Damned, seemed to confirm that the father of survival horror had acknowledged its dissolution. But survival gameplay has survived - thanks to those Clock Tower-type games like Alien: Isolation - so one could take the hype to mean Shinji and co. had something else in mind. Most likely that extinct breed of ammo maze games that was absorbed by third-person shooters.

That makes it all the weirder that The Evil Within starts with a stealth/evasion sequence that could've come straight out of Amnesia or Metal Gear Solid. The player is being stalked by a chainsaw guy through a mental hospital and has to sneak around behind boxes and in lockers to get through the stage unharmed. It feels downright conservative in its reliance on principles that are all very popular right now. Hopefully this is just a starting point for more evolved gameplay, but over the first hour Evil Within feels kinda like an acknowledgement that Clock Tower was right and Resident Evil was wrong. I just got a gun in chapter 2, so fingers crossed that things open up and some classically resonant (or original) gameplay emerges.

Also, it probably isn't coming through, but the actual reason I care is nothing to do with the hype and everything to do with the fact that I don't particularly like the run-and-hide type of game. It is boring and lacks tension. It is a lot less scary to replay a segment for the sixth time because I keep getting caught than it is to waste all my ammo on a mistake and have to go into the unknown with only 3 bullets. As illustrated by my session last night in which I died like 10 times trying to get past that guy and tension turned into tedium. 

While I'm at it, a chainsaw guy in a mental hospital? Come on. I know everything under the sun has been done, but that is as cliche as cliche gets and is really hard to get excited about. RE4 was a horror pastiche and the Texas Chainsaw Massacre: They Took My Baby Away from Me reference fit in both the context and the gameplay, not to mention it was fairly original for its time in gamedom. Seeing it in Evil Within just makes me think Mikami is out of ideas, especially when the death animations are nearly identical to those in RE4. That saw revving sound used to be genuinely scary. Today I respond to it the same way as the sound of some asshole's loud car exhaust. Again, hopefully this is just setup stuff and the content will get more interesting as the game moves on.

Also, moving further along the tangent of things that have nothing to do with anything, why isn't there acceleration on the aiming controls??? Who does that? It feels extremely awkward after having played any video game ever made.