Imaginary Monsters: Alan Wake vs. The Evil Within [Franchise Spoilers]

all the best horror is psychological it takes spheres and dreams things we usually struggle to articulate at all and teases them out into exaggerations and distortions that clarify and intensify the original feelings here are two extremely similar horror franchises that both take the foundational truth of horror and make it into the explicit frame with a whole piece and the evil within a detective gets pulled into a world of the imagination where people's memories and dreams mingle to make a realm of actual nightmares an Alan Wake a horror writers compelled by a demon to come up with a novel that will empower and unleash the demon by coming true unless Alan can sneak in his own ending to the story and save his wife either way the enemy in both cases is the imagination itself its depth its ferocity its disregard for the order that satisfies the other senses both game series hinge on a kind of malleable reality where you're never sure if the next time you go through a door it'll open on the same when and the same where you are in when you step through the door in the first place all four of these games on a technical level are tremendously similar third-person survival horror titles all with an emphasis on scarcity and disorientation but the devil is in the details none of these games even within their series rely on exactly the same presentation despite all their many surface and stylistic similarities it's not enough to simply be gory or to be dim there's a certain quality of tension that has to be there it has to actually be somehow scary to qualify as a horror game Dhoom 3 is a horror game for example it's all about being alone and hunted in the echoing darkness but the recent doom reboot is not in that game you're the hunter and the primary emotion is a kind of savage gleam you can have a moody dark aesthetic and still not be a horror game think back if you can Ahn's orc nemesis it's still an adventure game an environmental puzzler primarily its primary driver is curiosity but all four of these games that we're talking about now are true blue bonafide horror games their action and narrative are driven by fear the games are succeeding at their goals when the player is in the state of suggestible anxiety when they have no confidence at all and their ability to keep going and not be imminently torn apart by something grotesque think about the last time you were alone in the woods at night even if it was just venturing out to take a midnight piss on a camping trip think about the quiet you're aware of each sound and how each sound carries the wind will sway the branches of the trees in front of you but only the ones your flashlight illuminates there's more beyond there's always more beyond the woods go on forever in the shadow and you can never know for certain what's watching you back only that whatever's out there it's craftier and quieter and sharper than you we call that recreation today but the other thing is that that is the majority of human history alone and the woods hunted and cold something deep in the brain remembers and play these kinds of games is to reach deep into those ancient places in scratch an itch to stick a digital needle right into the center of flight-or-fight and light that center of the brain up like a Christmas tree it feels wonderful if the truth of horror is that for the most part it's all in the mind the paradox of that is that horror works because the mind is equal parts revolts by these ideas of blood and danger and shockingly hungry for the opportunity to confront these monsters and come out the other side alive another thing both series share is a real self-consciousness about the themes and tropes of horror media and a kind of a deliberate engagement with the cliches of the genre I want to start with Alan Wake because it's the more deliberate of the two on that front Alan Wake the protagonist starts off by throwing out a Stephen King quote pretty much right off the bat in the opening narration the quote is nightmares exist outside of logic and there's little fun to be had in explanations they're antithetical to the poetry of fear in theory this is very true horror is accomplished in small gestures and details moments where something's amiss in the environment or a character's life illicit and illicit said deeper anxiety from the reader or watcher player the history of a demonic presence is just exposition the suggestion of one and shadows and dust is horror in practice this quote is professional permission for some really goofy [ __ ] although the entire game is relentlessly wound around the idea that Alan Wake is a writer he is even by admission of the plot kind of shitty one wake is famous for writing a run of trashy hard-boiled detective novels and has just killed off his main character in hopes it will free him to do something more creative you know exactly like Paul Sheldon and his misery novels in the Stephen King story Alan Wake feels very much like a character in a Stephen King story not only because King is so irritatingly fond of making his main characters writers themselves but also because those writers are often such egotistical doofuses and Alan Wake is nothing if not kind of a doofus Alan Wake the game would be an awful book because it's centered around bad writers if he slapdash novel coming to life the metal level points would be lost in the fact that it's almost an impossible tightrope to walk to write a good book about a bad one it would be a bad TV series even though it's arranged into eight roughly hour-long episodes because it's by nature rather rote and repetitive and simple Alan Wake shined his flashlight on the monster then he shot it and then he walked to the next scene but this is a game it is okay that Alan Wake is a bad writer because no writing will be accomplished it is okay that a late-game moment resembles an early game moment because the tension is fresh each time the monsters advance and you have just enough or maybe not enough equipment in time to hold them off for a little while anyway until they come again true to the quote this is never examined in exhaustive detail the creatures are a definitely Alan's and be definitely dangerous so he just kind of goes from there the game leans heavily into the players dramatic expectations of what regularly happens in a horror story by playing the cliches straight telegraphing through level design and foreshadowing when to worry and when to relax you see it was advantageous of Alan Wake the writer to put in so many cliches into his story because that genre familiarity becomes a weapon with which you fight the creatures they behave like mindless monsters they behave like you might expect you can tell what an ambush is coming because it just looks like it ought to awareness of the tropes being used in the narrative becomes a situational tactical awareness to use in the game's combat so all the story itself just a story screams airport paper back it's use of the medium transforms the context of the cliche into something much more clever Alan Wake the game does have a knack for miming the flourishes of big-budget television though its color palette is muted giving everything a lens filtered look while accentuating light sources like neon and fire light is the most powerful weapon in the game it burns the protective shadow off of the figures attacking you so you can go pew pew with the more boring weapons and put the nightmares down until the shadow is gone though they can't really be harmed but they sure as hell can harm you this is actually a pretty genius mechanic that makes all the horror run smoothly the oil and it's mood engine firstly it gives the monsters two ways of unnerving the player as far-off shadows and distinct but advancing with a deliberate Menace and then closer as detailed freaks who throw up their hands to shield themselves from your light the vague threat and then whenever the player hits them with a flashlight beam a specific threat you'll see one or two in the darkness but come to find out there's actually four or five in the yard with you they'll focus your light on the big hulking one in front of you but still be aware on your periphery of the smaller and faster figures darting through the underbrush the flashlight allows you to be frightened during combat in multiple ways of multiple things all fluidly in control of the players themselves the way flares pop off in their toxic pink glow and make all the figures scamper and hide from the light is addictive the flares make you feel powerful it lets you narrowly avoid death but the flare soon fades and the monsters are still there it doesn't actually solve your problem powerful as it is later on you get police flashbang grenades which disintegrate the monsters but these are limited and given to you for some situations where you face an endlessly respawning amount of the creatures so you simply have to clear a path through them and run the flashlight also slows the advance of the creatures leading to a consistent tension we can't possibly have enough time to stop them all before they reach you so you have to spend lots of time whittling them down and then running blind through the foggy night Alan Wake is so simple in its Big Ideas light versus dark creator versus creation mouse - to aim and mouse one to shoot that the intensity of house satisfyingly it all comes together is kind of shocking Alan Wake is by virtue of its media so much better than it ought to be then it would be in a passive medium it's a case study for the power of active storytelling where the person being told the story is a participant in it like Alan Wake you are for the time being living a fictional life in someone else's creation until you save your game and get up from your chair the game's narrative has predestination built into it you don't get to make those decisions they're already written but the players individual choreography of peril and triumph is up to them the systems provide popcorn moments of tension dread release this is structured around the cliches and borrowed motifs of the narrative but Alan Wake is a good horror game within the microcosm of the primary gameplay loop the 30 to 60 seconds of engagement attack and defense that he repeat over and over and over again for the games 20 hours if you've got good tension and true horror there by virtue of the game structure you've probably got it everywhere Alan Wake is distinct also for being one of the only survival horror games I've played that takes place almost entirely outdoors there are a few here in their episodes where there's a large indoor sequence but Alan Wake is all about the dark and the disorientation of the woods and that makes it rather distinct among games claustrophobia is easier to pull off in a digital environment and not all horror games that give up claustrophobia for the vague threat of the outdoors succeeds just look at outlast - but Alan Wake has a couple things in the broad design going for it that really make the outdoor setting work one is the sheer length of the individual levels six in the main campaign and then two DLCs although the twists and turns of the plot are largely predictable the amount of physical space you traverse in a given segment is generally huge often your goal will be in the far distance and after a zigzagging path towards it you're usually diverted by a complication to a completely different goal with a completely new journey each node on the journey is usually somewhat mundane with the majority of storytelling done on the beginning and end of an episode gearing up for a cliffhanger to end the chapter on but the important part of the game more important than the writing of this game about a writer is how the unbroken chain of events snowballs into a real sense of progress and accomplishment by the end of in individual episode you've come a long damn way and survived much setting it in the outdoors makes that sense of scale much more present and powerful the other choice that makes the outdoor settings stand out is the game's avoidance of gore it's deliberately aiming for a less aggressive experience than a Resident Evil style survival horror setting it's going for what Netflix might call the supernatural thriller look and part of that aesthetic is not being quite so in-your-face with the blood and the guts as most games are Alan Wake is more interested in spooking out than grossing out as such the Menace is consistently oppressive and vague murky quality to the air deep fog creeping darkness with the occasional oasis of a single light bulb in a building you can always get a grip on your immediate surroundings even within a labyrinth and a long and winding outdoor ador environment it's harder to grasp where you're going and where you've been the level design makes it basically impossible to actually become lost within the level but because the level takes you on such a wild and serpentine linear journey the feeling of being lost the sensation of isolation and disorientation is preserved because the trees are used to funnel the player and stop them from going certain directions the combat all takes place in what is functionally still close quarters it happens quickly it feels dangerous and it often feels random - like the enemies just wander out of the fog wielding axes on the base of it Alan wakes enemies are very boring they're just small-town North Westerners with bad complexions and worse attitudes and then occasionally rowdy possessed objects and machinery but the way they move and the way they visually behave cloaked in shadow is legitimately creepy and unsettling using the flashlight to keep them at bay long enough to shoot them takes all the focus the plain design of the enemies just doesn't track much when everything is mostly an angry shadow in the dark if there was a lot of blood it would steal focus from what the game actually wants the player to find unsettling about its monsters the darkness is an unstoppable force and it issues forth as many shadowy figures as it likes the fight against it feels increasingly dire and unwinnable it's a pretty small thing to be one man with a single flashlight and that's exactly where Alan Wake wants you small and vulnerable in the Dark Knight the problem I've got with Alan Wake the game comes from the fact that I am perpetually irritated with Alan Wake the writer Alan Wake the Moody whiny schlock writer who yells at his wife for being so presumptuous as to buy him a typewriter when he's got a writer's block Alan's realization that his kind of a jackass is part of his character arc so it's not like