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.