Episode 137 - Horror Hairdresser - The Evil Within 2

I’m going to stab the podcast out of you! Welcome back to spooky Halloween! Today, we’re going to be talking about the Evil Within 2, a survival horror title from Tango Gameworks. The Evil Within 2 focuses more on larger areas than the game it’s a sequel to, with a pseudo-open world design, but gives the player an expanded action set to handle this larger space. There is a focus on stealth, and the bigger areas means that running away to hide somewhere else is more feasible than it would be in a more corridor-focused game. That being said, this isn’t really an open world game, with few options for returning to previous areas or completing quests out of sequence, which ends up working well with the survival horror mechanics. A truly huge area risks overwhelming the player and leaving them without any way to defend themselves once their meager supply of ammunition runs out, or alternatively, providing far too many resources for the game to maintain its bite. Sticking with the Big Rooms Game™ approach mitigates these issues, keeping it grounded in the genre, though the design can still be somewhat problematic for players trying to fully complete the game. We’re going to be talking about resource management (on the player side as well as from a design perspective) in a game that features semi regular boss fights, how the sci-fi elements of the plot can get in the way of the splatter horror theme of the overall aesthetic, and we point out several places in the game that could have just been doors. Thank you for joining us for the first full episode of Halloween this year! We actually played the original Evil Within back before we were even doing the podcast, and a bounced off of it pretty quickly, so playing the sequel after several years mostly comes down to word of mouth about it being more accessible and maybe even a little better in some aspects. We found this to be pretty true, but what did you think? Were we just being baby gamers, unable to handle the masterpiece of the first game? Did you enjoy the more open design of the sequel? Let us know in the comments, or over on our Discord! Next time, we’re going to be dipping back pretty far to take on the shooter/point and click adventure game “Realms of the Haunting” so we hope you’ll enjoy whatever it is that ends up being.