Evil inside reviews1/9/2024 Mikami isn't afraid to use cheap shocks to contribute to your sense of mental fragility and unease. The attempt to straddle two distinct cinematic genres creates a tonal melange, but the fear effect isn't diminished. Resources throughout the game remain scarce. Traps can be disarmed and the parts you collect from doing so later used to craft bolts for your crossbow. The horror trope of the anachronistic mental hospital is over-familiar, but Mikami revitalises it here by making it the place where you find sanctuary, if never peace. The chair in which you must sit in order to 'upgrade' Castellanos' abilities and weaponry - using a currency that's represented by green liquid, found in jars or pocketed from the dissolving corpses of your foes - has leather restraining straps a wire helmet descends onto his head as if about to perform a lobotomy. The door of your padded cell may be unlocked, but the corridors "smell of medicine" and decline. This area is an esoteric ward set within the mental hospital where the game opens. The tonal divide is best exemplified by The Evil Within's 'safe' space, an area to which Castellanos can retreat in order to save progress and enjoy a moment's calm away from the storm of the main game. As well as fighting and fleeing towering chainsaw-wielders, you find yourself pitted against characters familiar from contemporary Japanese horror films in the game's frightening boss battles. Camera filters are used to great effect, taking transparent freeze-frames and then smearing the frozen image over the subsequent action, in order to confuse and fuddle. The game constantly messes with space, shifting the sets and corridors in disorientating ways. The unnerving props and characters (a soiled doll, a lank-haired monster woman who walks on all fours, a butcher's slab for carving humans) are borrowed as much from the work of film director Takashi Miike as from Mikami's favourite, George Romero. The psychological horror that runs, spine-like, through each of the game's 16 lingering chapters is new. There are also new traits that mark The Evil Within as a distinct proposition from the schlock-horror series with which Mikami made his name. Either way, the aspect ratio is a curious choice. Two heavy black borders frame the screen, either to provide a sense of cinematic grandeur or to help keep the frame-rate up. This is a Mikami game from hilltop to catacomb, and it's undeniably the closest we've had to a direct sequel to his greatest work, Resident Evil 4. There are familiar sections during which you fight alongside a second, computer-controlled character, tending to their well-being while trying to maintain your own. There are rabid super-dogs, creeping villagers who stare with bright eyes and wield torches or chainsaws - and there's your own a burgeoning armoury, which you are restrained from using liberally through the scarcity of ammunition. There are fat, mad friars who roam derelict churches. There's a mud-slung rural village and ambient storytelling about unethical scientific experiments that drove its residents to violence. There are the familiar ponderous door animations, which ratchet up the tension each time you pass from one virtual space to the next there are the balloon-bursting headshots. There's the crouched zombie munching on a cadaver who peers back at the camera over a rotten shoulder - a frame-for-frame rerun of the famous scene from the first Resident Evil on PlayStation. The Evil Within is also something of greatest hits of the director's finest ideas and moments. Neither has the tone of his work changed, from the B-movie dialogue to the taut gunplay. It's been nine years since Shinji Mikami directed a horror game with Resident Evil 4 none of that game's rhythm and pace has been lost in the intermission. Inside the entrance, Castellanos finds a multitude of bloodied, slumped corpses. The few seconds it takes for the building's double doors to creak open are all the time that the game bothers to spend on creating an initial sense of tension and dread. The Evil Within opens with the psychologically wrecked detective Sebastian Castellanos arriving at a mental hospital surrounded by the flash and wail of police cars and ambulances. Shinji Mikami returns to horror with a greatest-hits package that recalls - but can't match - Resident Evil 4.
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