The Evil Within Bundle

The Evil Within is a weird game. There is a lot of issues here. A bad, often confusing story, a protagonist with the charisma of a chalkboard. Jarring environmental shifts that feel unestablished and random. Death traps galore. Worthless stealth. And worst of all, the start of the game is extraordinarily rough, to the point where I have lost interest multiple times on multiple playthroughs before making it through the slow and boring first few hours. If you stick with it though and overlook the issues above, you will find a devious game that feels awesome. Being chased by a man with a safe for a head. A girl chasing you, who can jump out of pools of blood and dead bodies. These moments are so cool and you feel like a protagonist in a horro movie. It's unfortunate that the entire experience feels so disjointed. Like a collection of horror movie clips rather than one cohesive piece because when it's firing on all cylinders, it's an extremely immersive horror experience.

Sure the PC port of this game isn't the greatest out there. You need to do quite a bit of tweaking to get it to work properly at 60 FPS, the letter boxing choice is controversial and depending on who you ask they will tell you they either love it or hate it. Thankfully you can choose whichever you prefer in the game settings. The technical issues with the port aside the game itself is one of the best survival horror games out there, some of the game mechanics haven't aged as well for today's standards but even so, if you're a fan of this genre this is a must play.

Disclaimer: I played The Evil Within 2 first, which undoubtedly influenced my opinion of this game. I consider the sequel a much better product overall. The Evil Within’s biggest draw for me was the idea of everything taking place in a Virtual Simulation. Think of “The Matrix” or “Inception” but with a tense and foreboding atmosphere. This is sure to keep players on edge, as the environment itself or the laws of physics can change right before their eyes. It also excuses the existence of certain video game mechanics, such as saving your progress or upgrading yourself. My biggest complaint is the lack of ammo and healing items. Having played survival horror games before, such as the old “Resident Evil” and “Silent Hill” trilogies, I found The Evil Within MUCH STINGIER with its ammo and healing items. Stealth kills, ammo conservation, grouping enemies together for area of effect attacks never seemed to be enough here. This is only made worse in later levels, where the game dials up the action exponentially, with enemies coming at you from all sides. I admit, I only managed finishing the game by using cheats to give myself ammo, healing and… matches (for some reason I really enjoy burning the corpses in this game, it feels so cathartic). I also had to use a FOV fix, as the field of view on PC is terrible. The fix can be found over at http://www.flawlesswidescreen.org/ Some other minor nitpicks would be: - the clunky controls - moving and aiming always seems a bit laggy; - the annoying checkpoint system - one fatal mistake can set you back 5-10 minutes; - confusing boss fights - there's a lot of trial and error in figuring out when I need to run from a boss or stay and fight; sometimes I can just shoot it till it dies while other times I need to get creative in taking a boss down;

Not without its flaws but still a really great game. The atmosphere is dark, creepy, and fills me with all those classic survival horror vibes. Even though I feel like things started to lose focus near the end I will happily return to this world again and again.

Love the story and combat especially