He’s now trying to contact his dead mother through an Ouija board, which, in terms of the game’s structure, materializes as you walking through his house across a bunch of different loops, each ending with finding another piece of the Ouija board, and each beginning at the beginning of the same corridor. You play as Mark, a man whose mother was supposedly murdered by his father and thrown into a well. "The similarities between the two are so blatant and so numerous that Evil Inside can feel like not just something that’s hugely influenced by P.T., but something that’s straight up ripping it off."īeing a carbon copy of P.T. would have been acceptable if Evil Inside was good at its job – P.T. is an excellent horror experience, after all – but this is a poorly made game that fails at most of what it tries to do. Hell, even its name is basically just another way of saying “Resident Evil” or “ The Evil Within“. From its narrative premise to the imagery it uses to try and scare players, from its looping claustrophobic hallway setting to even the design of the hallway, Evil Inside suffers from a crippling lack of originality. The similarities between the two are so blatant and so numerous that Evil Inside can feel like not just something that’s hugely influenced by P.T., but something that’s straight up ripping it off. To put it bluntly, this is a poorly made replica of P.T. that borrows from Hideo Kojima’s seminal horror demo liberally, but fails to do anything nearly as well as it needed to.
Unfortunately, JanduSoft’s first person psychological horror game Evil Inside is one of those examples that can and should be criticized for lifting things straight out of better games. Everything’s been done before, and so what audiences expect isn’t something that’s completely new, but something that builds on things that have been done before, implements existing ideas in new ways, and puts its own unique twist on them. In games, like in any entertainment medium, it’s impossible to do something that is wholly, entirely original. This is still a good entry in The Evil Within’s universe, but it falls short of its predecessor's greatness.The criticism that a game is too similar to something that came out before it can often fall flat. The gorgeous environments and ridiculous boss battles in The Consequence are among the best in the series, but an overabundance of exposition interrupts its flow too frequently. While the terrifying ‘lamp lady’ returns here with style, one boss - in the throes of Lyne’s ‘judder’ effect - spooked me in a way no video game nasty has before or since. Tango continues to be happy tapping into horror cinema - more specifically, Adrian Lyne’s hugely influential Jacob’s Ladder - and has riffed on the familiar to create new frights. It doesn’t hurt that these bosses are truly unnerving creations. Of particular note are its boss battle arenas, which pulled the rug from under my feet so frequently I felt genuinely panicked which is, of course, the point. Tango has always enjoyed messing with time and space, and here its set-pieces shift in wonderfully bizarre - and disorientating - ways. The Consequence has some of the creepiest environments in The Evil Within to date the series’ trademark askew camera angles and ghostly filters complement body-horror walls and narrow corridors.
A stealthy approach might have been more interesting, but it’s hard to deny the satisfaction of downing five enemies with five bullets in the chamber.Īnd fortunately, originality blooms elsewhere. She’s only a little stronger with a weapon in her hand - unlike The Evil Within’s tougher Sebastian, she is killed in two hits - so every bullet counts. There is a fun to be had once Tango throws up its hands and gives Juli a gun later on in proceedings.
Now something of an overexposed figure, his ‘all-seeing’ presence is mostly relegated to the clunky abstract in The Consequence, and one miserable sequence saw me lighting paintings of his face on fire in order to ‘break his demonic hold’. More problematically, The Consequence struggles to know what to do with its Big Bad, Ruvik. While Juli’s still without a weapon for most - but not all - of her journey, The Consequence struggles to maintain an air of tension while moving the story forward, and enemies, poised on precipices for a pre-determined shove or thrown carelessly beyond the obvious route, feel like an afterthought. Their constant interruptions break up the tight stealth gameplay that was such a highlight in The Assignment.