the game isn't aware of it but he's just a very dislikeable yuppie protagonist for a long period of time considering his ultimate fate he gets a severe comeuppance for being a jerk but I was unsure for a long time if I was actually willing to root for a guy who kept reminding me of that song about the fella who buys a 350 dollar pair of lampshades and then mopes about it over crabcakes the supporting cast though is mostly pretty good from a wife who's kind of bland but well voice-acted to a small-town cop who's the only reasonable person in the whole script to a comic relief literary agent who looks and acts exactly like the kid with a monkey from speed racer' but older and with more desperation that's Barry and like it or not the game thinks he's a very important foil for Alan sometimes this is true the only time the game actually cracked me up laughing was when Barry did a mocking impression of Alan with a cardboard cutout that was spot-on often though Barry is too comic and steps on the foot of the game's tone he's just a ridiculous person ridiculous things happen too when the game is already suspending disbelief with a low tensile thread to put it another way both Alan and Barry are more archetypes than specific characters Alan is an amalgamation of the kind of writer portrayed in the Stephen King stories and not really so much someone like King himself Barry is a goofy sidekick with a lineage going back at least to Abbott and Costello but probably to the dawn of time the but the plot complication that makes this especially interesting to me though is that Alan is not the only writer in the game many years ago Thomas Zane was a famous writer who also fell under the spell of the thing beneath cauldron Lake it's Zane's cabin where Alan wines have being forced to invent the invent the events of the plot it's Zane's wife whose body the darkness uses to manifest itself around town as the game goes on it talks about how Zane was actually a good writer where Allen is not that he tried to break the curse by writing himself out of the world entirely if he was never a writer then he can't write the story that lets the demon loose but the fact that this leaves a lot of plot holes means that it's bad magic as well and doesn't work for Zane the story must make sense on some level towards the very end of the game Allen finds something that's been kept for him for 80 years it's a page of Zane's manuscript and it describes Allen's growing up the courage to face the game's climax a snippet that plays out exactly as described on the page and the same way that Allen's manuscript pages describing future scenes always play out exactly that way Zane had one last chance to fix things by kicking the football years down the line to someone he could trust one of his own characters Alan himself is Zane's fiction it's why he's so slightly boneheaded why his work is so full of cliches he's a writer's idea of a bad writer it's why Alan is deadpan guy and Barry's punchline guy they're a deliberate trope together that way I love this twist way more than I expected predestination can get a little tiresome but adding this level of complication to it makes the plot feel unpredictable again I have an idea where Alan Wake might be going with his climax in his story but Thomas Zane I'd know nothing about and I don't know what to expect from a story from him the DLC has a snippet of conversation that undermines the idea of Thomas Zane being lead writer on the story but it's not trustworthy enough exposition to totally refute the idea whether or not Thomas or Alan are in control of the narrative however it's themselves that they're ultimately fighting their creativity made manifest and arrayed against them that is causing the problem there's a great segment about halfway through where Alan winds up at a mental wellness retreat for artists unsure if he's been there the entire time having a psychotic episode or if dr. Hartman has some other nefarious agenda in mind of course it's the latter but the game does an awfully good job of making you wonder if it is perhaps the former everything about Alan's journey suggests a kind of egotistical delusion everyone else is swallowed by darkness and you the only champion of life have to save everyone because of your very special gift the gift that just happens to be the core of yourself identity and this self identity gives you permission to run all over town shooting people walking that back for a minute you can see this as a point where it would have been completely possible for the script to veer towards the opinion that it is delusion that wake is a murderer having a breakdown the TEL here is the simple fact that Hartman is one of the only living characters the game familiar with Thomas Zane as soon as you get to the sundial with Zane's name on it you've got your supernatural proof that you're not crazy even if it's all actually happening as far as the game goes it's explicit that the demonic present takes this form in this course of action because that's what scares Allen that people live and die because Alan needs complications for a story and he needs tension is the demon responsible for the deaths in town or is Allen's imagination because he wrote in the specificities if the world spins on Allen's words can we hold him responsible Stephen King himself actually tackled this one too when he no joke wrote himself and a near-death accident he had into the sixth and seventh of his Dark Tower novels his characters meet him and he defends his creative decisions to them it's exactly as awkward as it sounds friend is for me anyway the stupidest damned thing in the entire eighth book of Dark Tower series but the Dark Tower books were always about King on some level anyway with their contemplative and personal forwards and afterwards and his insistence on joining well over half his other fiction to the series in some way large or small so having him weigh in on his own creation within his creation isn't a hundred percent as out of place as it feels on the surface of it I want to condense a little of that segment to illustrate how the creative parts of the self can feel all on their own monstrous a couple terms he uses Cummings faked and serves for a kind of predestination Godin is a more informal word for God and this stands for the forces of entropy chaos and despair anyway on to the quote what happens when you make a story rollin inquired my story for instance it just comes King said his voice has grown faint bemused it blows into me that's the good part and then it comes out when I move my fingers never from the head comes out the navel or somewhere there was an editor that could be wolf alright Maxwell Perkins called him a divine wind chime then later under hypnosis Rowland gets King to expand a little more on that King says I'm gone or possessed bygone I don't know which maybe there's no difference King began to cry his tears were silent and horrible but it's not this I repudiate dis and that should be enough but it's not cause never satisfied greedy old kha that's what she said isn't it what Susan Delgado said before you killed her or I killed her or God killed her greedy old kha how I hated regardless of who killed her I made her say that for I hate it so I do I buck against cause goat and will until the day I go to the clearing at the end of the path and still car comes to me comes from me I translated and made to translate it Cal flows out of my navel like a ribbon I am NOT car I am NOT the ribbon it's just what comes through me and I hate it I hate it - which roland advises King to stop his sniveling here's my point there are few horror stories that are also true horror media is an exercise of the imagination that its end its explicit mandate is to take our ugliest anxieties and most irrational fears and then give them form and function Rosemary's Baby is not to go to horror story because Satanists frequently run HOAs it's good because that ugly fear that the people around you actually hate you is something a lot of us feel but know better than to articulate Hellraiser isn't scary because the guy has pins in his head though it helps it's scary because everyone occasionally wonders if their hedonistic impulses won't eventually leave them off a serious cliff somewhere down the line Alan Wake is a scary game because in the primary gameplay loop it gets the blood pumping in the mind racing but it's a good horror story because I'm pretty sure every creative person eventually wonders if their works are something separate from and perhaps more powerful than they are as an individual person the idea is simple but as a game Alan Wake can have a long and winding execution that still feels worthwhile it's fun for Alan to fight his own imaginary monsters it's satisfying and as the game reaches its climax and then goes beyond it becomes increasingly desperate and disturbing on top of it the out that Alan left himself to actually succeed in the end was that the last page of the manuscript would be left blank in the typewriter until he was able to return with something to thwart the demon he would meanwhile escape live out 99.9% of the manuscript and then break the curse when he returned and finished to the other 0.1% however Alan frequently ruminates on the demands of genre and one of the demands of the horror genre is that everyone can't walk away clean from the ending if he saves his wife if he saves the town saving himself would break genre it would be bad magic for breaking genre so he writes in a swap instead his wife is released from her prison and he steps into the cell and closes the door on himself instead there is an underneath to cauldron lake a mere lake of raw dreaming where the demon lived Alan Wake ends on a fantastic line where having saved everyone else he reflects on this new place he finds himself trapped it's not a lake it's an ocean the word ocean all garbled in the Sinister now that would have been an excellent place to leave the game full stop and since very few people seem to have played the DLC it's the ending that most people are familiar with but the DLCs find Alan lost deeply lost within the dreamscape within himself the rational parts of his mind the parts that maintain the sense of self from the desire to go on are now fully separate from Alan's imagination which has gone completely mad and is now actively trying to kill every part of him where before there was a demonic intermediary now it's Alan versus Allen in a purely psychological battle between manic self annihilation and grounded perseverance I deal with the depression myself and so I was all too familiar with kind of frenzied self-loathing on display in the antagonist Alan who shouts at you from the television as he invents things with which to kill you where the main game was deliberate in hewing - a kind of organized a paperback feel every encounter in the DLC feels improvisational and incomplete the creative self is spinning wildly out of control no edited no filter no objective except to stamp out the pesky rational self as in the DLC that I actually started to care about alum as a character his headless doubt in this despondency in him the whole time and now it's really trying to kill him actually properly he's a universe away from moping in his luxury SUV it just wants to hold on put his mind back together and lord knows I respect that journey the combat in these last two DLCs is completely different in tone as well the creatures aren't frightening anymore it's Alan's mania that's frightening so the game throws more of the creatures at you at once than it ever did before absurd amounts of enemies absurd amounts of bullets an uphill battle that feels increasingly savage and impossible sense doesn't matter anymore just ferocity of emotion and ferocity of imagination and the closer Alan gets to his core self the harder that self fights to keep him down to keep him crazy the pace of the combat encounters and the more arcadey design is indicative of that as long as Alan wants to die he's gonna do it and it's only in negating each wave of his creativity's assault and persisting in the face of it that there's any hope for sanity and a hope for a future for poor Alan Wake I don't know if this is especially Universal but sometimes when I'm dreaming in a lot of detail it'll suddenly shift into something else and I'll actively wonder where the other place went what happened with what I was trying to do or say there sometimes I'll wake up a little bit and then fall back into dreaming over and over again for hours remembering the accumulation of little vignettes different scenes in my mind but feeling no control over going in and out of them I feel exhausted and confused it feels like I'm trapped in the dreaming and then I'm suspicious of the real world when I wake up after feeling that way at least up until the point that my dog bites my face excited that I decided to start moving again I've never seen a medium besides video games expressed that kind of hazy claustrophobic dreamscape in a way that seemed authentic to how it feels in books an ever-shifting environment makes it hard to follow from time to time where your mental image of the action becomes outdated and out of sync with a story if your attention wanders too much in movies it feels all too deliberate inception and Hellraiser 2 both do a pretty excellent job but their dreamscapes help form skeletons of their narrative and neither are as messy and nonsensical as dreamscapes often arm Valon wake DLC really does nailed the feeling of hazy dream it works also in part because it builds on top of the main game you've had time to get to know the normal whole alland and you've had the supernatural experience with him and his long nighttime Odyssey the DLC takes all that and jumbles it up the mechanical pacing and the structure of encounters all mixed up intensified jumbled with familiar places and themes that are mashed into this hodgepodge Alan's mind is scattered to the four winds it seems like it feels like it it really works well and it loops well the game opens with the dream Alan has about a lighthouse in the darkness in the main six episodes you don't hear another word about the lighthouse but as soon as you find your bearings in the dreamscape as soon as you stop wandering aimlessly through memory and fear the lighthouse appears in the horizon and you begin moving towards it just like you did in the very beginning it was explicitly symbolic then and it's explicitly symbolic now but it really does work especially because of how wicked difficult the journey is this time around the last bit before the lighthouse is by far the longest length