The Evil Within: Psychological Torture

It's an incredibly unpopular opinion, but I'm of the mind that Majora's Mask is a pile of shit.

Don't get me wrong - there are parts of that game that I like. I think the world itself is interesting and varied and I like a lot of the music. Oath to Order is a great piece, but it's a very short piece of music. But having to re-fight dull bosses over and over is grating, having to re-do things you might have done dozens of times before just to trigger something is incredibly tedious, some of the side quests are frustrating and needlessly complicated/difficult (alien invasion, I'm looking at you here), and the water area is possibly one of the worst in any 3D game. Don't even get me started about collecting eggs to drop off in a tank.

I bought Majora's Mask on release day. Gold cart. I played for most of that day and I literally never touched the game again. I don't know what became of my old N64 and its games. Possibly cleared in the garage purge that preceded us converting it into a room for my grandmother, were I to make a guess. I was not sad to see Majora's Mask go. When your gameplay goes from its intended purpose to tedious, repetitive, and frustrating within the span of one day, then you have failed as a game designer. When you make a player regret buying your 60-dollar title on day 1, something has gone horribly wrong.

I don't play The Evil Within for long periods of time. I tend to only play games in 1-hour bursts as is, and I don't think I've had a session even getting close to that. I'm only on chapter 9 of the game - on Easy, because I wanted to stroll through it to make mental notes for Akumu Mode - and god damn it I hate this game. I'm not sure I can say a single positive thing about it. The graphics aren't good - the PS4 version looks like a mid-gen 360 game. Especially if you keep the awful film grain on. I turned that shit off ASAP. Gave me a monstrous headache when I played through Chapter 1 with it on.

The letterboxing is pointless and aggravating. You'll never be able to see what you need to be able to see. And if the aiming of bottles and the Crossbow didn't have an arc-line, it might still be tolerable. But the fact that your line is constantly going off into the upper black bar is terrible. There's a trophy for clocking an enemy in the head with a bottle and then stealth killing them. I got that on chapter 7, though not for lack of constant trying. You have to point your camera so far downward that you'll effectively have to blind-fire and hope you hit where you want.

Sound design isn't good. It's hard to tell how far enemies are from you at a listen. Noises are made and you'll have absolutely no clue as to where they even might be located.

Controls definitely aren't good, especially when you're crouched. Instead of turning around, Seb will often just crouch-walk backwards like a dumbass, which I guarantee will get you killed at least once. We're this deep into video game generations and we still have fucking 'wiggle the analog stick rapidly' shit going on. That's a good way to screw up your analog stick is what that is.

But I realized something tonight, after spending just long enough in chapter 5 to get one jar of green gel to put me over 10,000 - almost every level has a really shitty gimmick to it. And if you don't know how it's supposed to go before you even play, you're going to end up dying a lot. Let me explain.

Chapter 1: You're slashed in the leg early on and spend almost the entire stage with a severe limp. You have no weapons and you're being chased by a Sadist (the guy with the chainsaw). Now there's only one big area with him, but it's a terrible area. I'm not sure I've seen any player go into the game blind and get through the chapter without A) following the Sadist into the back room and getting knifed in the beginning or B) sneaking by him in the second part without him noticing. And if you get by him in the first room, even if he never caught sight of you, he's going to charge into the second room a few seconds after you get in. If you miss distracting him with the one bottle they give you and you're screwed. If he sees you, you die. Full stop. You aren't fast enough to outrun him. On easier difficulties, you can take two or three strikes before you get impaled. That's it.

Chapter 2: This chapter's gimmick is introducing the concept of stealth kills and knowing when to run. It also introduces you to the concept of misdirection. Without fail, if you watch people play this game, the end of chapter 2 is likely to play out this way: They skirt around the outside of the stage, on the left, and see the Haunted on the ground, munching away at a corpse. They walk up and stealth kill it and promptly alert a group of like 8 other enemies that you aren't able to see because when you're crouch-walking, because of the letterbox effect, you can't see above the tall grass you're skulking through. This will lead to the player panicking, probably depleting their stamina bar fully, and getting turned around for a minute or two as they try to figure out how to get onto the bridge.

