The Evil Withinseries never really seemed to get off the ground, or entrench itself in the gaming horror consciousness. The two games, released in 2014 and 2017 respectively, are the brainchild of Shinji Mikami, who played a pivotal creative role in some of the best Resident Evil games, helping the series become the phenomenon it is today. While I’ve never played the first Evil Within (something about its Saw-in-a-mental-asylum trappings just left me feeling utterly numb), the sequel has had my attention for a long time.
On the one hand, The Evil Within 2 is Resident Evil but smarter, retaining the ‘evil science corporations doing bad’ and balls-to-the-wall combat scenarios while its simulated setting leads to some interesting visual experimentation and surreal scenarios. On the other hand, The Evil Within 2 is ‘Silent Hill 2 but blissfully dumber,’ very much playing on the horror of the sleepy all-American town setting, but instead of using the town as a symbolism-heavy delve into a troubled protagonist’s psyche, the town is instead a virtual space that thousands of people got hooked up to via evil science.
All things considered, the story of The Evil Within 2 is mostly nonsense, but what’snotnonsense is its world design, which somehow manages to squeeze all the jump-scares, frantic horror, and suspense-building of a meticulously choreographed horror game into an open-world setting. Horror games don’t usually go open-world, because it’s easier to deliver horror when the developer has more direct control over your experience. Just look at all the ‘ghost train’ games out there, or even Resident Evil. Yes, you can explore, say, Resident Evil: Village, somewhat non-linearly, but upon closer inspection it’s all just a bunch of corridors, designed to be played in a certain order, and confining you in such a way that you’re a sitting duck for shocks and thrills. Even less linear, more systems-driven horror games like Alien: Isolation and Amnesia heavily rely on player confinement to function properly.
That’s not the case in The Evil Within 2, where from early on you a pretty large chunk of town to explore freely. That town is Union which, as mentioned earlier, is the quintessential ‘quaint American town’ of the Silent Hill/Twin Peaks/Stephen King variety (you’d have thought that with all the harrowing horror stories set in these sorts of places, it wouldn’t be seen as so aspirational any more). The town is in factdesignedto be idyllic, as it all takes place in a simulation created by a corporation that’s ultimately planning on enslaving the whole world in a simulation using WiFi… or something.
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That’s not important. What’s important is that you’re largely free to explore this town and yet throughout the game’s running time it never becomes too familiar or comfortable. There are quaint little houses, auto-repair shops, diners, churches, and residential garages to snoop around in, yet the dynamics of these environments change over time to keep you guessing.
You may think that staying off the monster-infested roads and garden-hopping to your destination is the safest option, but you never know when you’ll step on a supine monster in the long grass, or get ambushed by one from a tree. At one point when I went off the beaten path, I stumbled upon an abandoned train. Once inside, I looked down the length of a couple of carriages and saw a monster beneath flickering lights that suddenly disappeared from view. Tentatively approaching the spooky sighting, I failed to see several still zombie-like creatures sitting in the seats that I passed, setting me up for a perfectly timed jump-scare and ambush.
Even with this tight little ecosystem of horror, there are some classical scripted surprises too. In an auto-repair shop, I read a diary entry saying that the owners managed to ‘lock a bunch of thosethingsunder the shop.’ Once I pressed the button to open a hatch to the shop’s underground, I was so worked up bracing myself to drop down into the hatch that I didn’t notice the Hysteric - a particularly nasty early-game enemy - that had just shambled in through the door with its head down. Only when I heard its gutteral grunting right in my ear (the enemy sound design isfantastic) did I shine my torch in the direction of the terrible noise to be greeted with the equally terrible sight.
Union isn’t an entirely open world. The town is - quite literally - split into pieces. The different parts of the town float in the sky at impossible angles, and you’re able to only reach them via The Marrow - a kind of underground tunnel complex that you get transported to Matrix-style from a computer (the Weird Science of the game has its own charms).
Union is not a huge place by any means but it is a daunting one,designed in such a way that each time you step out into it from the cosy safehouse sanctuaries, you need to take a deep breath and psyche yourself up. There’s no fast travel in the world, making each scurry between safehouses and each scavenging mission for supplies feel perilous, especially as the monsters in the world scale up as you progress through the story, and even innocuous spaces can betray you when you revisit them. That garage that was your go-to for Weapon Parts might suddenly have a Spawn lurking in the rafters, while reaching for an item under a car might result in a monster latching onto your arm. The horror elements are simple in themselves, but so impressive in this open-world context.
The Evil Within 2 is more than just a brilliant open world though. It’s an excellent showcase of Weird Horror; there’s a serial killer photographer on the loose, a haunted house that you keep getting transported to, and a black cat with a red bow that gives you Green Gel when you collect projector slides. It’s a strange and smart game from a strange and smart mind, and there really is nothing quite like it.
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