in between autosave checkpoints in the entire game and you'll likely end up fending off close to three dozen total of the shadowy figures on your way up they just keep coming relentlessly in both waves and based on certain routes you take for more choreographed threads where in the beginning one was enough to totally do you and here you're fighting not just what the demon mustered against you but as many enemies as in Alan's worst nightmares of combat which is right here right now made manifest closing the loop and reaching the lighthouse shut it on the trick and Bend the last scene but instead there's another part an extra part in which you fight shadowy versions of everyone who helped you in the main campaign culminating in Barry yes indeed Barry is the final boss of Alan Wake and he has three stages of attack he's quite dangerous but it's too much the value of fighting a negative shadow version of Barry in terms of plot and character is almost zero and the surprise of him being the final boss is almost all comic surprise I don't think there's a single person out there who found spooky Barry to be remotely spooky the first episode of the DLC ended with a fight against a monster made of televisions and that was great but this is a head scratcher but less frustrating than the softness of the end generally at last Allen is reunited with himself and becomes whole again but he immediately begins a new novel called the return it's a hopeful and triumphant note but so frustratingly neat and convenient it doesn't seem like Allen actually learned much from his experience it feels like he's just super excited to do more flashlight driven shootin now that he's validated himself and put his mind back together which is pretty much exactly the case Alan wakes American nightmare is not exactly a sequel it was a short budget priced budget production follow-up to the original but it doesn't seem canonical at all American Nightmare is hands-down one of the most bizarre official follow-ups I've ever seen to a self-serious original titles American Nightmare II isn't really a horror game at all it's an arcade arena playground for Alan wakes admittedly satisfying combat mechanics it's hard to know where to even start with the game but most people start with the Kassabian CD so I suppose I will to America nightmares only got three levels but you have to do each level three times got in a time loop where you have to do incremental II better at rescuing three women to complete each level you have to match the details of a scene to how it is Ann Allen's manuscript but the details of that scene are always trivial and bizarre the first level a desert diner in motel has its manuscript describe a scene where a nearby oil derrick with ghosts coming out of it don't ask has to a have an open valve leaking oil B have a series of blinking lights on a switchboard and C have a compact disc of mid 2000s band Kasabian playing their hit song clubfoot when this is complete a satellite will be knocked out of orbit and come crashing down on the derrick blowing it up while that song plays in the background even after the CD player is destroyed cuz clubfoot is just that great of a track or some damn thing you do this not once but three times three times in this four hour game you watch a satellite conveniently crashed into the thing you're trying to destroy well one of the most goddamn ridiculous songs blares in the background what's the point of all of this I hear you ask and well I haven't got any more answers than you do Alan wakes America nightmare might either be one of the most singularly nonsensical and bad stories I've ever seen or or it might be a scathing critique of Alan Wake the characters imagination and writing abilities it could legitimately be either I can't tell I've thought about it for hours and I cannot make up my mind whether this game is pulling my leg or having a seizure you see Alan Wake the writers first gig was a Twilight Zone ripoff called Knight Springs episodes of which are tucked into the original games levels they're actually very fun little 90-second horror vignettes I don't usually watch a games television if they put it in but I did watch those they're all better than American Nightmare but American Nightmare is framed as an episode of night Springs Alan explains that by putting the fictional town in Arizona he could come through to real Arizona right except except he's got a domotic double an honest-to-god evil twin on the outside named mr. scratch who's turned out to be quite the serial killer and that guy has him trapped here in the time loop Alan says this is a reworking of an episode he wrote called the champion of light so let's look at this you've got a writer trapped in his own imagination who when given control over writing reality regresses to his most juvenile work and steals from it you've got self-consciously stiff and awkward dialogue and three obvious damsels in distress for Alan Wake the big hero to rescue it all seems like the game is just titled wrong but I suppose Alan wakes narcissistic daydream is altogether not very marketable so the game makes it pretty plain that this is all a figment of wakes imagination and then goes further to suggest that Alan's doing little with his powers but writing low-effort self-serving schlock the only other explanation here is that the entire games writing team scribbled a story on bar napkins while uproariously drunk but it certainly liked to give them all the benefit of the doubt on that one but what do you do with a bargain sequel that puts in an arena fight with what sounds like 80s hair metal playing in the background combat beginning and ending with the song or another musical fight - a song whose main lyrics are I'm a psycho yeah I'm such a psycho or puts in a 60-second video clip of your evil twin dancing around with a kitchen knife - that song and some anonymous motel room there is no active attempt to build any kind of tension or do any kind of scares or even do anything fundamentally clever with Allen the supporting cast feel like they came straight out of a house of the dead arcade cabinet there's no interaction Allen has with them that isn't tedious and weird yet the game even calls attention to the fact that Allen wrote in three separate damsels in distress' for him to say isn't that a little too much even for schlocky Alan Wake and that's the thing it doesn't feel like a nightmare it feels like a daydream where you give yourself a cape and you always come out on top mr. scratch even though he was introduced in the main game feels like a bigger idiot than Alan ever was in his entire character argh it's impossible to believe any of it pointless to become invested in self congratulatory nonsense that is explicit about being self congratulatory nonsense if you doubt that it's nonsense just wait until Alan says good to finally go full-auto when he gets a submachine gun what's more is that each level is an incredibly deliberate arcade style arena with weapons you unlock when you find enough manuscript pages playing through successively more difficult versions of each levels and counters unlocking new crates it's an open world approach that takes away from and renders boring the feeling of oppressive wilderness in the original game it's quite a thing that even though these levels are now finally big enough to become slightly lost in they don't even feel an ounce as confusing your vast as the linear paths of the original game it's all about presentation and tone for making a horror product an American Nightmare is so purposefully cheesy and about presentation and tone in those areas that there isn't a shred of suspense or horror or even anxiety to be found in the whole [ __ ] game in open world Alan Wake is something full of fantastic possibility but this execution is a total waste of that entire stack of potential Alan wakes written himself into a corner at the end of American nightmare Alan's triumphant over his enemy and reunited with his wife in a literal drive-in movie ending the game suggests again that this is all a dream that things might be different for an Alan Wake too but there never was an Alan Wake - and there probably never will be the survival horror genre marches on though and Alan Wake isn't the only game on the market where the imagination is the source of all the trouble where dreams and stories shape the physical world there's also the evil within aesthetically there are almost opposites the evil within has its main character face deep in a pool of blood and viscera before five minutes of the game even pass but the foundation of horror between this and Alan Wake is the same this time is a little more hokey around the edges though an evil corporation hires an evil scientist who hires an even better but way crazier evil scientist's to make a machine that links brains together into a collaborative consciousness evil scientist one betrays the smarter and more dangerous evil scientist - and then uses his brain in a jar as the machines main world Miller detective Sebastian Castellanos his partner Joseph and their trainee Julie Kidman all end up being plugged into the machine without their knowledge of course but the game is so much more interesting if you know the frame the succession of levels as they are feel disconnected in almost random almost like a systematic checking off of horror environments and tropes let's see you start with a chainsaw man in the industrial place you move on to the zombie village you throw in a little Cathedral and graveyard and how about a haunted manor on top but it's all perfectly lucid once you know that this is all going on inside the head of some guy named Ruben Ruben who goes by the theoretically more sinister ruvik now wasn't always evil but he sure did get that way later on and each level is a twisted labyrinthine path through either an aspect of Rubens imaginative fantasies about himself or some of his memories it's valid to have discovering that be part of Sebastian's arc but for the player it only serves to make the game feel exceptionally vague mosted messy but like I said earlier being messy is a huge part of actually building the feeling of being in a dream of being that one on shifting dot on a swirling map of thoughts and memories and that the evil within succeeds there's a lot of phenomenal integration of classic horror tropes with a specific plot points as well like the importance of fire Reuben is scarred from childhood incident where some farmers wronged by his family burned down the barn that he and his sister are playing in his sister died his burns never went away these zombies in the village you fight through at the beginning they aren't actually zombies they're how Reuben sees how he remembers the villagers who killed his sister they're twisted angry broken things made a barbed wire in pain often they'll just get right back up again after you shoot them and tell you light a match and burn them Reuben is afraid of fire he's hateful at the memory of it so you douse his creations in flame and they go down for good his sister's in the nightmare to or his memory of her to Reuben she's a vengeful tangle of limbs and hair she behaves with the inarticulate rage that Reuben feels about her death in this dream Reubens dream she's almost completely indestructible impossibly tough and returns again and again to make you suffer for the injustice 'as of a past that isn't even in your own sure monsters being weak to fire goes back at least to Frankenstein and probably to the dawn of time but it's such a tidy justification for its significance in the game that it really resonates strongly and that's the thing about the evil with him sometimes you think this game knows exactly what it's doing and then it has a giant spider chase you as you flee on a city bus the evil within has a very specific design pedigree one that I'm sorry to say that I'm just not very familiar with as a person who never really had any consoles growing up it's greater is Shinji Mikami who was the brain behind the very first Resident Evil game and the equally classic fourth Resident Evil game those games paired with others like Silent Hill are really the ones that laid down the blueprint for the survival horror genre the way Deus Ex or thief set the template for the immersive sim but Resident Evil is something I've never really played in any iteration at all so while there's an interesting aspect here of a genre pioneer coming back for a modern take on his classic design priorities I'm really only able to take the evil within for what it is right now and what it is absolutely feels like something from an earlier more gameplay centric era it's characters are paper-thin in their development and look absolutely comical on top of it I mean this American every town is called crimson with a case City and it's Police Department's priority squad car contains a grizzled cliche in a trench coat a young woman with tight jeans and a dark secret and a fastidious young detective who were suspenders and loves to a homicide scene they're all preposterous but the game plays it straight and ultimately the cast is immaterial to the strengths of the game although it's helpful that Alan wakes plot and script is so complementary to its gameplay the evil within puts enough thought into the moment-to-moment horror of its levels that it can get along fine without it like Alan Wake it understands that above all a horror game should truly threaten its player that the player must be weaker and smaller than the creatures hunting them the survival mechanics come from scarcity sure you can move forward but only with just enough to make it through an encounter without dying use too many bullets here and they won't be there when you really need them and then your whole face gets ripped off this is standard for the sub-genre but the balance is really especially excellent in this game even if it's got funny anachronism like smashing crates for glittering prizes the evil within completely shoes the boring an indistinct monster design of something like Alan Wake for a kind of horror that provokes Anees because you can't help but look at it especially when it's looking back at you the designs of even the most simple monsters are expressively grotesque and almost every level you'll encounter a larger and often indestructible horror that you've got to run from fight/flight you don't really get to choose you're gonna have to use tons of both having recently played outlast I was interested to see how much better the encounter design was in this game even the sequences where you're as defenseless as an outlast and when your escapes are just as