As the director on Resident Evil (and it's remake), RE4, Dino Crisis, Vanquish and more, Shinji Mikami is understandably one of the best known industry personalities. After working for years at Capcom, Mikami went to Clover Studios, then Platinum Games, and finally in 2010 helped establish a new studio called Tango Gameworks. It started working on multiple projects, including an open world SciFi game and something a bit more supernatural, but after some early financial troubles, Zenimax stepped in with an offer to buy the studio which was accepted. Work on their SciFi project was sidelined and the supernatural project, called "Zwei" early in development went full steam ahead. This project eventually morphed into a story that did have a kind of SF angle to it, releasing in Japan under the title "Psycho Break" and in the west under the title "The Evil Within" in 2014.
In 2017, a sequel was released, but curiously, Mikami was not the director. In interviews, he claimed that it was time to let the younger generation of game developers shine, although he stayed on in a producing role and was definitely still involved with the game's development.
Mikami (left) and John Johanas (right). Johanas was the director on TEW2.
Ikumi Nakamura and Mikami. Ikumi was the creative director on Ghostwire: Tokyo until she left Tango.
In 2014, I played about 2 hours of The Evil Within. I just got to the village when I stopped playing. I don't really remember why I stopped, but it evidently hadn't grabbed me, and I do recall being irritated by technical issues. I think I waited for a patch maybe, then just forgot to go back. In any case, a few weeks ago I was reminded of the game and decided to take a crack at it.
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The Evil Within (2014)
Comparisons to Resident Evil, RE4 specifically, are inevitable. The naming is reminiscent, even down to how Japan and the West got a different name. If Evil is Within, then you could say it... a Resident Evil. The protagonist, Sebastian Castellanos is a police officer, who is kind of physically halfway between Leon S Kennedy (who is also a police officer) and Louis Sera. Early on in the game you encounter a masked chainsaw dude. There's an ongonig plot about how you might be turning into a zombie and have to resist it. One of your fellow police officers, Kidman, serves as a quasi-Ada Wong character, being in league with a shadowy corporate overlord and having a scene where the protagonist goes part-zombie and tries to attack her and then she runs away. Arsenals are similar. Mechanics, perspective and whatnot are similar in places. The "village" in TEW is strongly reminiscent of RE4, and later in the game there's a mansion that's reminiscent of OG resident evil. It's not all the same, of course, but nobody could play this and honestly think it wasn't a riff on a lot of the same ideas.
When the game launched, it copped a fair bit of flack for technical issues on PC, as well as for all platforms having black bars that turned the game into a 2.5:1 aspect ratio. But that aspect ratio is combined with what we could generously call a "limited" Field of View, which caused issues.
Positives:
Got a selection of rare things on sale, strangah!
Negatives:
Regarding the story, it is sometimes effective, but has a lot of problems. It's got a straight up anime villain (tragic backstory included) who is this edgy 20 year old dude in a coat who teleports behind you and might as well have said "nothing personal kid" before he does whatever fuckery to you in a given chapter. Unless you dive into the (missable) lore pickups, you're left with a lot of questions about the world you're in and the mechanics of the STEM system the game takes place within. The protagonist is a flat out idiot, who 3/4 through the game (having discovered that he's in a dream world) still says things like "woah, am I losing my mind?!" every time something spooky happens. Characters seem to know that doing certain things can or might help them "get out" or progress to the next thing, but for reasons which are totally opaque to the player. Sometimes you're disconnecting other enemies from the STEM... or at least you seem to be... but are you doing that in the real world, or is that a stem-within-stem that is... metaphorically still doign what you're literally doing? Are you strapped in a tub or doing things in the real world??? You can kind of figure this out partially by the end, but also, it ends with some random "BUT ARE YOU STILL DREAMING?" nonsense.
Hi I'm a child genius who got burned horribly and my sister was killed in a barn because local people didn't like me and now I do evil experiments and want to take over the world or something
Overall, my time with The Evil Within was generally positive, but I'd be lying if I said I wasn't excited to press on to the sequel to see what they'd improved. It felt like Resident Evil 4 on a shoestring. A lot of heart went into the game, but overall I only give it maybe a 7 / 10. There's a lot wrong with it, but still things to enjoy.
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The Evil Within 2 (2017)
This was really an unexpected delight. Directing duties were taken over by John Johanas, as mentioned above, who had previously worked on directing some of the levels in TEW1 (the mansion chapter being one).
