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!!!!

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.

Everyone's Mansion: Home is where the horror is

What is a mansion? A house. Nailed it. Mansions are a place where horror movies and games and Scooby Doo are set. They have ghosts for doors and vampires for windows, and there's always a skeleton in every closet! Did you ever notice that "mansion" and "dimension" are really similar words? Coincidence? Or something much more sinister?

What is it that makes mansions so appropriate for games, particularly those of the horror and mystery variety? They're a trope so old that we don't blink an eye to see one, but mansions have a few aces of spades up their respective sleeves. I don't give a shit about being a good writer today so here's a list. That's what paragraphs are anyway.

Rooms
Rooms are a pretty convenient thing for video games. Beyond the obvious conveniences they grant to processors and loaders and whatever is going on in those computer boxes, rooms allow gameplay to be parsed in a logical fashion. A room provides a self-contained experience, be it a puzzle, a showdown, or even SHODAN. It has a beginning, middle, and end. Mansion-rooms are particularly handy because they're so clearly defined, each characterized and remembered by its purpose. "Kitchen" is not the same as "Study" is not the same as "Underground Research Lab". It's basically Clue, with less Tim Curry.

Roomification is one of the strengths of the Legend of Zelda series, games which teach us life lessons like to ALWAYS shoot eyeballs and run from statues. Pretty much the hors d'oeuvres of the Legend of Zelda is its penchant for desolate halls and cavernous chambers. So it should come as no surprise that mansions were a natural fit for Twilight Princess's Snowpeak Manor. Eh. Snowpeak is one of my favorite Zelda dungeons of all time, as the mansion theme synergizes so beautifully with Zelda mechanics, yet manages to provide an experience unlike anything Link has ever experienced. Two bad sentences in a row. Great. The Forest Temple is kind of a mansion too, isn't it? Golem will have to edit in whether that's true. I don't have a great picture of it in my head, but holy shit he never shuts up about it.

Walls
This is kind of a spinoff of #1, but I separate it out because. Mostly what I'm referring to here is a lack of transparency - you never know what the next room is going to hold. For a game like Super Mario 64 that spends most of its time showing off broomy vistas, the player is liable to get downright claustrophobic trapped inside the halls of Boo House. Your situational awareness has shrunken to a screen's width and is doled out in discrete chunks - each room is a sudden revelation. Mario putzes through each door, leaving you to cautiously scan your OHGODTHEPIANOISALIVE

Ha! No one's ever done a "surprised at the piano in Super Mario 64 Boo House being alive" joke before!

Walls don't just control visibility, but access as well. There are fixed point of entry and exit to each room, so if some scary ass shit is going down (teeth-piano again), you better hope you have a clear path to the door - and especially hope that the door is unlocked. It's much harder to scare the player in open areas where they are free to run in circles (RE5). This can also be used to give the player a much needed sense of sanctuary when things get too tense to handle. And better yet, doors can trick the player into assuming a safe haven, only to unexpectedly give way for an especially terrifying scare.

So we've established that the very layout of mansions is conducive to tension, but why are they chosen in the first place? What differentiates them from sunken ships or, hey, I just realized that the space derelicts in Alien or Dead Space are the futuristic version of sunken ships. Crazy.

Isolation 

I don't know the reality of it, but as far as fiction is concerned, every mansion is situated on a gloomy hill in a gloomy glade amidst a gloomy forest with a raven eerily saying "ca-caw". Hey is there like a crescendo (or decrescendo) version of alliteration where you use words starting with subsequent letters of the alphabet? Because I think I just invented it: "hill [...] glade [...] forest [...] eerily". Nice. The player knows that if they're getting themselves into a mansion, they're far away from any sign of civilization, and thus help.

But why not use some old ruins or a carefully placed moat to accomplish the same feeling? The beauty of the mansion is that it is the epitome of high society, yet not a part of society. It is so civilized that it's become a civilization unto itself. It has its own class struggles (servants and masters), its own history, its own body of knowledge. This is fantastic for a mystery: there are rules to this microcosm, but the player doesn't know them. They're adrift in a world that is ostensibly familiar, but contains a heart of darkens.