Chapter 3: This chapter hammers into your brain positioning and learning to conserve ammo. The entire chapter is basically doing stealth-kill chains on enemies. If one sees you, they're going to alert more. Then you open fire and alert even more and then suddenly you're out of ammo. If you don't sneak around stabbing guys in the head, you're going to lose all your ammo before fighting the boss (the Sadist again). When people compare this game to Resident Evil 4 - which is isn't. At all. By any stretch of the imagination. - this chapter is the one they'll bring up, since you're in a village with not-zombies. That's where the similarities end. In RE4 you were leaking ammo at all times. Never do you reach a point, even post-boss fights, where you're hurting for ammunition. Your melee sucks here, a sharp contrast to the excellent knife in RE4, and you cannot afford to shoot everyone.

In a way, the previous two chapters also have a lesser gimmick of paying attention to the world around you and knowing when you should burn bodies. Most of the time, downed bodies will not get up. After awhile, you start to realize when they're most likely going to. Is there a switch or crank nearby that will require your attention? Look around first.

Chapter 4 goes farther with the introduction to Laura, who can spawn through any corpses left unburned. It also shows you that bunching enemies up will allow you to set multiple enemies on fire at once. If you try to fight Laura, you will die. She's invincible until chapter 10(?) and even then you can only kill her if you have the Rocket Launcher.

Chapter 5 introduces invisible enemies and will prepare you for arena fights while protecting someone. In this case, your partner, Oda. There's a trophy for getting through this shootout without him taking damage. I can only imagine how big a pain in the ass that's going to be. Oda's good, but he's not that good. Enemies also have dynamite, so that's fun. You have a sort of boss fight with Laura, the multi-armed shrieking lady from all the promotional videos. I have absolutely no idea how this fight works. Are you supposed to just burn all the corpses to prevent her from spawning? I never shot her, but I managed to drop her into the furnace twice. The first time didn't kill her, the second did.

Chapter 6 is where the game ramps up its meanness. You have to keep Oda safe again while he unlocks two doors in two separate rooms while enemies spawn in constantly. This will drain you of most of your ammo and will be one of the most difficult parts of Akumu Mode, where every hit, no matter how small, will instantly kill you. After this, you're given a sniper rifle and are effectively given a non-tutorial on when you should use it. Enemies will, at one point, spawn infinitely from across the board. At the midway point of this chapter is another fight against the Sadist. After that, you'll have two giants in a tiny graveyard and then a giant mutant dog. And once you beat it, you'll have to re-enter the boss arena, where another is lurking, to get your partner's glasses.

Chapter 7 teaches you that you really, really have to be mindful of traps. Even ones you will never have any god damn clue would exist before they trigger and instantly kill you. An example: Near the beginning, you see an enemy hanging from a rope. If you drop this enemy off of it, or he gets down himself, it will release a pressure trigger on the boards he was being hanged from, and spikes in the walls - walls that have no indication of housing spikes - will skewer you. Obviously, after that point you'll start taking those guys out at range, but it teaches you that even when you appear to be safe, you might not be. Thus the chapter is mostly comprised of slow moving, sniping, and trying to use the traps to your advantage.

Chapter 8 teaches you to fucking hate enemies you can't backstab and also introduces tiny little enemies you can step on but can still absolutely damage you. The chapter isn't really that long, but it's one of the most miserable levels in the game. There's a trophy for getting through it without shooting your guns. The cave is choked with enemies. Good luck!

Finally, for now anyway, Chapter 9 has Ruvik, the bad guy of the game, randomly appearing and walking at you. I'm not sure yet if you have to shoot him or just avoid him for awhile to make him go away. In any case, all of the enemies in the area were alerted to my presence once Ruvik vanished. I went downstairs to enter the save room to get them off my tail and quit playing. It's too late in the day for that shit. Presumably Ruvik grabbing you is an instant kill like so many other things in this game are.

While the game might try to introduce mechanics in the chapters, it's really just about the gimmicks. Stealth kill everything or the boss pulls them all when you free him. Don't waste ammo on Laura because she can't die. Hide like a wuss inside of a statue and let Oda snipe-kill the two giants so you don't waste a lot of ammo and health doing it yourself. Ruvik is a twat. I know there's a brief 'drive a bus' segment later, I've heard there's an RE5-style ride-on-something-while-chaingunning-shit sequence of some form or another, and I know at least one more arena fight is in the future. I know there's an invisible boss later on.

