The Evil Within (PlayStation 4) review "Resident Hill"

Time and again, you peer into the challenges and gauntlets ahead of you in The Evil Within, hoping the game will give assistance. You spot two boxes of ammo and ecstatically rush toward them. A message pops up, letting you know you're now exactly two handgun bullets and grenade richer. Oh, and there's a crafting item next to them, which you use to build arrows. One crafting item. Your arrows typically require two or more, so you didn't even acquire enough to create a single projectile. “Good luck!” the game says, as you take inventory of the absolute horde beyond the item dump, piecing together exactly how you're going to survive. You take what little was offered, and you know what? You make it work. Over and over and over and over...

Evil is not a gracious title by any means. It really emphasizes the “survival” in survival-horror without providing you many opportunities to run away and forgo combat. Here, you often must fight due to constant gating and/or huge hordes of foes. Worse, enemies left alive become hindrances when bigger, beefier enemies eventually appear.

So what do you do to survive, then? You're up against whole droves of zombie-like creatures and horrible humanoid mutations. You watch their behaviors and you form strategies to deal with them in ways that mitigate item loss. Thankfully, most segments don't see the opposition charge right at you. They're typically unaware of your presence, patrolling locales or hiding behind corners. This gives you ample time and space to traipse up to one and plunge your knife right into its skull, finishing it off for good.



Sometimes, though,they spot you regardless of your caution, and the undead come running in droves. That's when you must consider which items would best serve your purposes. Could you stick with your handgun, for which you most frequently obtain bullets? If so, then your aim had better be true. Headshots are an absolute must if you're going down this route, otherwise you're going to squander munitions and possibly paint yourself into a corner. Maybe you could get away with using the shotgun, but doing so might exhaust your supply or put you in a position where you won't have more powerful blasts to deal with mini-bosses or full bosses.

Still, you have other options. You can craft explosive arrows or utilize one of your few grenades. Or hell, you receive matches often while exploring. The whole purpose of these items is to ignite bodies lying on the ground. Doing so next to other adversaries also sets them ablaze, immediately killing them and saving you additional bullets. On top of that, some of your targets pretend to be dead throughout each level, so you occasionally hedge your bet on whether the next body you see is a cadaver or a trap.

It gets better. You also earn experience in the form of “green gel.” You take this stuff to an otherworldly asylum you access through broken mirrors found throughout the campaign, which serves as safe houses. You save your progress here, and also enter a room where a device takes your gel and turns it into permanent passive bonuses. In this way, you increase your clip size, your maximum inventory for each item, and even some of your physical abilities. Your hit points build, your aim improves, and your stamina drains more slowly.



By now you're probably scratching your head and thinking about zombies and mirrors that take you to asylums and wondering what the hell I'm jabbering about. Evil comes packed with surreal experiences, almost like you're muddling through a nightmare. If you've ever watched old Italian horror movies from the '70s and '80s like “Cemetery Man” or “City of the Living Dead,” then you've seen narratives like this one. You take the role of a detective who investigates a violent occurrence at a mental hospital in his town. There, you find all the patients and staff murdered, and a beefy juggernaut knocks you out and drags you off.

The early outs put you through so much strange material that you get confused easily. Somehow, the asylum has now become a maze of murderous traps, through which you're chased by a Leatherface knockoff. After sliding past saw blades and sneaking past not-Leatherface, you leave the premises and meet up with your entourage to drive back into town. Except the the buildings and the town as a whole shifts, crumbling in some areas and rearranging itself in others. Just as you think you're beginning to grasp the madness before you, your ride crashes and now you're in a countryside village that looks like something from the 19th Century.

You'd think that progress from here would at least try to be logical, but sometimes you go from the innards of a building to end up in a cave. Another point, you inexplicably battle through castles that lead to city sewers. Again, this title is rife with dream-like worlds, and for a good reason that I'm not going to spoil here.



That's half of the game's scare factor: you don't know what's going to come next. Sure, zombies are so overdone that their presence here will probably not faze you, but they're not what drives your fears in this quest. It's the illogical flow of the campaign and the unpredictable moments you face. Sometimes, you hit stealth segments. Others, you find yourself in a labyrinth of tables and trip wire-based traps that either explode or summon killing spikes out of the ground. Meanwhile, little robotic saw blades patrol the territory, looking to sink their teeth into your ankles. Thankfully, there are ways to disarm both, as long as you're careful...

You never know where you're going to wind up, and you never know if you're going to have enough resources to deal with that's ahead of you. The constant uncertainty plants a seed of fright and worry in the back of your head, because you absolutely want to see this adventure through. Granted, at times you feel like whole sections of the campaign exist only to pad out its length, but even still, its challenge factor engages you. It dares you to try and finish the affair without losing your mind or your patience, and you either rise to the occasion or move on to a less intense title.

And you give it your damnedest. You explore thoroughly, hoping to find anything that can be of use to you, locating special keys that allow you to open supply lockers in the safe house, and formulating ways to simply live and feel like you're not totally going to get overwhelmed later on. In my case, my supplies typically stayed at a reasonable level until the very end of the quest, where I had to battle numerous waves of foes. I will say this: Evil definitely knows how to go out with a bang, and it does so through its varied last chapter and an explosive and memorable final boss encounter.

So yes, despite all its apparent unfairness, I love The Evil Within. It's precisely what a survival-horror game should be: a difficult journey into a maddening world filled with constant uncertainty and nightmarish concepts. If Resident Evil and Silent Hill had a child, this would be it. And they should be proud parents...

Community review by JoeTheDestroyer (October 08, 2025) Rumor has it that Joe is not actually a man, but a machine that likes video games, horror movies, and long walks on the beach. His/Its first contribution to HonestGamers was a review of Breath of Fire III.