Resident Evil is one of the most captivating executions of this dynamic, leaving the player in what at first appears to be a desolate manor to find all kinds of life that they really don't want to find. This spooky spire exists in a reality of its own, where the dead inhabit the home of the living, sharks are in the basement, and something else. The player is only informed by their short experience with the game - they have no way to guess what this terrible world contains. And, dare you think of escaping... oh god.

Eternal Darkness' Roivas mansion is the prototypical old-world New England dwelling. The story tells us it's been around for like a million years, and then some. As the game progresses, we see the mansion in different eras, see it take on a life and growth of its own as it and its inhabitants are increasingly pulled into the epic struggle against the Ancients. All that appears normal in the mansion hides a sinister underbelly - the servants turn out to be monsters, the phone lines fake calls, and the library stores books (and more) not of the human world. This chasm between real reality and the mansion reality is further deepened by the perceivable deterioration of the protagonists' sanity. The house is weird enough already, and as things get weirder, the player has no means of determining whether what they're seeing is actually there or a figment of the characters' imaginations.

It's not a home, it's a house

The contents of the mansion are so carefully wrought and extravagant that they create a sense of the foreign, even in the presence of familiar objects like "sink" and "chair". What makes us uncomfortable is that we can still recognize and identify with the homey function of the setting. The mansion starts to make us feel at home, as ostentatious as it may be. Which makes it all the weirder if there aren't any residents. An empty hamburger factory or missile factory doesn't feel unusual to explore, as we don't really relate to those settings. An abandoned house just feels wrong.

Of course, I'm assuming you didn't grow up in a mansion. Anyone who did isn't really a part of society. Fuck those assholes.

I hate to use the same example twice, but Eternal Darkness is again the ultimate execution of this discomfort. As the story repeatedly returns to its overarching frame in the present-day Roivas mansion, we begin to feel at home - compared to Egyptian catacombs and Cambodian jungles, it certainly feels relaxing. When the game jumps from the frightening climax of one of these embedded tales back to the mansion's bedroom or study, we feel a sense of relief. Which makes it all the more disturbing as Alex (our protagonist) begins to experience violent visions and uncovers the history of what we thought was sanctuary. The chapter which shows one of Alex's ancestors being driven off the cliff of sanity sheds a completely new light (or darkness) on our supposed home base.

Decadence gone wrong

Ah shit, that's a redundant header. "Decadence" already implies extremity to the degree of corruption. One final point that strikes me about mansions is something that simultaneously delights and dismays us: the notion that all the success, riches, and status in the world are so easily twisted into something evil. On one hand, we plebeians like to imagine that you can't buy happiness. So we take a sociopathic pleasure in watching the downfall of those more well-off than ourselves.

Even brownies can be decadent to the point of terror. I think.

Third-world slums make a weak horror setting (RE5) because they're sad enough to start with - they don't need to be haunted by a spirit to unsettle us. We go in expecting to be horrified. A mansion should be AWESOME. It's the ultimate symbol of modern opulence - basically a castle. Seeing one transformed into a House of the Dead subverts our expectations that what looks good will be good. Think about it. When you see Batman hanging around Wayne Manor, you're like, "that place is fucking sw33t. I wish I lived there!". Then it's like under the house is a supercomputer and Batcars and Oracle (is she trapped there? I never saw a wheelchair ramp in the Batcave) and like all kind of lazers and shit and you're like "it's even cooler than I thought!". Then you see the house in Alone in the Dark, and you're like "that place is fucking sw33t. I wish I lived there!". And you look underneath and it's like literally Hell on earth. And you say "whoops!".