But before all of that, I have to get through Ruvik and complete chapter 9. And then I have to complete the game. And then I have to replay the game multiple times across its many difficulties. I'll replay on Casual until I get some trophies - all of the 'do this gimmicky shit on a boss' ones or 'completely upgrade all weapons/yourself' - stuff that would just take longer on higher difficulties. Higher difficulties are, specifically, for the trophies associated with them and nothing more.

There is a trophy for beating Akumu Mode. It is called You Asked For It.

I dunno about you jokers, but I sure as hell didn't.

Dishonored and Diablo 3: Breaking OCD.

I don't have great internet. Said internet comes with an almost hilariously low monthly bandwidth limit. It makes downloading games a major thing, and it's one of many reasons I went with a PS4 over the Xbone. I don't have the bandwidth for the One's massive patches/updates. I'll never be able to download a full, retail game on the PS4, though. 30+GB are well beyond the range I can manage. At 150 gigs a month, it wouldn't take long to go over. My download speeds are also not large enough to pull down files quickly, especially over wifi. Thus, sometimes I have to make a decision. Do I delete a game knowing that I'll probably never come back to it, or do I leave it festering on my system, mocking me?

In the case of Dishonored, I chose the high ground. Dunwall City Trials is a DLC made by someone who hated their job, their player base, and fun itself. It has 10 achievements associated with it and after multiple attempts at playing some of the levels, I deleted the base game and all DLC. I abandoned it at 71/80 achievements. Dunwall City Trials might not be impossible, but it certainly is trying to be.

I wrote up the list of Street Fighter achievements despite not beating that game, and while I may yet do that for the two games mentioned in the topic of this post, it won't be until I stop being aggravated at having to give them up. At a point, the OCD that drives me to do this is overpowered by frustration and stress. Even knowing the unfinished games will be a scar on my streak of perfected games, I couldn't do it anymore. It nags at me every day, and I just have to try and ignore it. I cannot go back to that abomination of gaming. Dunwall City Trials taints the entire experience, one that I thought the Daud DLCs already were doing a fine job of on their own. I know a lot of people really loved Daud's two campaigns. I did not. The levels were sloppily designed, the powers were terrible and didn't feel right in comparison to Corvo's, and the achievements were neither difficult nor all that time consuming.

I perfected Dishonored's base game, which I still feel is an excellent piece on its own. Unfortunately, it's a case where a game's DLC completely ruins the package as a whole. I would never recommend Dishonored to anyone, especially if they want to get all of its achievements/trophies. That is a fool's errand, and it's one that only a tiny handful of people would ever be able to do.

As for Diablo 3? I just don't have the desire to grind all six classes to level 70. That's really all there is to that one. Knowing how unbelievably long that takes, and knowing I'd have to go it even slower on my Hardcore character (ie, playing on Normal without the boosted XP gain) absolutely destroyed my desire to return to it. Once I put Ultra SF4 back in, that was the nail on Diablo's coffin. It's not a horrible game - it was when it launched for the PC, but the UEE incarnation is perfectly fine. Just not if you want to grind out achievements. Doubly so if you have other games you're working on. An hour of playing will not get you much progress at all. I may go back to it from time to time, as I have this one on disc, so it's a simple matter of reinstalling, but it won't be any time soon.

For Diablo, I don't think I even need to write an achievement review. It doesn't really have difficult achievements. The only one that requires skill/patience is getting a 50-item callout. And that's mostly down to luck more than anything. The rest of the achievements are either progress-based or simply require you to play for 100 hours. I don't have that kind of time and I literally have all the time in the world to play these games. If you expect me to stick with your game for more than 20-30 hours, you'd better be packing gameplay worth the investment. Diablo 3, at least on last-gen consoles, does not. Were they still being updated like the current-gen systems were... maybe. Maybe.

