Many hybrid games these days blend different genres to produce an entertaining romp. You know, a shooter that’s made up of cartoon aliens and raucous pratfalls, for example. Or a robots-in-love action-adventure RPG.
The popular game The Evil Within 2, however, is not one of those games. It’s pure survival horror. Nothing more, nothing less.
Det. Sebastian Castellanos is the game’s featured hero. But if you didn’t play the first title in the series, no worries. All you really need to know is that he’s an ex-cop plagued with fear for his loved ones and guilt about the past. And he’s the guy who’ll guide gamers into what amounts to a 20-to-30 hour fever dream—and a brutal one at that.
The story focuses on the nefarious doings of a secret organization known as Mobius. This group of heavily armed ne’er-do-wells has control of STEM—a Matrix-like virtual reality technology that these baddies hope to use for Matrix-like domination of humanity. Alas, something has gone terribly wrong (as these things usually do): That vast inner world is now crumbling apart in gravity-defying chunks. And the place is rife with zombies and all manner of deep, dark grotesqueries.
That’s where Sebastian comes in. It seems his young daughter, Lily, is involved in this horrid cyber reality. He thought she had perished in a terrible fire. But she was actually kidnapped by Mobius, and her death was faked. In fact, his young girl’s uniquely malleable mind is somehow being used to maintain everything in STEM. Of course, if anyone can have his consciousness beamed into that grim virtual place to set things aright, it’s Lily’s hard-fisted, fiercely determined dad.
That may sound like a particularly hard-to-wrap-your-brain-around backstory. But truthfully, that intricate narrative’s sole purpose is to explain why Sebastian will have to keep pounding into scores and scores of nightmarish, leaping-from-the-dark creatures; maneuvering his way into shadowy, terror-filled structures; and wading through miles of rotting, stinking gunk.
If the goal of survival horror is to make you feel like you’re always holding on by your virtual fingernails and just barely surviving the deadly onslaught tossed at you, well, The Evil Within 2 nails it—with a large and grisly nail.
Everything from gunmen with high-caliber weapons to reality manipulating madmen to crawling corpse thingies attack you, filling your camera’s eye with splashes of bloody goo or gutting you altogether and sending you back to a previous checkpoint for another try.
Characters’ heads are partial blown off, limbs are rent, bowels are spilled. We see a screaming young girl’s face melt away in the heat of a blazing fire. “Artwork” on display is comprised of eviscerated entrails, creepy corpuscular corpses, oozing puss bubbles, bathtubs full of blood, severed arms skittering about like spiders. Gruesome hybrid monstrosities—pieced together from naked and goopy body parts (some, obviously female in origin) and sharp-edged power tools—haunt dark hallways. And F-words and s-words (as well as milder profanities) choke the dialogue as well.
“Ugh, who comes up with this stuff,” Sebastian groans aloud while looking at a particularly nasty piece of “art” skewered to a wall.
That sentiment easily speaks for the entire game.
After spending more than two decades touring, directing, writing and producing for Christian theater and radio (most recently for Adventures in Odyssey, which he still contributes to), Bob joined the Plugged In staff to help us focus more heavily on video games. He is also one of our primary movie reviewers.