choreographed here the alternation between being able to defend yourself from things close to your size and then being powerless against a twisting and nemenyi of human limbs a couple hallways down the line makes those moments of powerlessness feel much more terror fine the inconsistency of the encounters like throwing to different boss creatures out of you in a single level breeds anxiety and dread even if the specifics of the horror are kind of wrote in generic the structure on which the scares are arrayed is pretty sophisticated Alan Wake used genre tropes in cliches to Telegraph itself to attentive players the evil within uses them more straightforwardly but it also uses them way more aggressively and less immediately predictably and that makes them feel fresh as well I'm a fan of dead space another a very similar third-person survival horror game and these monster designs stack right up there with it but the relentless pace of one disconnected moment of horror after another begins to diminish the power of an individual monster over time even Sebastian seems to agree responding to each fresh hell with an irritated grunt balance is by far the trickiest thing to pull off in a horror game like this where you aren't perpetually defenseless I played through some of the game on its default difficulty before deciding that I'd like to move through the game a bit faster and then bump down too easy and yet the game was still extremely tense Evan narcissists who reviewed the game for Kotaku played at a high difficulty and took 30 hours to finish the game with a total of 140 deaths I took 20 hours and only died 79 times on the easier setting the difference in completion time for the game is kind of astounding I don't doubt for a second that almost that entire extra 10 hours of Evans playthrough was trial and error that ended up being error I explored every nook and cranny of the game world that I cared to and I was actually quite satisfied at the game's length and pacing I died a lot 79 times is a hefty heap of getting dis meld yet I'm pretty sure Evan is overall much sharper and much quicker at the gameplay than I am and he still died nearly twice as many times and is in in his review that factored negatively the extra ten hours of failure states weren't ultimately that complimentary to the experience for him when a game is so punishing that you're reloading your save every 30 to 60 seconds often by that point you're only thinking of the game in terms of objects in a room that you have to avoid or shoot you hyper focus on timing segments and just getting to the next safe point and you lose the value of the context the art the atmosphere when you're stuck on the same hallway for an hour or more that hallway is no longer very horrifying its rote its familiar this game gave me some wonderful scares it made me anxious it gave me those moments of dread and doubt and scrappy triumphs that I want from a survival horror title and I got all that on the setting the game says is for spineless cowards so go figure but this experience vary so widely from person to person you take someone who's got all sorts of fancy reflexes in their thumbs and they probably find the setting that I found compelling to be a total cakewalk for them the higher settings are necessary for creating the right level of tension to make the horror work but the game works either way you ratchet things up to be tighter and more dangerous where age mistake is fatal or you wretched them down so that you spend less time getting things exactly right and more time simply traveling along the experienced horror is different things to different people and a whole number of factors have to come together to produce the right cocktail of emotions for the genre experience by making certain things malleable for differences in the audience the horror becomes more broadly accessible more Universal by fracturing the presentation I've seen people play blood-borne and I've seen people love blood-borne but when I had an opportunity to play it myself I spent four hours on the first level with no progress I eventually had an encyclopedic knowledge of exactly where each enemy was in the first 20 minutes of the game and when they would jump out but I never found the coordination to do anything meaningful with the knowledge for that first 20 minutes I felt attention I fell in love with the atmosphere but blood-borne is not a good horde title for me because horror is not the emotional experience I get from frustration is pure mechanical frustration after four hours with blood-borne I felt the same as I do after four hours trying to get a rust and bolt unstuck from my bus all busted knuckles and boiling rage the evil within 'he's got that same ambition towards extreme severity and on the higher difficulty levels it certainly won't tolerate a single thoughtless step but all those systems still sing their song of violence and fear just as loud and just as lovely if a moment's inattention doesn't produce a game over screen well I'm sure plenty see it as a poor compromise to sacrifice danger for momentum in the pacing it led to me enjoying the game a lot more than other reviewers who became mired by the game's mechanical cruelty and the repetitive hours that that cruelty adds to the experience the game is deliberately vague dreaminess is a major factor in making the repetition of death after death after death after death after death so exhausting you don't know why you were where you just worry you're not sure where you are now and there's nothing to meaningfully indicate where you're going next and this goes on for a long-ass time 20 to 30 hours of an almost completely linear journey if you can just keep the dreamscape rolling along it works but it surely does feel strange to move say immediately from a hugely tense stealth oriented boss fight in the underground maze of fire and rust to suddenly pop out on a rural hillside and have a prolonged gunfight through what seems like a dilapidated english and garden complete with faux roman ruins the hard stop mission complete screens aren't really helpful to combating this because they just emphasize that each hour so of gameplay is in fact disconnected from the previous hour and the next hour no one tells you and tell two-thirds through the game that these are someone else's dreams and memories in this it feels old-school in a negative way it used to be the games were more deliberately broken up this way but it makes less sense here than for a purely action-oriented game think about say duke nukem vs. half-life 1 wants you to be aware of each level is a discrete play space with its own secrets and challenges the other still has those things but avoids mentioning in it at all to preserve immersion it stops the flow of the experience to say hey good job of the game man the evil within doesn't really see itself as an arcade title but it does have more than a few of these arcade elements that are blatantly artificial and call attention to the narrative of player versus game instead of the narrative of protagonist versus plot when it's throw in all those deaths for often arbitrary reasons of mistimed button mashing that feeling of trying to beat the game comes through much stronger than the carefully cultivated feelings of dread and anxiety that makes the horror work in a more general kind of way artificiality is an estimate - horror because it puts what can and can't happen in the smallest of boxes let's revisit the Stephen King quote from the opening of Alan Wake where King said nightmares exist out of logic and there's little fun to be had in explanations they're antithetical to the poetry of fear while games are nothing but logic everything my mathematically follow nothing exists that wasn't programmed in there is no actual spontaneity just the painstakingly crafted illusion of it when you've played an encounter ten times when you've memorized an enemy's attack patterns and no wallets tells well this explains the horror more meticulously than any exposition ever could it's like going through a haunted house so many times you come to find out the guy with the chainsaw his name is Dave and he's a yoga instructor when it isn't Halloween when Laura the sister creature that's all limbs and hair first appeared I was goddamn terrified of it and I stayed terrified all the way up until its final appearance in a boss battle when I became stuck on the battle I died to fully 30 of my 79 deaths right then it's a multi-stage process where you shoot three valves dropped down a level and then go around shooting and cranking more valves as Laura creeps up behind you for a murdering theoretically it seems like you ought to be able to defeat the Laura creature the loading slides say she can be killed and there's an achievement for doing so I spent almost two hours trying to fry the monster and I couldn't so I gave up which is nice even having the option to run away and give up without delivering the killing blow if it did the valves right without dying but by the time that whole experience was over Laura was not remotely horrifying to me I thought of her in terms of logic and navigation and timing reach movement speed we even get the valves right let alone roast the monster I had to begin ignoring the impulses that were tripping me up by impulses of fear I don't want to be near a monster I startled at its approach I run from it or else I turn around and I fire round after round into it to try to put it down before it reaches me here you can't do either you've got to do an environmental puzzle and that takes priority horror is lost when you're managing the situation and not simply reacting to it because the truth is that the player has always had total control over the situation they can try again and again and again and eventually they'll get it even if what they're trying to do is make it difficult or else they just stop and then go about the rest of their lives the truth is that the danger was always artificial and false the better encounters in the game try to make you forget that but the lesser of them end up elevating that boring mood-killer of a fact to the forefront of your mind the wider the levels are the less you feel the artificiality of them if there's just one hallway in just one Dori you run out of ideas of what to do with them pretty quick then it becomes just a matter of get it right or don't but for every level of the evil within that's strictly trial and error there's one with a more open and meandering design in terms of complexity and scale it's hard to beat the third chapter actually is a whole neighborhood of a pastor old town from Reubens past full of traps and too many enemies it's also where one by one you piece together your main arsenal for the rest of the game in a lot of ways it is a tutorial arena meant to learn you a lot of lessons both triumphant and harsh and short order but it's such a tight well consider little map that it really sticks out even though I died there and many times trying to get my bearings and there was always a new approach that I hadn't actually considered yet to try and when I left I had all the skills and I needed to press on and actually beat the game yet going forward there's hardly a level as open as the third many of them leave you with the impression that they're open and quite a few of them have wide open vistas especially toward the end but in terms of creative space the game really piques by its third hour the only real return to that form is in the fantastic 9th chapter where you visit the manor that Reuben grew up and it eventually claimed for himself when he murdered his parents he spelled with a satisfying lima cob backstory that is so endearing lychees vaulted it ought to be narrated by Vincent Price except you know what with him being dead and all it's also got a blood lock that requires you to visit three wings of the manor house in any order you choose occasionally Rubin himself will appear for a time and then all you can do is hide there's a permanent safe point in the foyer but otherwise the whole manner is dark dangerous and at your disposal there had been so few concrete answers up to this point about the goings-on of the plot but it is a real delight to get so much exposition delivered in such a free form and self determined way once the three wings are complete you enter the depths of the house for even more exposition and even greater dangers and it's here you eventually open the door on a field of sunflowers in this farmhouse where Reuben and his sister burned it's a visually striking moment of the game and it's honestly too bad that there aren't more diversions of memory like the sunflower field Reubens given more character development than any other character by a good margin and while he is one hundred percent a serial killer with fantasies of blood and barbed wire there's got to be more in there that's aspirational that's peaceful it would have been thematically powerful to see a struggle between Rubens different impulses in the Environmental Design and would have allowed for a more creative range than the relentlessly moody and gory mindscape of a pure villain there are some fantastic images of unsettling things within the game like a canyon of dull parts and a maze of concrete and viscera with eyeball spotlights roving back and forth but there are more generic destroyed cityscape moments and anonymous industrial tunnels then there are surprising and shocking moments of spectacle which is too bad if this is truly a dream then the sky shouldn't even be a limit any more the later hours of evil within are to put it lightly though a crazy atonal mess this is where the giant spider on the city bus comes into play the least sensical part of the game is this where all the Crimson PD folks find themselves suddenly trying to get back to the beacon mental hospital where everything began after having moved farther and farther away from it through the dreamscape which also changed their position in the city somehow which is also part of the dream question mark the DLC provides some specific and helpful answers but when you're actually playing the main campaign there's a lot that seems like it's flying completely by the seat of its pants so he ended up spending a huge amount of time doing things like avoiding shark creatures in a flooded street or puzzling your way across toppled buildings or running over zombies with the Afra mentioned bus the mechanical focus shifts away farther towards combat innovation and it skips whole chapters without a boss fight it simply doesn't feel scary or oppressive or even unpredictable anymore in these segments and just