The Evil Within Review

The Evil Within is not a game that relies on cheap jump scares. It’s driven by a slow, sustained, and deeply pervasive sense of dread that sets your mind racing at every crunch of glass beneath your feet and every distant groan from an unseen enemy. Much of this tension is thanks to the game’s striking use of atmosphere, so gloomy and impactful it often borders on suffocating, but it’s also a testament to an action-heavy combat system whose scant ammunition and immediate threat of death is just as demanding as it is satisfying. Were it not for the occasional stumble into moments of immense frustration and an aimless, sputtering story, The Evil Within could have been something truly great. What’s left, though, is an uneven but ultimately captivating ode to the glory days of survival horror.

At the center of it all is Sebastian Castellanos, a detective called in to investigate a vicious collection of murders at a local mental hospital. The brief preamble leading up to this investigation is all the calm The Evil Within can muster, because from then on Castellanos is sent tumbling through a twisted and only occasionally coherent story involving supernatural apparitions, gruesome monsters, and a seemingly infinite series of nightmarish backdrops.