Game Review--The Evil Within 2 (PS4)

"Detective Castellanos.  What a pleasant surprise.  Welcome back..."

--Tatiana, The Evil Within 2

With imagery and themes often more adjacent to Silent Hill than its more mainstream cousin, The Evil Within 2 leaps into persistent bizzarity thanks to regular but sometimes abrupt shifts between worlds, enemy design, rearranging rooms, fractured or floating pieces of Union, and multiple layers of technological-phenomenological simulation.  All of this works together to display how utterly strange and graphic visual horror can be.  The sequel features a pseudo-open world with optional objectives and special encounters distributed throughout.  Players are nowhere near as vulnerable as in games like Outlast, but the journey of Sebastian Castellanos through the simulated landscape of Union only yields so many bullets and crafting resources.  The psychological horror derives in part from the relative vulnerability and in part from the gore-drenched or highly abnormal things depicted.  This is a game that leans into strong pacing despite its chaotic, ominous atmosphere until the approximately second half of the story takes a turn into sheer narrative bloat.

Production Values

As strong a fit as the aesthetic style is for the thematic tone, the graphics lack any sort of high quality.  Hair does not look natural and vegetation does very noticeably phase into visibility on the screen as Sebastian walks closer to a given spot.  No one who grasps the real power of the PS4 would think these textures and character models come anywhere near utilizing this power maximally, but the atmosphere remains intact, reinforced by the aesthetic design, until the aforementioned story shift.  Even at that point, the intensity of the visuals persists; other factors are what change.  A sustained night filled with enemies of one kind gives way to a reddish sky over a town now populated with flamethrower-wielding humanoids rather than the multi-headed amalgamations of body parts that once wandered the same map.

Sadly, the dialogue falls to lower depths than the graphics, failing to match the philosophical potential for a story with the game's premise.  Not only do the characters tend to say illogical things, something that does not lower the quality of a story in itself, but the conversations also tend to be superficially or informally worded, in contrast with the very weighty concepts the game explores.  In the midst of the lackluster dialogue, the audio still has its brilliant moments.  Chief among these is when Dualshock 4 controller plays the humming sound made by an enemy called Anima through the speakers when she stalks you.  In fact, the volume of Anima's noise corresponds with how close she is to Sebastian, as she wanders around in the optional encounters while the player sneaks past her.  Having the controller play her tune is an excellent way to utilize the hardware of the PS4 while deepening the tension.

Gameplay

For the most part, the gameplay of The Evil Within 2 is about balancing direct fighting with stealthy evasion and quiet takedowns.  Traveling through the dismantling virtual landscape of Union becomes easier as enemies are killed, because they often do not actually respawn once killed, if ever.  Further contributing to diminishing difficulty is the green gel from defeated enemies, which Sebastian can use to purchase upgrades that gradually impart very useful benefits like a longer health bar, quicker stamina, and stronger melee attacks.  Also, a particular item frequently found, albeit in small quantities, enables weapon upgrades.  The amount of bullets the player has the capacity to load at one time, for instance, can significantly increase.  Even so, the game seldom allows you to amass so much ammunition that you can afford to take a more blatant approach to combat except in sporadic bursts; sneaking past a group of enemies or an especially powerful singular foe can be the most advantageous strategy.

It is easy to spontaneously, incidentally wander into an optional mission area, useful item, or a random Anima encounter.  Something very excellent about the game is how smooth these transitions are.  Multiple Anima encounters, both the scripted kind and the incidental kind that can randomly start as you walk though the streets, have no warning (at least on the first playthrough), and yet the pacing never suffers as you initially walk around stumbling into side missions and collectibles.  As for Anima, beware if you dislike vulnerability as a player!  Only in safe houses scattered around each map can Sebastian truly be safe from any enemies that remain.  Just like my wife, Sebastian can also drink coffee restore his HP at safe houses (she deeply loves coffee!).  In one of the most clever healing mechanics in gaming history, the coffeemaker will brew more coffee after use, but players have to wait several minutes between uses.  You cannot simply heal yourself fully, leave the safe house, lose an enormous amount of health, and then return to drink more coffee in the same four minutes.

In these safe houses, one can find a mirror that cracks upon approach, an unusual means of teleportation to Sebastian's "room," a construct designed within STEM for its familiarity to the character where you can view collected slides or special items from other Bethesda franchises, use a crafting table, purchase green gel upgrades, and so on.  To access the green gel upgrades, Sebastian sits in a chair that alters his perceived surroundings further by bringing him to the room of Nurse Tatiana, where he can also spend any keys obtained from breaking statues throughout Union to open a locker of the player's choice along the left wall.  Tatiana later introduces a variety of shooting gallery minigames that actually provide great rewards upon reaching certain score thresholds.

Story

Sebastian Castellanos is distraught about the death of his daughter in a house fire--until he is kidnapped by an extremely powerful secret society called Mobius and told she still lives.  To save her, he must again enter the construct of the infamous STEM, a machine that links minds together by impacting the neurological processes correlated with them and projecting a shared digital environment.  A sadistic murderer is leaving his "artistic" flourish inside STEM's city of Union as he kills agents previously sent by Mobius, seeking whatever his egoistic sort of self-expression leads him to, as other forces grapple to use their digital and mental power for the sake of seizing control of the artificial world.

Intellectual Content

I absolutely wish this game went further in its exploration of certain concepts like mental perceptions, technology, and logical possibility beyond just trying at times to move from one point in the story to another.  For one thing, some characters claim to "know" they are in or not in STEM even though either option is logically possible and not true by inherent necessity, and thus it simply cannot be known. Upon finally escaping at the end of the game, Sebastian asks Juli if he is really out of the simulation, when this is impossible for a human being to know since the mental perceptions that one is in a certain environment would look the same if one is seeing the real physical world or a digital or otherwise projected/illusory construct.  The mental experience is real either way.

For another thing, nothing out of the highly unusual imagery or events depicted in the game is truly impossible, for if something is logically impossible, it could not be portrayed in any medium--for example, the absence of any truths cannot be presented in storytelling because then this too would be true.  Logical axioms cannot be false even in fiction because they are inherently true; anything that contradicts them must only be false even in fiction.  For yet another thing, as is typical in entertainment, psychopathy is fallaciously presented as necessitating malevolence and extreme egoism.  In reality, all that psychopathy logically entails in itself is that someone has no conscience (a subjective sense of morality), not that they are cruel, selfish, unconcerned with moral truth (if there is such a thing).  A sense of morality or a personal desire to be kind have no connection to whether good or evil exist, knowing if good or evil exist, and whether a particular deed is good or evil anyway.

Conclusion

Suffering from a very steep clash between narrative threads due to an abrupt villain switch, The Evil Within 2 still manages to provide great action horror gameplay as it portrays the instability of an artificial world fueled by both technology and mental experience.  What does the game do right?  Its gameplay strengths mainly revolve around slowly becoming more powerful and thus less vulnerable and exploring the miscellaneous passageways of each map.  Philosophically, while a more streamlined plot that does not discard one primary antagonist for another would have done wonders for the game, the title really does succeed in depicting a horrid intersection of malevolent organizational power, simulated worlds projected by technology, psychological despair or madness, and epistemological uncertainty.  Very few games are so utterly, intentionally chaotic and aesthetically foreign to everyday life.  In the best moments, this chaos absolutely works in The Evil Within 2's favor.

Content:

 1. Violence:  Dismembered body parts are found in the environment.  A vast amount of blood is shown directly resulting from gunshots or melee attacks.

 2. Profanity:  Characters utter "damn," "bullshit," "fuck," "bitch," or "bastards" at various times.