becomes a sci-fi Channel original movie style cheesefest there for a minute and really there's nothing to be done about it visually it produces some fun moments supernatural apocalypse is pretty dependable for looking cool at the very least stringing of commuter train cars forming a bridge between two collapsed buildings was a hell of a dramatic Vista when you get to it but it's all pretty immaterial to the aesthetic presented so far and immaterial to the major themes the plot and your final confrontation with Rubin takes a wild turn for the ridiculous as soon as you're done running the climax is really emblematic of the best and worst of what the evil within has to offer first you reach the stem machine where everyone's minds are connected it's the machine in a mundane way but it shifts and becomes this tortured brain sculpture that's appeared several times so far Ruben consumes one of the supporting cast and becomes huge you outrun his enormous claws as they rake down the landscape but yet that's fine it's good it's imaginative and it looks spectacular but then you're flung through the air and you catch onto a military Humvee and then use the Humvees machine gun to shoot Reubens hands Ruben shakes you off and in pills you want to spike this is frustrating for Sebastian so grabs a nearby rocket launcher and then fires missiles at the boss till he dies dead serious that's how you do them with rockets and a machine gun so on the one hand you've got this tremendous visual creativity and the limitless potential of a self-consciously imaginary landscape on the other hand you've got an execution rooted in some of the most boring gameplay cliches of them all like the one that says the player only really feels powerful when they're having a pew pew pew explosive blow out action climax simply getting out of stem would have been enough for Sebastian I really didn't need the rocket launchers on top and it is such a wildly ridiculous waste of the premise you're in the limitless mind escape of a brilliant murderer and the way you end up defeating him is with conveniently placed military hardware after all the nonsense the player puts up with it to get here you'd think they'd give you something sincere nah after all the horror in this survival horror title it ends on rote and derivative action tone is a fragile thing in a horror game but the evil with ins DLC shows a mastery of tone that makes this tone-deaf finale especially confusing and frustrating the assignment and the consequence form a two-part side story where you follow Kidman's pass through the main games timeline pretty much from start to finish although it begins and ends and constantly intersects Sebastian's story it's only 4 to 6 hours instead of 20 to 30 and it features almost no gun play saving combat to complement beats in the story and choreographed ambushes in the environment it's mostly all about stealth pretty much dependent on trial and error gameplay that drew so much higher and people's experience of the main game and yet here it works so much better it provides an almost encyclopedic list of answers to the main games lingering questions and uses the idea of a subjective shifting dreamscape more creatively giving Kidman has struggled it's much more influenced by her personal demons than by Rubens a lot of this comes from the fact that Kidman's treated as a whole person with a past in a way that's a lot more comprehensive and what the main game did with sebastian despite being so much shorter sebastian journey was reactive forward moving the environment reflected Rubens world and his history but Kidman's experience in stem is derived in large part from her private memories and fears Kidman works for Mobius you see the shadowy corporation that funded the machine and is largely responsible for the trouble going on but they recruited her young pulling her out of a life of poverty and crime and giving her a job that grew and challenged her natural talents mobius did well by her her being a company woman is one of the late-game revelations in the main campaign but there it slotted into the urban segment and it feels like just one more pointless diversion during that whole uninspired slog here though that seemed that felt devoid of context and setup now actually makes perfect sense much about sebastian this journey does one of the most frustrating holes is that while at the end of the game everyone's hooked up to the machine there is no explanation for when or how that happened here Kidman asks the same question but gets an answer in a remembered conversation with her faceless boss the machine it's wireless everyone was connected to the system while they were in still in the squad car while this still doesn't answer how they got upstairs and into the bathtub things I appreciated at least a token response to this question the DLC also pivots events and characters toward the sequel which builds considerably from the themes and events in this extra content almost moreso than the main game it's peculiar to see so much effort going into content and more importantly context that so few people will play almost across the board for most games of motion on rez it seems like barely more than 10% of players played DLC of achievement racking missed be believed with the evil within on Steam its 5.5 percent of players of the assignment 4.7 percent for the consequence and a paltry 4.4 percent for more tangential executioner level I feel like the evil within is a much more vague and frustrating thing without the DLC the assignment and the consequence for him what's basically a hidden skeleton for the plot of the game the deliberate structure of the experience that seems so meandering and Sebastian's story like Alan wakes DLC they allow the game to intensify and more thoroughly explore its core themes but I wonder at the wisdom of splitting off Kidman's story aside content but it's so critical to the franchise as a whole when I was a lot poorer a few years back I hated BLC because I could never afford it I felt left out and left behind by the content as a critic now I love it a lot more because it often shows alternate takes on the design sensibilities with the core game that put those decisions into sharper relief it's fun for me to think about but I've got to acknowledge that it's more than a little unfair to ask for more money to explain what the hell is going on in a game's story to give it context that's almost necessary to see the big picture of the strange central idea besides stories expansions that's one thing but the evil within just feels flat-out incomplete without its DLC Kidman's version of events is about half revisiting locations from the main campaign from different angles and about half revisiting Kidman's corporate memories of mobius that sounds a little boring but it's done in such a compact fast-paced way that it never stays with anything long enough for it to feel truly boring or stifling the thing is Mobius is absolutely 100% an evil thing to work for and Kidman's done a lot to try to minimize that in her mind she's grateful for the life she's been given one where her talent is recognized but she does know deep down that everything she's doing is corrupt built on predatory lies and greed so her environment reflects that the hallways that were once important to her where she felt important are now rusted in abandoned Kidman walks them alone because the truth is that none of the people she trusted there really had her back so get a few of Reubens monsters in some of his dreams and memories but only to reunite with the other comes in PD fellows for their parts of the main game and the stories where they intersect when Sebastian becomes separated from her again Kidman wanders into some part of the dreamscape that's personal to her it makes me wonder if any part of the name game was Sebastian's doing was the crumbling city his mind was that Sebastian's fear of I don't know too much damn crime in his city manifest as a bus chasing spider hard to say Sebastian was such an on character and a blank slate that it's really hard to tell anything about him with this kind of world building the better you know the characters in control of the dream the more interesting the dream becomes even the way you save the game in the DLC has personality scattered leather couches with a black cat wearing a red ribbon it's such a small thing a cat in a couch yet it acts as an oasis of personal comfort and sanity for Kidman amidst the oppressive chaos just like the combs of light and Allen wake these two DLC are full of touches like that with a few exceptions the monsters and puzzles are all excellent as well as good as the men came sometimes maybe a little better while it's still a completely linear experience with no open approach sequences at all it's much tighter and more considered in its level design than the main game is with its linear sequences familiar mechanics are given new weight like the ax unlike Sebastian Kidman doesn't have the option to stealth kill everything you only get to do it when you have an axe and then once per axe and he can't axe anyone from the front like Sebastian can if there are two enemies and one axe you have to choose and then sneak up from behind it makes the combat much more like a puzzle this way less reactive less fast but more tense because miss timing or misunderstanding the situation inevitably ends in death this difficulty is locked in at survival the middle setting but that's fine with fewer enemies in slower play I was experiencing about the same amount of tension as I did on the lower difficulty of the main game the monsters are another real standout more specifically a spotlight monster that seems to represent the blind devotion that Kidman has to mow bases orders it's got a woman's legs on the bottom a spotlight on the top and nothing in the middle but teeth teeth teeth it's looking for Leslie like Kidman and anything that is not Leslie get even more than once a powerful monster in your path gets completely chomped out of the way for you and there are great climactic sequences where you have to avoid the monsters gaze while waiting for an elevator like the famous Pyramid Head in Silent Hill - grotesquerie is just better when you know it's personal somehow to the person being pursued it's also an opportunity to try out some mechanics that might not work for a longer more drawn out experience like the glowsticks at one point in the consequence Kidman loses her flashlight and has to rely on a bottomless bag of little green chemical players you can only have three flares going at any one time so rather than a cone of light showing you the way you get these weak puddles that can't possibly illuminate the whole area it's a great mix of control and helplessness put them anywhere you want but they're never totally effective the half an hour or so you spend with the chemical flares is fun but the green glow is too neon to consistently work with the game's dour earth tone color scheme it's not a game long kind of deal even as an option but as a shorter more scripted experience the DLC feels free to add or remove items from the player as its own moods and ambitions dick table you'll have the pistol for a little while trapped under a pile of rubble and then it will conveniently run out of bullets right at the correct time for the narrative it'll get the pistol back for a little while in the destroyed city for an every headshot count segment and then later on the game will give you a shotgun but not like the one in Sebastian hat you get a dinky little one-shot but coming right at the end of the DLC as it does it feels like a goddamn cannon after being so powerless for so long the limitations of the one-shot then reload format seems totally workable but they limit you from really approaching eight approaching a combat situation in a frontal way if you can't do the job with a single shot god help you and for a lengthy pre finale bed the enemies just keep coming you never have enough ammunition to stop them you just have to pick your shots and cleave a path through them and escape the game is seriously good at making running away feel exhilarating chasing both Sebastian and Kidman with gigantic and terrifying hoaxes of madness forcing them down long corridors and tight turns with a claws of death right behind them hitman is hunted by her boss or her perception of her boss as a dark and demanding shadow who grows more and more murderously displeased with Kidman's performance in the stem at first it seems like he's the real deal actually communicating with Kidman from the outside but his things go on he starts criticizing more and more personal things about Kidman and growing more and more supernaturally menacing until finally he becomes the largest and strongest of the monsters pursuing you Kidman's fear of failure her fear that she was never good enough her worry that she gave up her soul for the company conquering those fears is essentially the climax Keeneland's climax in boss fight is infinitely better than Sebastian's connected as it is to the more imaginative possibilities of the environment and Kidman's own story arc it feels right it feels truly climactic and it looks amazing it's an abstract and impossible environment with an unsettling monster dead in the center while the evil within is most certainly a horror title it wasn't able to maintain horror consistently across its somewhat bloated length the assignment and the consequence can and do they illustrate why sometimes short stories and vignettes are more frightening than long novels and movies when it comes to horror a smaller shorter meaner piece often cuts deeper than a thing trying to split its thematic attention the final piece of DLC the executioner is a funny bit of content in a lot of ways it combined with the epilogue of the consequence set up Sebastian's wife Myra is a major character for the next game right down to her working for mobius and her large pearl earrings it also humanizes some of the monsters in the main campaign showing that there were actual mines behind some of the largest and most grotesque of the main game's creatures you play here in this VLC as the keeper the fellow with a safe for a head who would come back from the dead again and again in the main campaign the executioner has a completely different mechanical approach than anything in the main game though it's a first-person melee focused combat brawler you visit the manor house from chapter 9 but with new extensions and additions there are other people trapped in here that mobius wants dead and if you succeed in tenderizing the living [ __ ] out of them with your big