This game really builds upon some of the strengths of the first game, while also stepping back on some of the more heavily criticized aspects of the first game. It has a higher metascore, but not by heaps, however I personally found it to be dramatically improved.
Not actually as tough as she looks
The structure of the game is a little controversial among people who played it, but I feel it was generally well received. Basically, the game is a much more consistent world compared to TEW1, and you have several instances where you are given a kind of miniature open world town to explore at your leisure. There are little encounters you can run into (most notably "The Anima", more on that later), buildings to comb for resources, and enemies you can avoid or pick off. Between the semi-open segments, you're still funneled into linear segments. The majority of the game is still fairly linear. These open sections are not very big, and feel like an expansion of the Village in TEW1, just with more space and buildings.
On the technical side of things, almost everything is dramatically improved. Animation work is much better on the protagonist and enemies. Things blend nicely. Temporal Antialiasing cleans up a lot of artefacting, SSAO is better implemented, it has native support for 60fps or higher and FOV changing right out of the box, and overall it just looks very nice. Unfortunately, on PC there are some stutters and frame-time spikes that nobody can seem to solve, but it didn't stop me having a good time (even if it did irritate me).
In terms of mechanics and game-feel, it's also a huge step up. Moving, using cover, shooting, sneaking all feel GREAT. I can't emphasize enough how much nicer it feels coming straight off the first game. Crafting is expanded a bit but doesn't feel overbearing - you now craft ammo from gunpowder in addition to the previous game's bolt crafting. I often hate crafting in games, but as a survival experience I really liked it here (kind of like how I didn't mind it in The Last of Us - it's easy to understand and simple to use and evocative in the setting/genre).
There weren't as many bosses by my reckoning as TEW1, nor were there as many unique environments, but what it does have is a very strong sense of place. You get to know the world, much like you do in a game like Prey (2017) because you revisit parts and see it change through the course of the game. I love this aspect of it. It also reminds me of Batman Arkham Asylum in this way, you learn the routes, you remember where things are placed, but it's not some massive world you can only possibly navigate by GPS in a car or something like that (that's the sort of open world I dislike).
TEW2 is not really as scary as TEW1, for the most part. It's also a little easier and more generous with stuff assuming you actually learn to use the crafting and explore. If you bum rush the game, it's probably hard, but I was farly thorough so I was always prepared for every situation. There was something very cool and frightening in the game though, which was the Anima. This is basically a Japanese Ghost Lady who stalks you through parts of the game, but interestingly, her encounters are all technically optional. It's one of the few times in the game where you are genuinely helpless (this happened WAY more in TEW1), and how she ties into the lore is pretty cool.
The story is way more straight forward, with stakes you understand, enemies you get to know well, and allies you can more consistently rely on. I much preferred this to TEW1's jumble of discount Jacob's ladder themes crossed with every episode of a TV show where they try to gaslight the protagonist. Some people dislike that it's fairly understandable. It's just much more to my taste though. That's not to say it's flawless - there's a bit much character melodrama, there's a lot of cliches from the genre. That's one way in which the sequel feels very similar to some of the RE games actually.
The villains are larger than life (in a good way), and one of my favorite things is how each of them has their place in the game, and as you beat one and a new one takes precedence, the world changes around you and the enemies get warped in new ways. Love that, visually and mechanically.
Overall, I give TEW about an 8.5 or 9 out of 10. It feels to me like a natural evolution of where a game like RE4 might have gone and I highly recommend it.
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Tango is now working on Ghostwire: Tokyo, which is set to release in 2021. Zenimax is also set to become a Microsoft subsidiary early next year, so it will be interesting to see what direction the company heads in. There's no real narrative need to return to TEW2, but I love how it plays, so I'd like to see them do another action/horror/stealth game in the future even if it's a different IP.
What did you think of the games? Did you play them both? Which was better? What are your hopes from Tango in the future?
In 2017, a sequel was released, but curiously, Mikami was not the director. In interviews, he claimed that it was time to let the younger generation of game developers shine, although he stayed on in a producing role and was definitely still involved with the game's development.
Mikami (left) and John Johanas (right). Johanas was the director on TEW2.
Ikumi Nakamura and Mikami. Ikumi was the creative director on Ghostwire: Tokyo until she left Tango.
