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The hospital of nightmares


It's a shame that Tango Gameworks had to close its doors. Without knowing anything else after the departure of the mastermind, Shinji Mikami created three eye-catching games in the aforementioned studio, The Evil Within game is one of them. The argument is intriguing, given the significant impact of Resident Evil and Silent Hill —that is, the way of telling a horror story with plenty of mental motifs. Instead of a virus, however, there is an evil inside, dwelling in some part of the human mind. It only required someone to control a device interconnected with many minds to cause them to experience the horror and transform them into nightmarish creatures.

It is a rainy day. Detectives Sebastian Castellanos, Joseph, and Kidman, going in a patrol car, head to the Beacon Mental Hospital to respond to an emergency call. There was a heinous crime. They arrived at the hospital so soon, pulled open the doors, and surveyed the scene. In the lobby lie the bodies of the nurses; it seems deserted. Although there is someone alive, a medic is in the security room. Delirious and convinced that none of it is real, he brings up Rubik. So Sebastian inspects the security cameras to find out what might have happened. Impressed, he peers at the recording of a hooded person moving fast and smacking the police with one hand. However, something unusual does occur. The hooded man turns to gaze at the camera, vanishes, shows up behind Sebastian, and pokes his eye with a syringe. The detective is whisked to a dreary room. Hovering while Bach's Air on G String is played, Sebastian would try to sneak away. Not to disclose more, the disturbing story begins here.


Stepping into the abyss of torment


When we experience a dream, we often don't realise how it came about or how we got there. It's just happening. Well, in the case of the nightmare, it conveys something more. Being inside one causes a feeling of anxiety and fear until it acts as a type of "jumpscare" that forces us to wake up. We witness everything suddenly falling apart. The dream and the nightmare are interrelated, although we aren't aware of it due to the level of stress we live with daily. It is interwoven with other elements such as traumas, daydreams, and lucid processes, but one will always predominate over the other.

The method of telling the story of the game seems original to me. The narrative structure involves the deformation of the dream into a nightmare. As players, many times we don't “recall” how we got there. Each place is a unique setting where an omniscient entity observes our steps. Just as horrible traumas and memories are repressed deep down, accessing them becomes a terrifying endeavour. They're protected with doors and creatures, all of them symbolic or representative, which design a labyrinth that conceals the underbelly. In this way, although the plot is linear episodically, when we're telepathically transported from one scene to another, it seems disjointed or fragmentary, as if it played out in a dream. The scenarios are rearranged through a game of perspectives and directions. Rubik is the omniscient presence who averts, at all costs, showing the core of the nightmare.

Almost every corner and creature has connotations, with many references to psychology. The clairvoyant dream occurs as the gravity of the world engulfs the protagonist. It evokes the feeling of being observed. To achieve the creepy aesthetic experience, horror surrealism was relied on to emphasise the unconsciousness. The presence of Japanese art is appreciated, in concert with the surrealism of René Magritte, the expressionism of Kubin and the baroque of Goya, as well as other inspirations from romantic and baroque painters. All art was created by Ikumi Nakamura. The adventure in the plot is also enlivened by an atmospheric soundtrack. When we're visiting the sanatorium to save the game, we can listen to Claude Debussy's Clair de lune. In this manner, not only does the story stand out in the script, but the intention is to have an aesthetic experience of the horror of the nightmare within the corridors of madness.


In the dark corridors of madness


The story is seemingly linear. They all branch off to the mental hospital and the lighthouse, seated in many almost “dissociated” places. Each site is like fragments or sketches that confine the player; and once completed, as a chapter, it's whisked away to a new site (page, remembrance, trauma, or room) with no possibility of return. The scenarios become dynamic and roam, altering the same scenes in some cases to create confusion and uncertainty for the player.

This type of dynamism in the world makes it convenient to denote the nightmare above the character. That shows how vulnerable the protagonist is —the antagonist's mental power and control over Sebastian. So in each chapter, at the end, we always fight a boss. Each enemy and boss are symbolic, like obstacles or guardians, which are dealt with in distinct ways (a mode of play is required, e.g., fire to defeat Laura or bolts of electricity or ice to fend off The Keeper).

The character can be honed. His betterment is mental. Along the way, we pick up green gel, with which we utilise it to boost the character as well as to upgrade the weapons in the sanatorium. There, we can also save the game and open some boxes with small keys. We locate them in statuettes tucked away in the scenarios, which provide supplies. Given that the game is survival horror, resources are scarce. So there are methods for dealing with enemies, such as stealth, shooting, or some traps in the environment. The story's omniscient antagonist sets traps for us, so we can deactivate them or harness them to our benefit. It even features a simple crafting system; whereby, by collecting trap pieces, we produce bolts. The combat is not powerful; it is a shoddy-implemented melee. So some chapters are short and challenging, which provides a diverse pace as the plot continues to evolve.


Scribbling on the walls with insane reverberations


The atmosphere in The Evil Within is unique: it evokes memories of the narrative style of a survival horror in the classic style of Resident Evil and the symbolic-representative style of Silent Hill. To this is implemented a cinematographic visual style, with which, with the benefit of dynamic scenarios, they transport the player's mind to the antagonist's whirlwind of pain. I liked how the plot was interwoven, in the sense of a dream and a nightmare, where we don't realise how we ended up there but, at the same time, the gaps are always filled by the twists and turns of the story and the fragmentary contexts that come up in the adventure

In the end, I wonder, what is the nightmare about? And how did each fragment become interconnected? I loved how the plot played with perspectives of the setting, grabbing my mind from one place to another, where the places seemed impossible. Thus, the adventure is absorbing to go through with as many times as necessary, like the film Inception directed by Christopher Nolan, although being this a terrifying atmosphere where the labyrinths express reverberations of torment.

Although the plot is performed with chapters, some shortly depending on the difficulty, the game is extensive and panoptic. In my opinion, a game should always be complete, realized, and concise. No DLC is necessary. Thus, the game has its years, but it doesn't halt providing an excellent experience of a game developed by a company that closed its doors.


Recommendation: 9/10