But these things aren’t always visually clear, or the open door is triggered by something arbitrary, and you’ll spend a few runs trooping backwards and forwards, trying to find the gameplay trigger to end the pain. Finding this will likely trigger the basement door, and you can progress. Each ‘run’ wants you to find a thing – a torch, some matches, a camera – or to find the open drawer or door that wasn’t open before. That’s a death-blow when Evil Inside’s level design is so patchy. In a better game it would make things tense, but here it’s interminable. Mark clearly doesn’t want to raise a sweat, so you’re moving at something approximating a single kilometre-per-hour. Strip out the fear and you’re left with the game, and there’s nowhere near enough to enjoy. One sequence in particular is a direct rip from Ringu. The happenings also have a habit of directly copying iconic moments from film. Once you realise that Evil Inside is going to sporadically flash mannequins at you as you walk about, the fear evaporates. Yes, babies can be creepy, but a baby that looks like it was modelled in the dancing-baby era, unanimated, and then scaled up to human size is – unfortunately – going to make me full-body chuckle. The jump scares are completely undermined by the graphics. You’re always aware of them sitting there, and it’s not scary, it’s just surprising, and those two are not the same thing. I’ve never understood the cold jump scare: it’s the equivalent of having someone sitting next to you, staring at you, waiting to shout loudly at random points. Turn a corner – LOUD SHRIEK – there’s a clown. Open a cupboard – LOUD SHRIEK – and there’s your dead mum. Evil Inside, perhaps because it doesn’t have the privilege of immersive graphics, absolutely flipping loves them. If only the rest of Evil Inside was even close to this level of tension.Īh, the jump scare. But the walls are streaming with blood and littered with messages, which are only seen in the light of the flash. It’s a sequence that’s pilfered, of course, as so much of Evil Inside is, but you’re given a polaroid camera and it’s your only light source, so you’re illuminating your surroundings in the hope of seeing an exit. Mostly because what happens isn’t scary.Ī fantastic sequence near the end is an example of this. This is where Evil Inside is at its best: when it leans on what might happen, rather than what actually happens. You won’t want to turn around, simply because your imagination creates horrible possibilities. Breathy voice acting appears when you least want it (in a good way), and classic horror tropes like a ghost whispering “don’t look back” are still effective. Oh Mark, you deserved all you got.īetter is the audio design, which creates some decent moments. You return home to do what any grieving son would do – contact your mum via Ouija board – which plunges you into a parallel hellscape of your family home. You play Mark, a poor chap who’s mother has been killed by his father, and his father has been chucked in the clink as a result. There’s a story that slowly becomes less and less relevant, until an ending reminds you that it exists. You’re completing multiple ‘runs’ of this type, and the horror escalates.

Step through the basement door and the loop starts again. You walk up and down the corridor, getting barraged by horrific things as you complete simple tasks and puzzles, which eventually leads you to a basement door. We won’t get snarky – while it’s a near-direct lift, it’s not as if you can play P.T.

And now we have Evil Inside.Įvil Inside is moderately larger than P.T., as it’s an L-shaped corridor with one more staircase and a couple more rooms, but it’s ostensibly the same set up. to an entire house with mixed but mostly positive results. Since then, we’ve had a few games that have tried to capture its unbearable tension, most notably Visage, which extrapolated the single corridor of P.T.

Evil inside ps4