In 2014, I played about 2 hours of The Evil Within. I just got to the village when I stopped playing. I don't really remember why I stopped, but it evidently hadn't grabbed me, and I do recall being irritated by technical issues. I think I waited for a patch maybe, then just forgot to go back. In any case, a few weeks ago I was reminded of the game and decided to take a crack at it.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Evil Within (2014)
Comparisons to Resident Evil, RE4 specifically, are inevitable. The naming is reminiscent, even down to how Japan and the West got a different name. If Evil is Within, then you could say it... a Resident Evil. The protagonist, Sebastian Castellanos is a police officer, who is kind of physically halfway between Leon S Kennedy (who is also a police officer) and Louis Sera. Early on in the game you encounter a masked chainsaw dude. There's an ongonig plot about how you might be turning into a zombie and have to resist it. One of your fellow police officers, Kidman, serves as a quasi-Ada Wong character, being in league with a shadowy corporate overlord and having a scene where the protagonist goes part-zombie and tries to attack her and then she runs away. Arsenals are similar. Mechanics, perspective and whatnot are similar in places. The "village" in TEW is strongly reminiscent of RE4, and later in the game there's a mansion that's reminiscent of OG resident evil. It's not all the same, of course, but nobody could play this and honestly think it wasn't a riff on a lot of the same ideas.
When the game launched, it copped a fair bit of flack for technical issues on PC, as well as for all platforms having black bars that turned the game into a 2.5:1 aspect ratio. But that aspect ratio is combined with what we could generously call a "limited" Field of View, which caused issues.
Positives:
- The addition of stealth mechanics are something I think is smart for a horror game. It lets you have a lot of tension without being strictly helpless. You're playing cat and mouse with enemies who are quite dangerous, but if you do it right you can take them all out and feel like a boss.
- Traps and the crafting systems are reasonably good. It feeding into resources makes you care about them beyond just being minor nuisances.
- Strong visual design in places. Art is good mostly.
- Some of the more open levels, the Village in particular, are a lot of fun.
- Progression systems are pretty good. It's not as charming as the RE4 merchant, of course.
- It does succeed in making you feel helpless in a lot of places and is therefore quite tense and scary (although there is a flip side to this discussed below).
- Later on in the game, when you've got some upgrades, you start to feel like a boss and the combat becomes a lot of fun against regular enemies.
- Some of the themes can be evocative.
Got a selection of rare things on sale, strangah!
Negatives:
- Stealth is fidgety and sometimes inconsistent.
- Animation work is a bit rough and presentation is overall a bit unpolished
- Controls are also a bit rough, including...
- Aiming is hard, which is exacerbated by...
- The FOV, which is extremely narrow and cannot be changed without hacks that break UI elements on PC. You will frequently get snuck up on by people who are like 45 degrees to your left, or you will be aiming at someone and can't hit them because they got too close to you and the cursor accidentally overshot their head by 1 pixel.
- There are way too many one hit kills and bullshit setpieces where you just end up trying a bunch of times. When the game takes agency away from you, it can be scary, but it's almost always frustrating. Most major bosses have an instakill during some phase of their fight, or during some kind of scripted escape scene.
- Misc technical issues. Framerates above 30 on PC cause physics glitches. Ambient Occlusion is bad in this game and causes a lot of visual artefacting.
- The story is often incoherent and overall I didn't like it.
- The final boss is a rocket launcher fight (you have never had a rocket launcher before) where the player can't even move and a monster is slowly coming towards you. This is as I mentioned in another thread, like taking a final exam in a class you didn't know you were enrolled in.
Regarding the story, it is sometimes effective, but has a lot of problems. It's got a straight up anime villain (tragic backstory included) who is this edgy 20 year old dude in a coat who teleports behind you and might as well have said "nothing personal kid" before he does whatever fuckery to you in a given chapter. Unless you dive into the (missable) lore pickups, you're left with a lot of questions about the world you're in and the mechanics of the STEM system the game takes place within. The protagonist is a flat out idiot, who 3/4 through the game (having discovered that he's in a dream world) still says things like "woah, am I losing my mind?!" every time something spooky happens. Characters seem to know that doing certain things can or might help them "get out" or progress to the next thing, but for reasons which are totally opaque to the player. Sometimes you're disconnecting other enemies from the STEM... or at least you seem to be... but are you doing that in the real world, or is that a stem-within-stem that is... metaphorically still doign what you're literally doing? Are you strapped in a tub or doing things in the real world??? You can kind of figure this out partially by the end, but also, it ends with some random "BUT ARE YOU STILL DREAMING?" nonsense.
