![]() Other characters and villains duck and weave throughout the game’s story, and while I wish some lingered longer than others, they all manage to be memorable in their own ways thanks to brief moments of quality characterization. Files scattered around the environment flesh out the shadowy Mobius organization, and projector slides found throughout the game give way to tender conversations between Sebastian and Kidman. Sebastian’s arc is the core of The Evil Within 2‘s story, but the game offers a lot of narrative meat to chew outside of his struggles. His singular quest to find his daughter is instantly reminiscent of Silent Hill and The Last of Us, but focuses less about the things he’s willing to do for her as much as why he’s willing to do them The Evil Within 2 is a story of redemption for a man who needs to learn to forgive himself. He makes jokes, he forgives, and he is drawn to helping people who deserve it. Sebastian Castellanos of The Evil Within 2 is an angry, broken person, but not one without a heart. Gone is the bland cypher of the first game who reacted to everything with almost nothing to actually say. But as Sebastian makes his way through STEM, I was pleasantly surprised how much I came to know him as a character. The opening moments are cheesy and don’t give characters any time to breathe, choking the life from each scene as it drags them from plot point to plot point. I knew The Evil Within 2 would have a greater emphasis on storytelling, but I was initially unsure of the quality. ![]() Thankfully, the sci-fi conceits of the story are eventually expanded upon in a way that makes good on the high-concept potential of the story, which is another improvement over STEM’s poor explanation in the first title. It is also a lot of information for players to process, and if you’re not paying attention it can get pretty convoluted fast. While the opening scenes do a much better job of setting the story’s tone and character motivations than the first title’s immediate dive into madness, the dialogue and voice acting here gets pretty cheesy in a way that doesn’t do the rest of the game justice it’s not a good first impression, but it gets better as the game goes on. ![]() Taking the opportunity to save his daughter, Sebastian enters STEM and makes his way through the artificially constructed city of Union, where he finds a madman has taken control and monsters roam the streets. With Sebastian being one of the few survivors of the incident at Beacon Mental Hospital, he is uniquely qualified to enter STEM and find out what has happened to a missing Mobius search team. STEM connects the minds of those hooked up to it and creates worlds based on their subconscious. Before long, Juli Kidman, his ex-partner and double agent for clandestine organization Mobius, informs him that not only is his daughter alive in a Mobius facility, but that she is inside a newly built version of STEM, the experimental nightmare machine from the first game. The game opens with our hero, the gruff detective-turned-alcoholic Sebastian Castellanos, drinking his days away, wracked with guilt over the death of his wife and daughter and traumatized by the events of the first game. It’s everything one could want from a sequel. By innovating on the gameplay established with the series’ initial outing and expanding the game’s scope and storytelling, The Evil Within 2 feels confident enough in its own skin to stand tall next to genre mainstays. The Evil Within 2, however, is an entirely different beast. Viewed by many as a spiritual successor to Resident Evil 4‘s style and gameplay, it never fully escaped the shadow of its zombified sister series, despite its psychological horror aspirations. A back-to-basics approach to survival horror from Shinji Mikami himself, it offered all the scares and tension of classic titles like Resident Evil, but was hamstrung by a slavish devotion to genre tropes and a nearly nonexistent narrative structure. 2014’s The Evil Within was a divisive title among horror fans.
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