Even the usual horror cliches have been twisted and contorted in imaginative ways meat lockers, clanging industrial interiors, and mannequins have been granted new and ghastly life. While far from subtle - this is about as excessive as a horror game gets - Tango has created some incredibly strange and wonderful places in The Evil Within’s 15 chapters. It’s hard to care about the stakes when it appears that he doesn’t, even if his calm detachment - “I must be losing it!” - is on occasion darkly comic. Sebastian still quips mundanities like “what is going on here?” after hours of facing the kind of monsters that would drive the average person into a jabbering wreck.

In part, this narrative wrapper is undermined by the rather lifeless player character, Detective Sebastian Castellanos, who is emotionless and cool to the point of parody. I found its ending in particular, complete with an unnecessary boss battle apparently inserted only to serve the story, disappointing. While its central mystery starts off as compelling, it gradually veers off course, and eventually buckles under the weight of its own unfocused ambition. The Evil Within is an investigation of what appears to be a multiple homicide at Beacon Mental Hospital in its fictional Krimson City, before you realize things are not as they seem (an understatement). Play Not that the plot is a strikingly original work for the horror genre.

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