The Evil Within Hands-on E3 Preview

“There’s something wrong with this place,” the trailer’s narrator tells us, and that feels like as concise a description as any of The Evil Within. The game is the latest work of Shinji Mikami, the (twistedly) creative mind behind the Resident Evil series, and seeks to take survival horror back to its roots: scarce resources, scarcer safety and a meticulous cultivation of player paranoia.

The game’s E3 trailer feels like a nightmarish sort of fever dream, and sets the game’s tone. The main character Sebastian stands in an idyllic field of sunflowers, only for the trailer to jump to a shot of him being beheaded by a guillotine; the video cuts away mere milliseconds before its gory conclusion. The message is clear: this twisting, hallucinatory landscape is not to be trusted, only survived.

Survival, in its most brutal sense, is at the core of The Evil Within. Going into the hands-on demo, Bethesda’s staff warns us that bullets will be scarce, headshots may not always equal kill shots, and some enemies should be burned to be certain. The world of Evil Within may be divorced from reality, but not its own internal logic. Enemies are dangerous, but not omnipotent, and clever players can usually find a way to avoid them—or at least minimise their danger.

However, survival constantly feels tenuous at best. Exploring a decaying farmhouse, Sebastian’s light is a double-edged sword as I hunt for supplies, constantly aware of the sounds of breathing and shuffling from down the hall—or is it just outside the door? I can’t tell, and the wide-open eye icon lets me know Sebastian is being watched. Or maybe he just thinks he is, I wonder as I wait for several breathless seconds under a bed, a position that keeps Sebastian hidden while leaving him unable to escape, should he be discovered.

Nothing happens, but I decide to continue exploring under the cover of darkness just to be safe. After an ill-fated encounter with a few of the game’s inhabitants early on, I made the decision to avoid open conflict. The game’s combat system feels unwieldy—perhaps intentionally so—with its third-person viewpoint, and enemies seem alarmingly ready to attack me with the spikes impaling their skulls, jamming them into what I’m sure are at least three of Sebastian’s arteries. True to its genre, the entire affair is messy and dangerous, and not something that’s worth repeating more than necessary.

In stark contrast to its macabre visuals, The Evil Within seems designed to almost actively discourage guns-blazing tactics—which is more likely to end up with Sebastian dead than whatever he was shooting at. Combat feels risky, which makes it all the more compelling when it’s the only option left. And there are definite points where the only solution is a headshot and a book of matches. An early encounter with a grisly looking surgeon, for example, forces me into uncomfortably close-quarters combat that costs far too many bullets on my part. I burn the man’s body afterwards to be safe; while matches are nearly as hard to find as ammo, I’d rather be cautious than stingy.

It’s this almost compulsive attention to realism in a decidedly surrealist environment that gives The Evil Within its distinctive flare. The pretentious promise to “take survival horror back to its roots” feels considerably less so when you’re hidden in a wardrobe with one bullet and a hunting knife hoping that thing in the halls didn’t see which way you went. And really, survival feels like the main objective. The game is careful to strip away the effectiveness of a player’s usual source of agency, their weapon, and the result is a creeping anxiety that builds into deliciously tense moments of fight-or-flight instinct.

While The Evil Within unsurprisingly has its debts to Resident Evil in terms of visuals and mechanics, Tango Gamework’s latest project seems to build on its predecessor, not copy it. It’s a promising introduction for Bethesda into the world of survival horror as well, and the sort of game that promises to make a few waves when it lands on October 24th this year for new and previous gen consoles and the PC.