meat hammer your daughter who is also plugged into the machine won't lose her memories and won't lose her sanity and become lost in the nightmare it subverts the whole survival-horror aspect you're much more powerful than your foes and you can tear a dozen of them apart in just a few bloody seconds you have a somewhat ridiculous upgrade currency to make you even more dangerous you even have a chainsaw and Molotov cocktails by the end of it so where's the horror well what you've got instead is dread you're playing a monster who is increasingly aware of how tuned he is and the final boss fight is actually against yourself and a fit of self annihilation deeper you go the farther away your daughter gets it becomes obvious that Mobius never had any intention of doing anything other than treating you and your daughter like Lab Rats and after two major narrative is about powerless characters who eventually triumph we've got a little short one about a powerful character who can never and will never triumph there's still horror being accomplished through the powerlessness of his position drifting deeper into the nightmare like throwing a knight into a lake yes they're big yes they're strong but you know they're just gonna drown and there's a real melancholy there and despite the evil corporation cheese and then there's the gore of course the evil within is all about gore just heaps and buckets of it with intestines for streamers and skulls for Doug lling every bit of it leverage i leverage is extreme and grotesque imagery for all it's worth and it's worth a lot games are so obviously artificial that they can make gore a huge part of the world and not seem as off-putting or cheap as movies might makeup on humans is hard to make convincing an artistically consistent world of seeping wounds and barbed wire done up in 3d though well that's something that just feels more naturally easier to suspend disbelief for Gore alone can certainly be boring but when you pair it with other tonal priorities that the evil within demonstrates it becomes more than just a red mess you throw in dread throw in despair throw in discomfort and it elevates the viscera into something more memorable even if the main point is still squishing zombies with a hammer I think everyone was caught off guard though by how much better the evil within to does with essentially the same damn setup as the evil within one it contains hands-down some of the best horror imagery in gaming and one of the more satisfying open worlds in an explicitly horror driven title it fully realizes the creative possibilities of the night my dreamscape and doesn't hold back at least not much the setup for how the dreamscape works is slightly different with hundreds of connected minds all living in a stable replica of a sleepy rural town why I'm not entirely sure I suppose so that the people researching the dreamscape have somewhere comparatively normal to cling to in any case rather than Rubin as the core the mind that dictates the dreamscapes prime art form you've got someone more stable and cooperative keeping the homes in laboratories coherent and fixed its drumroll please Sebastian Castellanos his daughter with Myra is her caretaker bump a bomb so when something goes terribly awry inside Union the mine town Judy Kidman shows up at the bar where Sebastian is deepening his cliche and recruits him you've got to go in again Sebastian but this time it's personal I think this is a lot why the game was such a surprise because the set up makes it sound like a straight-to-dvd sequel like we weren't gonna get any more out of the evil within - then we might out of cube - hypercube but it actually feels like though is like starting over fresh evil within one might as well be backstory delivered in a journal from here on out Sebastian Castellanos is treated as an actual human being with cobwebs of grief and regret covering up the dream of family he used to have it's not amazing characterization it's pretty straightforward but it's done with a kind of sympathy and weight that make Sebastian seem like more than a brown trenchcoat mobility system what's important here is the level design and monster design is now going to be even more closely tied to the characters to their self perceptions and their fears the town of Union is falling apart breaking into Island chunks in the dreamscape with the lack of cohesion powerful minds are reshaping the environment to better suit their own whims and egos but all of that is unpredictably interlaced with the town of Union as it was intended neighborhood-wide maps with dozens of scares and curiosities these neighborhood hubs branch off for a few chapters of time into more linear maps that more closely resemble the evil within one's design and sensibilities everything that I hope that Alan wakes American nightmare would be the evil within - actually is it's a horror game that knows how to build and maintain tension across an open world map it's a game about the imagination that's actually imaginative end damn good third person action title on top of it the game is roughly broken up into three parts based on which antagonist is closest to the core Lily all the main villains are completely distinct from one another in aesthetic and in tension but there's some other shapers making contributions to the world as well Sebastian brings in parts of the hospital from last game and memory of his office at the crimson Police Department the offices surprisingly exactly as portrayed in the consequence DLC from last game cementing the relative importance of that content to the franchise and then there's the industrial quarters of the Mobius labs interconnecting the whole neighborhood hubs that wouldn't look to many miles off from Brite Falls the evil within to benefits a lot from being a sequel and getting to cram the whole set up into the first 45 minutes or so it begins with so much more narrative context and momentum than its predecessor which reveled in its teasing vagueness so Sebastian encounters his first nemesis right off the bat a deranged photographer who's taken a shine to using the mutability of the dream world to make art out of murder when he kills folks he freezes the moment of death and a recurring time loop they die over and over the most dramatic spurts and spatter is playing and replaying now consider how useful this is as a design feature in the game as the player creeps around looking for items in secret hallways and all the poking at the seams of the game the players engage in from time to time the McCobb thing that the game wants you to look at is always at its dramatic peak from any angle that the player approaches it never in life could a haunted house do the same trick by making the villain of vain and narcissistic psychopath they've given themselves as game designers license to use wildly baroque flourishes that never would have fit in with angry Rubens world of revenge in the first game the villain here wants you to see what is doing all done up in lights for an adoring audience and whatever Sebastian may think that's certainly why the player is in here in the first place as well I thought Stephano the artist might be way too over-the-top when I saw a preview of the game he's actually just right his self absorption is so absolutely huge that his ego is tearing chunks out of the streets he's a ham totally a ham but the performance is deliberate on that front and he does come off sincerely crazy which is key and making him feeling genuinely menacing if I was actually in Sebastian shoes I would be pretty goddamn wary of this guy but I'm not I'm comfortably at home and so I appreciated the hell out of Stefano showmanship like how Rubens obsession with traps was important to both plot and gameplay stylish cruelty becomes important in these first few chapters the game dealing with Stefano under his hand the town of Union has become a three-ring circus of mutilation and suffering and you've got to hand it to him for being a really good ringmaster the staggering of different types of level design and different rhythms of horror is the backbone of the evil within to success though the first chapter is introductory and expositional the second builds apprehension and throws in some serious Cora Goethe scurries in a linear space that feels familiar and then the third chapter where in the first game it mostly felt open here the third chapter is one of two major hub neighborhoods and it's noticeably the larger of the two it's a map so enormous and so meticulously crafted that it has a lot of salesmanship for the entire rest of the game even as the game narrows and narrows the scope of how open it's truly willing to be later on points of interest are marked by crackling radio signals whose signal gets stronger or farther away as you do it's suitably creepy but more important is that it's inconsistent and how trivial or challenging a thing you'll find and generates a kind of thrilling anxiety and wondering which is which the largest diversions are the ones that form an interesting side plot involving an invincible Wraith which kind of thing that haunts properly haunts Sebastian for most of the game but only ever by relative surprise in these optional areas each time Sebastian uncovers one of the areas that the Wraith is lurking in he'll be pulled into his memories of beacon Asylum from the first game sometimes the form of mazes sometimes puzzle rooms but always with this spectral nemesis on your tail after perhaps half a dozen encounters you evade her and get to the heart of what she was hiding and it's Sebastian Castellanos himself his fear that he never left the asylum his nagging doubt that he never came back to reality in the first place to a part of him beacon was a trauma he could never overcome or run which manifested into a monster with the same definitions I was immediately reminded of Allen finding himself again and that games DLC they're true to that games tone it was a peaceful reconciliation but this is a darker game and Sebastien snuffs that part of himself out with a bullet to the head that part of Sebastien will never find rest so he just sends him on into oblivion I suppose but when Sebastien regains himself he's holding the revolver that he used in the first game and then that becomes a usable weapon from there on out bring back the pinpoint accuracy that that gun enjoyed it's a hell of a side quest not only did it have some theft some heft to its thematic impact but it gives a surprising delightful gameplay reward to the player for pursuing it almost every side quest in the game and there are only a handful of them is well worth pursuing for some sort of twist to reward like this none are as impressive as the Wraith which side quest but there's one as melancholy there's a technician Sykes who's a pretty likeable guy he's in the second major huh neighborhood hub and the last time that you helped him he thinks that he's got away out of stem and asked Sebastian to clear all the nightmare creatures out of a hidden laboratory when he doom he climbs into a tub like the one that Sebastian climbed into to begin with he waves an intrepid goodbye and then he disappears into a soft and quiet fog then the door opens with a recording and some prizes behind it while you're admiring your new shotgun and hoovering up the other valuables in the room a last-minute revelation comes through 75% of the time this tub fails to work and sends you deeper into the Dreaming far below any coherent thought into madness and nothingness there's only a 1 in 4 chance that Sykes didn't just dam himself to an even worse hell than everyone's already in it's that kind of kicker that makes this game so memorable sometimes you get the monsters the screaming the blood sometimes the misery comes in all on tiptoes quiet sharp the alternation between the two and the game's skill and never tipping its hand too early about which kind of horror you're gonna get is surprisingly masterful it's the glue that binds the horror together viscous with anxiety and dread the world is falling apart rapidly with so much violence in fear and so many competing minds and that growing instability becomes a source of dread in itself as the game rolls along Stefano gets sidelined relatively early on in the plot it seems deeper in because the bulk of the open-world freeform content comes before his death but in terms of the game's actual narrative attention his short and fast arcus villain works greatly to his benefit he keeps topping himself in terms of McCobb spectacle so you've got his ever watchful cameras eye dominated the skyline you've got his murder cube compositions and then you see the obscura it's a truly unsettling chimera of model and photographer literally sewn up together and it cut into a kind of flesh crab of agonized and angry skin there's a little similarity to the spotlight creature from last games DLC but the way it moves is creepy and distinct in its own way and it is uniquely awful all on its own merits once you've gotten over the sights and worse maybe the sounds of the thing you get a tremendous spectacle from Stefano Stefano gives you a theater full of exploding heads time to go off at the exact same moment it is a Rose Garden of death kind of crazy kind of impressive of course it's also where Stefano gets his cheesiest line about entering his crimson period of his craft so he kind of peeks here in terms of both spectacle and believability as a character and then the boss fight follows immediately afterwards no lingering no going further up the scale of ridiculousness than it's appropriate for him to go and then the game does a great little bit of three-card Monte with the story to follow you thought Sebastian's daughter with with Stefano but ho here's Myra monstrous and wrathful version of Myra come to collector the zombies are actually all her fault anything with a crazy red eyes and white goop is a monster from her particular domain of nightmares so there's cup number two but then the very next chapter puts mire and Lily far out of reach and introduces yet another villain manipulator behind the scenes whose presence had so far only been hinted at father Theodore now Theodore is a manipulator in a very direct sense he preys on other other people's insecurities and draws from them fashioning visions and environments designed to hit people where they're most vulnerable he's quite believable in the role maybe just as visually over the tapa Stefano but who wouldn't indulge a bit if he could look anyway you pleased to imagine yourself everyone knew him as a kind of good-natured sort before everything went south he had kept this part of himself