Right now, I'm working on finishing up Lego Marvel. I jumped from 500/1000 points to 630/1000 in one session. It's mostly replaying stages in Free Mode, doing Open World Cleanup, and collecting characters. 13 achievements + the Platinum remain. Lego Marvel's one of those weird games, like Dark Souls 2, where the Xbox version has a 'you got all other achievements' thing. It's a Platinum achievement. After that, I need to return to Eternal Sonata. That game has very few achievements, but the ones it has require commitment. And a NG+ playthrough. And multiple guides because holy god.

On the PS4 front, sadly, things aren't going much better.

I got my PS4 about two weeks back, give or take. I bought Evil Within on release. Annnnd boy, was that a mistake. Absurd letterboxing, trial-and-error gameplay with infrequent checkpointing, expecting you to know what to do in any given situation without explaining a god damn thing, horrendous boss battles, areas that exist for literally no other reason than to make you burn down stored-up ammo, short levels that feel ten times longer than they are due to how many times you'll die while playing them... it's genuinely one of the worst games I've ever made the mistake of purchasing.

Akumu Mode, which is the toughest thing to do in the game, might be what causes me to abandon the Platinum for the game. I'm not happy that the first retail game I've bought for the system (I grabbed PS4 Minecraft just to have something to play that didn't make me want to strangle someone...) is most likely going to go uncompleted. But I don't think there's anything I can do about it, unless NG+ lets you up the difficulty. If you can go in with a fully-upgraded arsenal, then it might be tolerable. But it's a mode where everything, including environmental objects, are a one-hit kill. One-hit kills in a game with a 30-second load time are insufferable. If I do struggle through it, I'm going to keep a kill counter and notes on what struck me down each time. Maybe write down how long each chapter takes me. Things like that.

Looking forward, as far as PS4 games go, I plan to grab Akiba's Trip, Shadow of Mordor, Costume Quest 2, and Binding of Isaac: Rebirth. As far as 360 titles go, I have no idea. I plan to grab Bayonetta 2 at some point, but it's a Platinum game and I don't want to bust the WiiU's expensive, clunky, terrible gamepad, so I'm not going to try for whatever counts as 100% in that game. Impossible entities do not 'count' as far as my OCD is concerned.

I wish I had seen Dishonored as an impossible, because that's what it turned out to be. It's aggravating, it's maddening, but there's little I can do about it. I thought about downloading Darksiders 2, as I rented that when it released, but I know exactly how long and dull it is. I don't think I need that in my life. As of this writing, the Dragon Age games are on sale. I've always been interested in the series, but I've never played either of them. ...Downside is the first game has scummy DLC practices. ...It also has a ton of DLC. My problem with them is that some only have two achievements, and they seem progression-based. In other words, the only reason they exist is to force completionists and OCD idiots like me into buying them to keep their score from being incomplete.

That's fucking gross, boys and girls.

Plus it's cheaper to buy the Ultimate Edition of Origins on Amazon than it is to grab the game+DLC on Xbox Marketplace, even with discounts. DA2 is more expensive on Amazon, but the bandwidth required for both games basically means they're absolutely not downloadable titles for me.

I've been putting off writing this post, because it'd just mean having to admit and accept that I've given up. I don't like doing that. I don't think anyone who's played Dunwall City Trials would laugh at my giving up, as I'm sure that DLC can't be perfected by most average players. But it won't stop me from being hard on myself for giving up. One of the reasons my brain latched onto this was that I was doing it to keep myself from giving up. I wasn't going to quit playing, no matter how bad or difficult a game was!

But reality and what I'd envisioned are two very different things, sadly. Up until now, nothing's been able to slow my progress down. Dishonored did, and it was a serious blow to my morale. It's something that's had me feeling down and not wanting to get anything done. But Evil Within is staring me down, and I have incomplete titles still on my 360. After a year of suspending play in the 360 version of Minecraft, I went back in and got the two achievements I'd been lacking, then started on Lego Marvel again.

Getting so many achievements in one day has rekindled my fire a bit, but I don't know if it will be fully relit until at least Isaac. That one I know I'll go at full force, and it'll probably suspend my playing of anything else on the system until I'm done. For now, I'll take what I can get. Sometimes you only need a little push to get yourself going. Achievement hunting, as all things, requires motivation. Or are least stubbornness. For awhile, I had neither.