You are given only a modest but well-balanced arsenal - the usual pistol, shotgun, sniper rifle, grenade and crossbow combo - with which to fight, as well as basic melee. Play It is The Evil Within’s most unnerving juxtaposition that combat with these terrors is so grounded in reality.

Despite a little roughness around the edges - I noticed texture pop-up and clipping issues in the PS4 and Xbox One versions - the game has been beautifully designed. Zooming in, these places are small and linear level designs, yet with the aid of excellent lighting, they become claustrophobic and labyrinthian. 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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