relatively hidden and he kept it hidden from sebastian until now as well but at this point in the game there's no one around to tell him otherwise so Theodore has created a pocket world of fire and stone medieval torture and medieval penitence it's actually kind of amazing to see a cult leader type of character this way not as they are but and the self delusion of who they think they are they're in the refuge of dreams they're powerful and dangerous people even if they're weak and small in real life father Theodore uses Sebastian's worry and Sebastian's guilt as actual weapons against him even if Sebastian knows that Lili is around here somewhere he still has years of thinking that he let her die in a fire weighing him down so that guilt becomes real fire and the fire burns again it's not like this is amazing or revolutionary writing but the presentation is so colourful and the central idea allows for such creative visual representations of Airy themes that it seems novel anyway unfortunately the only open world segment and father Theodore is part of the game is a rehash of the neighborhood you met Sikes in but all set on fire and even worse off it's strange that they chose only to use the Union parts of the dream world in a free-form wait like that there's no reason why they can't have a neighborhood of cinders for Theodore's segments besides the ever pesky concerns of you know time and money and development but still Theodore is a villain who could have done with at least two more hours of focus whose god complex is interesting enough that I wanted much more of his particularly awful definition of heaven but things go so quick once they get going and Theo gets relatively shorted on the one hand the pacing of his game compared to the last is just insanely fast and that's welcomed by this point in the last game you just be getting your first concrete answers here you're two-thirds done already Theo's religion also seems to be part of a larger recurring motif that the franchise hasn't really done much with yet this strange symbol that you see all over theodora's domain was also painted on the walls of the beacon Asylum and it's the symbol and the cult that prompted Kidman's parents to essentially abandon her as revealed in a dlc so there's some kind of mystery there they might find some interesting payoff later in the series but here the meaning of that particular symbol is dormant second to theodora's cult of personality his boss fight reminded me a lot of the level in Dead Space 2 where you revisit the issue moral bloodstains turned neon purple by the investigative chemicals here you return to last game as well to fight three major bosses in rapid succession but here you triumph in a way that you never did in the first game the boss fight is actually deliberately explicitly therapeutic for Sebastian as a character he's done feeling guilty he's done feeling lost he's here for his goddamn daughter and he's not gonna take it no [ __ ] monsters not no more Sebastian always one of this catharsis and now thanks to Fyodor he's actually getting it it's a real delight helping him out with a monster smashing because this is a moment that subverts the horror into a positive moment of triumphant badassery like when ripley appears in the power loader to battle the Queen at the end of aliens the hunted decides to stop running and then the hunter wonders if it hasn't made a terrible mistake which it has at that particular sort of story beat it's a really wonderful tone shift and Donna the exact right moment to pivot to a whole new set of emotions that the climax wants to get into father Theodore was the last true monster the last psychopath but myra is the last antagonist her fierce overwhelming desire to protect Lily and keep Lily safe will trap them in the dream world forever and an illusion of family suspended in a dying world like choosing to live in a snow globe Sebastian wants them all to come out to try to be a family again on the outside where nothing can be controlled like the Dreaming can be controlled and so in the evil within to Spinal hours the game becomes the most high budget spectacular domestic dispute in the history of the medium what makes it work so well is that Sebastian is not portrayed as being hateful or fearful towards Myra and although Myra has a bit of monstrousness in her now for sure the Sebastian doesn't move towards the final confrontation as if a monster is necessarily what he'll find there throughout the game Mayra actually offers Sebastian little snippets of domestic dreaming and even explicitly forgives him for some of the things he's felt that he couldn't forgive about himself this is shuffled into the deck with all the other disparate parts of the dreamscape all the horror and all the dread and appearing there in these moments of calm didn't really feel out of place but read the environment now Theodore sent Sebastian into a dark pit of himself full of monsters in haze Sebastian's worst fears of what he's like on the inside empty except for the fight but here everything is a frozen plain with nothing but the house they want shared together as a normal family far up the hillside this is the place Mayra made for herself cold remote unchanging stagnant Sebastian's interference presents more questions than Mayra cares to answer stay here safe forever that was the plan there was no second option to the plan so they fight it out with Mayra transforming into a gross and colossal version of herself I was getting ready to feel like this was kind of a dumb idea for a boss fight until it made me quite unexpectedly very sad my my parents divorce was about as bitter drawn-out and acrimonious as it got and I remember the way they talked about each other the angry distortions they'd use to try to poison my opinion of the other one it's not actually so unusual for parents to speak this way of each other to make monsters of each other it's just uncommon for those monsters to fight with pistols and machine guns in the middle of the snow imagination and perception are powerful and dangerous things that's why a horror media plays around with them so much makes real and present the kind of awful things we think or feel or say if my dad was the kind of person my mother described he would also be a hundred foot tall slab of withered meat and open sores inarticulately roaring and pounding the earth if my mother was the kind of person that my dad experienced her as she would also be a blind wrathful creature with no blood and no heart not on the inside but blank unreadable nothing but of course they were neither of those things they were just regular people who couldn't stand the sight of one another yet in teasing out the monstrousness of these feelings by giving them form by giving them weaknesses in solutions horror lets us confront and consider them in ways we might not as just a vague feeling there are no monsters in the evil within the universe that are not imaginary but that does nothing to stop them from being dangerous so the feeling at the end here at the final boss is a fine tightrope between sentiment and grotesquerie but I've got to admit I feel like they're in balance here in the drain world the grotesquerie is representative of the sentiment and that's a thing that would struggle to work as well in a medium that didn't have such wild possibilities of presentation and interaction if anything with the game is unbalanced it's that the evil within - is excessively back-heavy with its story the fight with Myra and the compassionate resolution that follows it was the climax and the conclusion that I was really looking for but the game wants to tie up the entire fate of the Mobius corporation before winding down entirely and that ends up being a bridge too far for the games already heavily downshifted tone it's not anything so ridiculous as the final boss fight of the first game not exactly but it is a whole extra 45 minutes of cheesy cutscenes in espionage action as you suddenly begin switching perspectives between sebastian and the dream and Kidman in the real world so at this point the game is decidedly just done being scary and once Mobius out of the way is a future plot point which is honestly admirable if there's any one element of the franchise holding it back it's the shadowy suits with dark sunglasses aspect with Kidman's DLC had worked because it was personal to her but in a general kind of way Mobius is the most cliche Ihnen crong gross element of the story honestly I'm surprised at this part that this is even part of the main campaign of evil within - and not split off into DLC itself swapping between Sebastian finally being reunited with his daughter and Kidman having a hakama shootout with a with the other company men seems about as cheap as it is unexpected the whole sequence just can't escape how workman like it is how obvious it is that they're just tearing down the final thing that stands between Sebastian and a happy ending for the game but again ultimately I'm glad of it because it is a positive step for the franchise by the game's description Mobius has agents at all levels of power and influence the world over a secret private army that knows no boundaries how does that help franchise about individual anxieties and self-delusions taking form and substance I mean it doesn't it's just a convenient way to explain the secret brain linking machines you know being a thing so Myra stays behind in the dream world and becomes the core using her knowledge from working with Mobius to fry the microchips in everyone's head and kill every member of Mobius the world over simultaneously and immediately it's pretty tidy meanwhile Kidman means to extract Sebastian and Lily before they're caught in the same collapse that Myra will be and yeah there's some good momentum and some tension as we see all three of these characters move and build toward the finale but it's all soundtrack driven momentum the feeling comes mostly from editing and the moments where the game chooses to swap perspectives the game as we knew it had been over for a while by the time the credits roll the game even gives Sebastian a real happy ending where he gets to literally ride off into the sunset with his daughter I never cared for Lily's character design she looks like she escaped from a Precious Moments greeting card but I'm rooting for Sebastian he's a person to me now not a trenchcoat and I'm glad he found true self resolution in the stem this go-around I mean hey this time it really was personal of course there's a cliffhanger suggesting old Rubin might not be done and to look out for the evil within three and yet I liked it this way this actually does feel like a transitional work elevating what worked best about the first game and paving the way for a potential third game to express the same themes with even more effectiveness and intensity without some of the baggage of the first two games more melodramatic impulses and why not there is no end to the diversity in depth of human emotion no ceiling that the imagination will ever slam fruitlessly against the mind is a beautiful thing certainly but it is terrible too like those old maps of the ocean we simply draw the wave as we see on the surface and say here there be monsters thanks for watching I wanted to take a moment and thank my name all the people who are currently donating $10 a month or more to support me on patreon there's a lot of people who are donating less than that and I'm grateful to you too but only really got time to list the people who are donating $10 month or more because that's particularly helpful and thank you people like Cassie Ranjha Bay come B hat yalla Lazlo Gabriel Nicholas Christian Zechariah inson Eddie Burton so a sheik will Hooten Milkyway resident Nick Cole Hamilton Jake Brennan Daniel Pennypacker Dennis Clark Eli Eli Berg mass Julius Dean World War two freak Alexander Lyster coumarin lesion Alex for Ghana Justin Hughes Igor Babiak Brian Hill nobody Thunder O'Brien Andrew Steele Jared Meyer Andrea's Larsen Kevin Chou Anthony Bardell Peter flink Dana stupid care Laura's Ingvar Anderson Zach corpse teen Matthew Sutton Jesse Wilkinson Diller Alexander Oh food Oh Chris Wright Peter Radetzky sigh Hercules Johnson and ray-ray Gagarin Sean Webber Aidan ak-47 Tim moon Scott Miller Kim oh hi Conan Medal of Connor Mathias Hillstrand Joel Warren Tim darning ties Arabic Arian Jeffrey Knudsen Mike downing Devin Vernon Kim Winston Oscar stingin Bert sanghun Burke Tom painter which Luke Murphy will Dobbins Sebastian Perrone II will Wargrave Jack Harvey Carol Henderson dice prophet William Davis Jonas Martinson Jeannette and Robert Glover will Edwards Kyle Hooton Jack Dawson Alex Salado Karl Clark Stephen Garrett day Jason T Barnes Preston Allen clay Harrington Laurie Ramey Jacob Robertson Andrew Schiphol Michael at well pal Hooton Carl arc Matthew Maxwell Newton Steven podium Devin Fitzpatrick Steven primo Balder Carlsen Pascal Moray Jack Dawson Alec salado red car Phillip coffee hurricane Coleman Trivium art history Cameron booth Cheryl devera the soul game Brian Van Dyke Micah Shalom kesselmann uh Nathaniel garish Daniel mower miry tile rush ray Sawyer sharif Kazemi artem ser now rich Stowers sorcerer Dave Colby Howard Joris Middendorf Andrew tap Caleb Guthrie Luke Fowler niekvanson John Vickers Fergus Foley Carla listen Eric Jepsen John Paul harsh Brendon boat Gallic Dewey Christian Sean NK jemisin Josh Marcus Greg Greg Mira's reference aired Alex B Nicholas at cocytus Andy Mitchell Brad Smith beast X Cohen Simon nearfall Wesley am Harley McAvoy Matthew Cassady free morpheme Argos Swift Mark Phillips Clayton Divya Faust Rader a coy abdul-rahman alum see Daniel appearing Aurelien rynek Ricard Olson Martin Karsten Chris larkey Matthew Mason massive liar Brian Puckerman Spiro cetera space and goostin Ashley rain and rave Adela anxiety cat lupus younger boys oten kcp Olli gumdrops Rob Tackett Thomas witty agonal bruh Peter Pan here I cannot fly Brett Gelman is Ambar booty Nathan Janssen language ow Thomas keys Tim Marsh Antonio Joseph Duvalier the third Alexander soon dan dan pop Cameron Jackson Las Olas Tyler Dow Z Michael Conan Dirk corporal needles buck from ER Josh Evan Hill David Carlson q ax Morton scanning rowan king zach B Jordan Clive Brennan Ritchie Shan Hsiung young scorpion strike Anthony : too young creme riche let's Lucas coal coke on my coal soon invader no afford Durr corporal calling short Adrienne komal a Avery white Andrew boys oh no Michael Lillard Oh drew Morgan mall Zach see Lindsay and Mark Phillips thank you all so much I really appreciate it and I appreciate your patience on this video as well

