4) The Evil Within
Shinji Mikami’s first return to survival horror, following his completing Resident Evil 4 and parting ways with Capcom, is every bit the gruesome and mercilessly terrifying experience you’d expect to come from the mind of a man that helped to pioneer the genre. Sure, there’s the chainsaw-wielding, mask-wearing psychopath eager to lop your limbs off and the familiar smell of musty, abandoned villages to skulk through that draw inevitable comparisons to Mikami’s earlier works, but make no mistake, The Evil Within‘s nightmarish universe has been grown from an entirely separate Petri dish.
That’s not good news for Sebastian Castellanos, though, as he’s the poor sod who has to confront the freshly-spawned, hellish creations that only Mikami could dream up, and let me tell you, they’re a drastic upgrade over the mindless undead one can find shuffling around Ozwell E. Spencer’s crusty Mansion. One after the other, the denizens of The Evil Within‘s dream world reveal themselves, each one a homage, of sorts, to other horror works. The Keeper and Laura, for example, draw their visual inspirations from Silent Hill‘s Pyramid Head and Japanese horror cinema respectively, each with their own role to play in making sure Seb remains trapped in Ruvik’s warped reality forever.
Sadly, the same can’t be said for the game’s leads, which hardly amount to anything more than forgettable side attractions meant only to further Sebastian’s descent into madness, but that’s forgivable – Resident Evil‘s hammy cast are as equally one-dimensional. It’s the world and what resides within it that makes The Evil Within the hair raising gauntlet of despair that it is, and I can’t wait to see how Tango Gameworks intends to improve on it with this year’s sequel.