Hi I'm a child genius who got burned horribly and my sister was killed in a barn because local people didn't like me and now I do evil experiments and want to take over the world or something
Overall, my time with The Evil Within was generally positive, but I'd be lying if I said I wasn't excited to press on to the sequel to see what they'd improved. It felt like Resident Evil 4 on a shoestring. A lot of heart went into the game, but overall I only give it maybe a 7 / 10. There's a lot wrong with it, but still things to enjoy.
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The Evil Within 2 (2017)
This was really an unexpected delight. Directing duties were taken over by John Johanas, as mentioned above, who had previously worked on directing some of the levels in TEW1 (the mansion chapter being one).
This game really builds upon some of the strengths of the first game, while also stepping back on some of the more heavily criticized aspects of the first game. It has a higher metascore, but not by heaps, however I personally found it to be dramatically improved.
Not actually as tough as she looks
The structure of the game is a little controversial among people who played it, but I feel it was generally well received. Basically, the game is a much more consistent world compared to TEW1, and you have several instances where you are given a kind of miniature open world town to explore at your leisure. There are little encounters you can run into (most notably "The Anima", more on that later), buildings to comb for resources, and enemies you can avoid or pick off. Between the semi-open segments, you're still funneled into linear segments. The majority of the game is still fairly linear. These open sections are not very big, and feel like an expansion of the Village in TEW1, just with more space and buildings.
On the technical side of things, almost everything is dramatically improved. Animation work is much better on the protagonist and enemies. Things blend nicely. Temporal Antialiasing cleans up a lot of artefacting, SSAO is better implemented, it has native support for 60fps or higher and FOV changing right out of the box, and overall it just looks very nice. Unfortunately, on PC there are some stutters and frame-time spikes that nobody can seem to solve, but it didn't stop me having a good time (even if it did irritate me).
In terms of mechanics and game-feel, it's also a huge step up. Moving, using cover, shooting, sneaking all feel GREAT. I can't emphasize enough how much nicer it feels coming straight off the first game. Crafting is expanded a bit but doesn't feel overbearing - you now craft ammo from gunpowder in addition to the previous game's bolt crafting. I often hate crafting in games, but as a survival experience I really liked it here (kind of like how I didn't mind it in The Last of Us - it's easy to understand and simple to use and evocative in the setting/genre).
There weren't as many bosses by my reckoning as TEW1, nor were there as many unique environments, but what it does have is a very strong sense of place. You get to know the world, much like you do in a game like Prey (2017) because you revisit parts and see it change through the course of the game. I love this aspect of it. It also reminds me of Batman Arkham Asylum in this way, you learn the routes, you remember where things are placed, but it's not some massive world you can only possibly navigate by GPS in a car or something like that (that's the sort of open world I dislike).
TEW2 is not really as scary as TEW1, for the most part. It's also a little easier and more generous with stuff assuming you actually learn to use the crafting and explore. If you bum rush the game, it's probably hard, but I was farly thorough so I was always prepared for every situation. There was something very cool and frightening in the game though, which was the Anima. This is basically a Japanese Ghost Lady who stalks you through parts of the game, but interestingly, her encounters are all technically optional. It's one of the few times in the game where you are genuinely helpless (this happened WAY more in TEW1), and how she ties into the lore is pretty cool.
The story is way more straight forward, with stakes you understand, enemies you get to know well, and allies you can more consistently rely on. I much preferred this to TEW1's jumble of discount Jacob's ladder themes crossed with every episode of a TV show where they try to gaslight the protagonist. Some people dislike that it's fairly understandable. It's just much more to my taste though. That's not to say it's flawless - there's a bit much character melodrama, there's a lot of cliches from the genre. That's one way in which the sequel feels very similar to some of the RE games actually.
The villains are larger than life (in a good way), and one of my favorite things is how each of them has their place in the game, and as you beat one and a new one takes precedence, the world changes around you and the enemies get warped in new ways. Love that, visually and mechanically.
Overall, I give TEW about an 8.5 or 9 out of 10. It feels to me like a natural evolution of where a game like RE4 might have gone and I highly recommend it.
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Tango is now working on Ghostwire: Tokyo, which is set to release in 2021. Zenimax is also set to become a Microsoft subsidiary early next year, so it will be interesting to see what direction the company heads in. There's no real narrative need to return to TEW2, but I love how it plays, so I'd like to see them do another action/horror/stealth game in the future even if it's a different IP.
What did you think of the games? Did you play them both? Which was better? What are your hopes from Tango in the future?
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