Scare Tactics
Ride the open road to hell in The Evil Within 2.
The Evil Within 2 revels in its grotesqueness. In the opening five minutes, you’re forced to watch a young girl burn to death. Later, you repeatedly observe a man’s head explode by gunshot. Then you witness a scene so horrifically graphic I worry recounting it will cause me to bring up my lunch. It’s punctuated by stomach-churning moments throughout—this is a psychological horror game determined to terrify beyond jump scares. For the most part, it works. And, while cheap frights are served by the game’s zombie natives on occasion, its tortured antagonists, manifestations of guilt-driven grief, and open world elements present a far more ambitious game than the original. Like its forerunner, it struggles at times with the B-movie trappings, jarring narratives, and ham-fisted voice acting, yet The Evil Within 2 rarely feels disposable.
It drops protagonist Sebastian Castellanos into the simulated world of Union—a corrupted, monster-ridden town that’s thought to contain your (presumed dead) daughter Lily. It’s here that the game experiments with an open world structure, as you make your way back and forth across a handful of well-sized maps, each filled with accessible buildings and collectible items. Early on, you pick up a communications device that allows you to track Lily’s whereabouts, as well as a host of optional side ventures, such as the locations of weapon parts and caches, and bits of additional storytelling.
This presents a more thoughtful approach to progression. During the earlier chapters, I regularly found myself abandoning the main story, instead trekking to the furthest corners of the urban sprawl in search of loot and ammo. The loot was often well guarded, which forced me to engage with the game’s new cover system: Two modes that allow Castellanos to hug surfaces when crouched, and portray him as a greyed-out silhouette when hiding in long grass.
While this marks a departure from pure survival horror, it benefits the game’s stealth systems since you’re no longer required to distract foes with smashable bottles. Open areas are less densely populated, although enemies are more aggressive. With this in mind, the first game’s optional enemy visibility indicator is switched on by default, which I’d suggest sticking with given how easy it is for enemies to get they drop on you.
Variety in your means of attack is important, as your environment can often be manipulated to suit your circumstances. One failed attack saw me running from a horde of The Haunted. I unscrewed a fire hydrant, waited till the group was ankle-high in water, and blasted the pool with a Shock Bolt, taking down six enemies at once. Another botched onslaught had me setting a crowd alight in a gas station oil spill. These tactics add a nice twist to the conflict.
Fright return
The story tells a familiar tale of anguish, where beleaguered hero Castellanos has again been duped by the Mobius corporation. We learn that his daughter, Lily, is the core of the crumbling STEM neural network—within which Union is housed—and her extraction is being blocked by two distinguished and charismatic villains. These foes are unhinged art lover Stefano Valentini and power-mad cultist Theodore Wallace. Both will keep you on your toes in the story as well as in battle.
In pursuit of this double act, you’ll traverse a familiar set of corridors that spawn mysterious doors and unsettling messages, before facing off against a number of shit-scary foes—not least The Guardian, a shrieking she-devil composed of writhing corpses and saw blades. The Evil Within 2 always looks great, but these set pieces look extraordinary and sound terrifying.
Almost everything has been improved, yet it still feels like a classic survival horror, one infused with enough psychological scares to keep it feeling fresh.
The game experiments with an open world structure