Conclusion
I actually was going to tie this discussion together with Luingi's Mansion, but I'm honestly not sure it has anything original to offer. It's not all that mansiony. Frankly, it's just too happy. Which is a weird thing to say about a game that tasks you with sucking dead babies out of drapes. And don't say "duh of course it's happy, it's a fucking Nintendo game you fucking stupid-ass dickbrain". Well fuck you too, buddy. Boo House and plenty of Zelda locales capture that nice family-friendly terror familiar from movies like Gremlin and Ploteregeists, which resonate both with humans and children without going over the line to offend. Except actually Gremlins never did seem super child-friendly to me. It's kind of mean-spirited. Parents dying on Christmas is just :/ . Great, now I'm all :/

Resident Evil Revelations - Early revelations

Ah, Resident Evil, what a popular series to hate. Ever since regaining its steam with RE4, the series seems to have run out of steam. RE5 conservatively repeated the approach of its predecessor while introducing a few superficial interface experiments, all of which miserably failed. If you don't believe a game can be utterly ruined by superficial interface experimentation (a la inventory management), you haven't played Resident Evil 5. Worse yet (per fans), the series was beginning to have completely drifted away from its survival horror roots! Being the not really a fan of the series as I am, THAT I couldn't care less about. So what if it used to be survival horror? It clearly isn't trying to be anymore, so how can you evaluate it on that basis? I guess by being the type of gamer/reviewer who prefers evaluating a work in terms of personal expectations rather than what the creators set out to achieve. 

Anyway, I'm still optimistic about 6, which had a great demo but hasn't yet found its way to my Xbox, so until then I'm occupied with Revelations (which came out on 3DS during the long pause between 5 and 6). I have to be honest - I was not optimistic about Revelations, having been relatively disappointed by the demo and discouraged by reviews that wanted to talk more about context than content (e.g. "this is the best Mature title on 3DS", "makes good use of 3D", "production values"). Also, I don't really like handheld games. Oops. Anyway, I'm glad I gave ResiRev a chance (thanks Golem!), because it's had me locked onto the handheld far more than any other game thus far.

Remember back in RE1 when just ONE zombie was scary?

In direct contrast to series fans, my immediate fear in the first few minutes of ResiRev was that it wasn't going to be a shooter. Or, more appropriately, that it was going to be a poor shooter. Taking RE4/5 expectations into Rev, I was startled by the lumbering enemies that chew up and spit out handgun bullets with barely a shudder. That the enemy count would be lower was predictable - I didn't imagine the 3DS could (or Capcom would dare push it to) handle RE5 mobs of dozens of villagers - but I wasn't ready to have to turn and run from the very first foe. At first I was thinking, what the fuck, this is just plain unfun. Needing to unload two full clips to take down what was apparently the most basic foe didn't bode well for the pacing. Gradually, however, I came to realize that this was a return to the mechanics of the very first Resident Evil. These claustrophobic rooms where just one or two enemies give chase and are bounded by doors are exactly what made up the environment in RE1.

The callback jumps from subtle to overt in the second chapter (about forty-five minutes in) when Jill wakes up in a locked room without a weapon. The subsequent fifteen minutes should be bliss for survival horror purists - a defenseless avatar, monsters bursting from closets to give chase down narrow hallways, racing against time to find that right key or door before they catch you. I call it an overt reference because until that point the game had been set in the dim, steely blue, swaying corridors of an ocean liner - then, just as the gameplay becomes really RE1y, you're transported to opalescent, warmly lit living quarters that, not knowing any better, one might assume comprised an old-world New England mansion (which, for the uninitiated, is where RE1 was set). Frankly, I found this decision downright cool. At this point the series is so far removed from its origins that it was the last thing I was expecting, and it completely recolored the game I'd been playing up til that point. All of a sudden I understood why I had a dodge move to escape monsters at arm's length, why I'd been circling past so many locked doors, and why I could only carry a limited amount of ammo.

ResiRev welcomes you back to the mansion

I'll tell you later (when I get there) how well ResiRev holds to this revelation, but it's a truly exciting prospect. With a modern streamlined inventory (far simpler than RE4's and light beers better than 5's), friendly auto-saving, no ammo-scares, and surprisingly pretty visual presentation (nearly on par with RE5 but for the low resolution and lesser effects), this could be the best traditional Resident Evil out there. Oh right, a major interface advancement I should mention, since it solves one of RE1's worst problems, is a Metroid Prime style universal environment scanner. At first I was all, "ru4srs?", worried that it was dragging down the pace even further, but this tool proves a major boon to the scavenging nature of the Resident Evil quest. There's no longer any excuse to walk straight by a key that you could barely see or a statue that you didn't realize you could interact with - this provides immediate identification of all interactables without resorting to glowy outlines or sparkles.