Channel: Noah Caldwell-Gervais

Views: 275,116

Keywords: Alan Wake, American Nightmare, The Evil Within, The Evil Within 2, The Assignment, The Consequnce, The Executioner, Review, Critique, Retrospective, Comparison

Id: Jjfm4ths2J0

Length: 97min 43sec (5863 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 01 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/TripleAych]

I really liked his bit on the difficulty levels.

When Amnesia removed weapons from the horror protagonist, the point was streamline the experience rather than remove ability to fight your fears. There was a small horror game in an asylum that gave you a gun but no real enemies. The joke on the player was showing in the end how many bullets you had left in the game, and taking away points for each bullet shot. You are meant to use the gun as means to express fear, not to beat the monster.

[u/vikingzx]

I'll have to find time to watch the whole video later, as I have an appointment to get to now, but ...

One thing I don't know if he brings up, but really codified the differences between Alan Wake and The Evil Within for me is how one gets scarier as things go on, while the other gets less scary.

In Alan Wake everything builds. You're in the real world, but the real world is slowly being infected by the dark presence. It starts simple--ground rumbling, strange fogs--but then escalates to trees being ripped from the ground and bridges twisting apart. It's otherworldly and constantly getting worse.

The Evil Within does the opposite, starting out with the earth-ripping and then gradually breaking things down. The moment I learned that the game was all in your head, all sense of tension vanished. The monsters are imaginary, the destruction and weirdness just dreams inside the mind being played inside the mind.

Alan Wake's nightmares are Lovecraftian and spilling into the real world, warping it more and more, which made the stakes and fear feel much higher, personally.

[u/agentCAPS]

I was just wondering the other day what happened to him. I looked around on his Patreon and Twitter to make sure he wasn't dead. I will have to watch this soon!