The Evil Within

★★★⯪☆ (3.5/5)

"A delicious fake."

As I sit here awash in (yet another) important property in my life's fixation on the Clair de Lune, I can't help but ruminate on my relationship to Shinji Mikami's work.

When I was a preteen, my father took me to one of his many training conferences in a dazzling wooden lodge in the forest somewhere in the midwest. We ate caribou coffee granola bars and listened to music in the car on the way. He was there to teach curriculum urging police officers to use skills that deescalated conflicts and use non-lethal force, particularly with mentally ill populations. Sebastian Castellanos could learn a thing or two from my dad.

At the time, I couldn't understand the messy nuances of this work, of course and instead found myself killing time in the lodge cafeteria with scratched silver Nintendo DS with it's floppy, barely-connected top screen that never left my side. The walls were made of thick whole-tree trunks and large windows overlooking the Appalachian forests around me.

I can't recall what I was playing at the time, likely involving Super Mario's cast of colorful friends and a bright sugary-sweet atmosphere. I couldn't help but to notice a group of four ambiguously older kids at a nearby table. They were the only other people in the hall - vaguely older in such a way that only children can be ignorant of. Anywhere between 16 and 23. Their loud laughter rang through the echoey cafeteria, as did the crackling sound of music emanating from a Nintendo DS of their very own.

They were playing Keiichi Yano's take on a western OSU-style rhythm game - "Elite Beat Agents." It invited the player to tap and slide the stylus along the DS's bottom screen in time with real popular music. At some point I addressed the group, or they addressed me. I can recollect the memory of holding their DS in my hands and playing Elite Beat Agents for the first time - Avril Lavigne's "sk8ter boi" blaring loudly through it's crunchy speakers. I was beside myself with nervous excitement.

We began to discuss other games we had played. I, of course, didn't know any of them. At one point, one of the teens turned to me - a genuine look of anguish on his face, and proclaimed "You HAVEN'T played Resident Evil 4?!"

So we went, perhaps as a cruel joke to the kid playing Mario alone in the cafeteria, or maybe as a sincere gesture in our shared hobby, back to their room down garish green carpets. Antique mirrors and mounted animals lined the halls. I sat on the bed in a room that it seemed the four of them shared, clothes and food wrappers were strewn about. I nervously looked across the way at the CRT sitting on the floor plugged into a Nintendo Wii. In it was Shinji Mikami's lauded masterpiece - and shockingly good Wii port of - Resident Evil 4. It wasn't the fear of the mature horror game that rushed through my veins, it was the fear of not looking cool in front of these older skater and stoner types.

There, I got my first glimpse of Leon Kennedy. And of digital blood. The teens blasted zombies apart with a wii remote, offering for me to try. They slayed monster after monster, but the creeping fear of them never left my body.

Years later I had played Shinji Mikami's Resident Evil 4 more times than I could count through on an old laptop that would get hot enough to burn my skin. I played it on car-trips and on vacations. I played it next to my sleeping girlfriend. I played it in my room late at night. And in 2014, when Matt & Patt of Youtube channel "Two Best Friends Play" turned me onto "The Evil Within" the familiar excitement of seeing Leon Kennedy suplex a zombie in that musty cabin filled my veins.

I did not grasp at the time who Shinji Mikami was or what made a "spiritual successor." I had yet to conceive of games complexly as works of many multi-talented teams of artists creating with intention.

Instead, I saw all of the things I loved about Resident Evil 4 cranked up to one million. Detective Sebastian Castellanos was no Leon Kennedy, but he moved twice as fast and ducked around bloody monsters of every variety. The Evil Within quickly became one of the first Steam games I purchased with my own money. I leveled up the revolver to the maximum power and popped zombie heads in a single carefully placed shot. I remembered the set pieces and the bosses - the Pyramid-heads style "locker" head, a "the ring"-style black-haired harpy, and many a gelatinous skin monster.

I don't think the game ever "scared" me, but it's dance of always being a bullet too short and a pace too close to the next freak left me filled with adrenaline start to finish.

Replaying it a decade later, the patina has worn. There are many too-long cinematic death animations, an overemphasis on action set pieces, and the game overstays its welcome by a couple hours. Pacing issues make it feel as if it's running out of steam by the end.

But in a lot more places, Tango Gameworks' "The Evil Within" was ahead of it's time for the trends of video games to come - for better or for worse. It released during a truly dire decline of the survival horror genre /five years/ before Resident Evil 2's remake would reinvigorate it for modern audiences. All of the tricks that make Resident Evil 2: Remake work are lain bear here. The same dance of combat and resource management, engagement and stealth, always being one foot behind your digital enemy. The Evil Within does it all a half-decade earlier. It does so with good a measure of the other markers of modern survival horror as well - pacing issues, an over reliance on action set pieces, rail shooting sections, elevators - you name it!

After all, The Evil Within was Shinji Mikami copying his own homework in Resident Evil 4. Then, the rest of the industry copied his copy of his homework - and so on. It's echoes can still be felt today, in the Silent Hill 2 and Resident Evil 4 remakes, in Alan Wake 2, and other lauded "genre-defining" survival horror titles. Dare I say - as I write this - we are currently experiencing a bit of a survival horror renaissance, and I can't help but feel it's at least in part owed to The Evil Within.

I was extremely disheartened to learn just four months ago as of writing this that Microsoft has shuttered Tango Gameworks following the release of one of 2023's most successful mid-budget games, Hi Fi Rush. I remember seething reading an interview just weeks after shuttering them with a Microsoft exec who claimed they "needed more games like Hi Fi Rush." I remember reading that more Evil Within content was actively being developed at the time of their closure. Since, Tango Gameworks was bought by another company, but Microsoft retained the right to The Evil Within, and it's unclear if we'll ever see what they were making.

For me, it may be the faint smell of caribou coffee and velvet-y green carpets, but Sebastian Castellanos, his partners Joesph and Kidman, and escaped-insane-asylum-patient Leslie all have a place in the heart of classic survival-horror cannon for me; it's flaws and boons hand in hand. It's generic asylums and butchers and blood pools. It's too-long too-janky set pieces. It's wooden characters and it's nonsensical plot. I don't know what else to say, man, I love this game.