I've strategically (or just regularly) avoided thus far mentioning that there are intermittent chapters that play completely differently from this main haunted house/boat adventure. The two thus far have been balls to walls shooting action (even arcadier than RE4). These create an excellent pace for the game, allowing it to have its cake, and eat its cake too. Hmm when you read "have your cake" there in the uh Biblical sense, it's a pretty frightening expression.

XCOM: is it survival horror? Hafta think.

Let me note that I'm again referring to Enemy Unknown, though this discussion will also mostly apply to the original UFO Defense, and it is specific to the higher difficulties, though not necessarily Iron Man mode (for those who haven't played the game, Iron Man is a one-file-only auto-saving mode that prevents the practice of "save scumming", i.e. reverting to an earlier save when you're losing).

As usual, we need to start from a definition of survival horror. Seriously, at this point it won't be long before I've defined just about every genre ever, I'm moving at such an annoying rate. Horror is something in which video games can really excel beyond any other medium, because the player has a much more vested stake in the action. They can't look away from the screen, because the character in the horrifying situation is an extension of themselves. Yet that notion is not what makes the genre - that's why there's that whole other word in the title. Horror can show up in action games like RE4 or Devil May Cry, RPGs like Shin Megami Tensei, or shooters like DOOM. Survival is the real gameplay meat here. Survival. What the hell does that mean. Not dying?

That creature you see before you is the antithesis of survival

That's quite the insight, "not dying". But that's common to nearly all games. If all we want to do is survive these games, surely dying must factor in more prominently than it does elsewhere. Constant threat of death? That's closer. Survival horrors are going to go for unexpected kills. Unpredictability is part of it. That's not good enough though. Jumps scares, eh. You can unexpectedly fall into a pit in Super Mario Bros. and it'll make for a hilarious moment rather than a terrifying one. I'm gonna go from my gut here. Forget the semantics. I think... survival horror is gameplay in which every forward progress the player takes raises a lethal threat to his success. A game where everything is always at risk. Because when I think about it, RE4, BioShock, and Dead Space were when the genre started to transcend itself. And why did that happen? What was lost, that made these games no longer about survival? That there were conflicts in which you felt no life-threatening stake.

Whew. That felt good. These definitions aren't always easy, because it has to be simple. If it can't fit in one sentence, you've lost it. I'm happy with this one though. Survival horror means you put your life on the line with every step. I'm not really interested in conventions and all that baggage, that's what I mean when I say the definition has to be short and snappy. We want the heart that drives the classics, so we can look at it in a new light.

XCOM is a good way to do that. Taken through the lens of SRPG, it's still a smashing game, but a familiar one. Units are fragile and expendable, weapons are inaccurate, fog of war. That about covers it. But if we look at it as a survival horror, it's a unique and expansive experiment. Now I know the other Greg out there reading is all riled up right about now and gonna tell me this is completely a writing gimmick, but hear me out. I think the game very much invites this analysis and reflects some interesting ideas back at surv-hor.

The very premise of the game is to operate a military force which ensures the survival of humanity against otherworldly invaders. On the large scale this "survival" is represented as "panic", though clearly the understanding is that if the player loses the game, civilization ceases to exist. So this is kinda like the mother of all survival games! Where the risk/progress core really unveils itself is in the individual battles. Every mission requires you to deploy 4-6 soldiers. Each soldier deployed may not come back.

You can plan and strategize and play it safe as much as you want, but in the end you just never know who might die. The situation can always escalate. This is worked into the turn-based gameplay with simple die-roll statistics. For everything that should happen, you never know that it will. This tension builds up with every move, as you ask yourself whether you want to take that step into the dark.

Yeah. I think the answer to the title is yes. XCOM is survival horror, in its own way. So the genre's not as dead as someone wants you to think you believe. There's Dark Souls too.