This Week In Retro: The Evil Within

October 14, 2014: Scream if you love barbed wire!

by Diamond Feit

As much as I hope that the words I write might find an audience, I don't know if I could handle true fame. Sure, I might get lucky one day and strike the perfect balance between financial comfort and creative freedom, but all too often we see authors or filmmakers become celebrities only to find themselves pigeonholed into chasing past successes.

This kind of creative rut seems especially bad in the world of video games, partly because fewer developers actually gain name recognition, but mostly due to the long, hard hours involved in making games. I've never met Hideo Kojima personally but I can't believe he wanted to spend 15 years of his life toiling in the world of Metal Gear Solid. Time and again he announced he would leave the series behind only to find himself staring Solid Snake in the face again.

Over at Capcom, young Shinji Mikami joined the company in 1990 and cut his teeth on an assortment of Disney-licensed family-friendly titles. Yet when Tokuro Fujiwara sought to reimagine his horror RPG Sweet Home for new hardware, he gave the job to Mikami precisely because Mikami didn't like getting scared. That project eventually became Resident Evil, a horror game so successful, it kicked off an entire genre—in addition to sparking a multi-million-selling franchise for Capcom.

Suddenly, executives and audiences alike now associated Shinji Mikami with survival horror. Even after leaving Capcom in 2006, every few years capitalism decreed he must resign himself to crafting cursed mansions filled with frights; EA touted Shadows of the Damned as an all-star collaboration between Mikami, Suda51, and Akira Yamaoka. When Mikami stepped out on his own again and founded Tango Gameworks, the startup studio initially experimented with new concepts. Yet Mikami made his directorial debut for Tango 10 years ago this week by returning to the survival horror well with The Evil Within.

In fairness to Shinji Mikami and his Tango team, The Evil Within strays from the well-worn Resident Evil formula that made him famous. The game begins inside a police car speeding towards an emergency situation at a local hospital; cops have the building surrounded but reports from the inside are sketchy at best and no one who's gone in has come back out. Detective Sergeant Sebastian Castellanos escorts a small team in to investigate but things go south immediately, as everyone in the front lobby lies dead on the floor.

After Castellanos witnesses an impossibly-agile killer cut down three officers, the mystery man takes him out. Castellanos awakens alone, hanging upside-down somewhere in the bowels of the hospital, surrounded by corpses. A different man looms over him, one who takes his time grabbing bodies from the pile and carving them up with a cleaver. With an empty shoulder holster and a bad limp, Castellanos must free himself and escape before he ends up next on the block.

This means players spend the entire first chapter of The Evil Within in full stealth mode, constantly on the run from a sadistic, if simple-minded, pursuer. Even though Castellanos picks up a knife to slice open his bonds, combat is not an option; any attempt to stab the butcher results in an immediate, fatal counterattack. This sequence teaches the value of sneaking and hiding, remaining unseen as often as possible, and how to toss breakable objects to distract the enemy.

Even in later chapters when Castellanos finds a gun, these covert techniques remain crucial in The Evil Within. Players won't find much ammo and even a common foe might eat multiple bullets before collapsing. Getting the drop on unaware monsters helps conserve resources, although avoiding them altogether works just as well. Tripwires and other traps also lie in wait throughout the game, offering further encouragement for the slow and steady approach.

Along with this emphasis on eschewing engagement, The Evil Within serves different sorts of scares than those seen in Capcom's flagship survival horror franchise. This starts with the creatures out to kill Castellanos; they look like zombies at first glance but they've been corrupted somehow, not merely mutated by a man-made virus. Disfigurements abound among their ranks, along with extreme body modifications that go beyond piercings. The game's cover depicts a screaming man with barbed wire pulled tight around his face but that's one of the tamer sights players will see in The Evil Within.

There's also the larger matter of Castellanos struggling with images and events that just cannot possibly make sense. The first chapter ends with him and his team fleeing the hospital in an ambulance as the road and the very city collapses around them. They just barely avoid disaster but still suffer a terrific crash, yet Chapter 2 opens with Castellanos alone, again, in a hospital. The lone nurse escorts him into a chair that locks him in place and straps a nasty-looking skullcap onto his head. Suddenly he's back in the ambulance, middle of nowhere, with nothing but trees surrounding him. In a 2013 interview with Famitsu translated by Kotaku, Shinji Mikami said "this sort of world that changes in real time serves to haunt the player."

Looking back at his comments prior to the release of The Evil Within, you can tell Mikami wanted to entice players but didn't want them to buy the game expecting a Resident Evil-type experience. In Edge, he said "The scariest parts will be when you encounter enemies that cannot be killed with a gun." Speaking to The Guardian, Mikami said "If there’s a situation where you’re not 100% sure that you can avoid or defeat the enemies, if you feel maybe there’s a chance you’ll make it – that’s where horror lies." He also specifically expressed his dissatisfaction with "shooting dozens of enemies," something the Resident Evil series had leaned into around this time.

The Evil Within struck me as a hard sell in 2014. As frustrated as I felt with the trend of incessant action in horror games, I felt even more intimidated by games that expected me to run and hide from monsters I couldn't kill. A cryptic Tokyo Game Show demo did the game no favors; I remember encountering a puzzle that required poking a living brain and when I made a mistake, Castellanos dropped dead and the demo ended.

Giving it a second look on its 10th anniversary, I can see the truth behind Shinji Mikami's statements to the press. When each wandering hostile represents a genuine threat and Castellanos only has five bullets in his revolver, the tension shoots through the roof. This also adds to the excitement of every successful execution of an inattentive goon, although I find it funny that a knife to the back of the neck would kill a guy who's got two giant iron bars stuck through his cranium.

While critics and fans had mixed feelings about The Evil Within, enough people bought the game to warrant a sequel in 2017. Having repeatedly promised to use his position at Tango Gameworks to foster new talent, Mikami took a supervisory role on The Evil Within 2. Today, thanks to Microsoft's purchase of ZeniMax—owners of The Evil Within publisher Bethesda and Tango Gameworks—both games remain readily available on Game Pass.

A decade later, Shinji Mikami is striking out on his own, again. He left Tango Gameworks in 2023, later stating that he hoped to "break free from the survival horror genre." For now, he's got a new company called Kamuy and no one knows what they're working on besides Mikami himself. For his sake, I hope his days of haunted houses remain firmly in the rear-view mirror; with the breadth of horror projects from studios big and small, no one should force Shinji Mikami to feel afraid ever again.

Writer/podcaster/performer Diamond Feit lives in Osaka, Japan but xer work and opinions exist across the internet.