Possible Spoilers for The Evil Within

The Evil Within 2 is locked and loaded on my Xbox, waiting to be booted up. But before I felt confidently familiar with the story, I felt that I needed to brush up on my Evil Within knowledge. More specifically, I needed to make sure I understood just what the hell happened.

I played through the entire first game, and still never really had a confident grasp on the narrative. It took me till a few minutes of hindsight to realize that the entire game actually took place in the character’s mind. I mean, I knew that some of the messed up shit that happens to Castellanos was fake, but I figured it was mostly hallucination.  Anyways, I recommend reading the wikipedia plot if you want the entire story explained in a straightforward manner. Because I can’t do it.

While I didn’t love The Evil Within, I didn’t hate it. It definitely had its issues but there were some cool ideas there. Castellanos was physically weak though, and his running stamina was laughably short. I’m serious. I’m talking Homer Simpson levels of endurance. Playing the game on Casual (or Easy, if you wanna call it that) gave some room for error, though, and I ultimately enjoyed the psychological thriller. There’s a New Game + mode that I’m seriously considering giving a shot. But first I need to get through all the DLC, because that’s where I left off. The whole adventure left me a little burned out, so I decided to give the game a rest for a while. But now with TEW2 on my to-do list, I needed to get it out of the way. That meant starting with…

The Assignment

The Assignment was the first piece of DLC and followed Special Agent Nicole Kid— Juli Kidman in her attempt to track down Leslie, the psych patient in the main game that pretty much everyone wants a piece of. It takes place in parallel with the events of The Evil Within, i.e. it’s what Kidman was doing while everyone else was doing the other stuff. This piece of game was.. well it was fucking ridiculous. It just doesn’t make any sense. I’m not even talking about the story!

For one, Kidman doesn’t have her gun. So you’ll spend the vast majority of the game playing hide and seek around corners and behind boxes. You’ll throw bottles, and whisper to get the enemy’s attention, Sam Fisher style. Except you can’t kill them, because as I mentioned, Kidman doesn’t have her gun. Except she does have her gun, until she doesn’t. Then she does again. Why does she only get to use her gun during one specific scene, when she has seemingly unlimited ammo, only for the gun to magically disappear again. Then, toward the end of the DLC, after sneaking around an entire cemetery throwing bottles and running from enemies, she finally makes it into the church, where you’re treated to a cutscene WHERE SHE PULLS OUT HER GUN! Where did she pull this from? We can only imagine.

The game then takes it one step further when, after an entire game’s worth of extremely limited running ability, she can apparently sprint full speed down multiple corridors without stopping. Where did this newfound running ability come from? One of my all-time video game pet peeves is when characters do things in cutscenes that you can’t do while playing. I really hope the next part of DLC is better.

The Consequence

Instant deaths are bullshit. They always have been, and they always will be. I was hoping that the second part of the DLC would lose the hide and seek crap and actually give Kidman a means to fight, but so far it’s just more of the same. The hide and seek mechanic is okay in small doses, but here I am, several hours later, still doing the same shit. Still hiding from the same enemy, still playing hide and seek, and still dying instantly if the creature gets too close. It’s so old by now.

At this point I can totally see myself turning this off and just moving on. I have no desire to play Ring Around the Rosies with the high-heeled, armless nurse monster for the tenth time. The fact that Kidman can’t run if the creature gets too close is also bullshit. Like she was a fucking track star to begin with! It’s just not fun.

-Yep, done with this. Fuck this DLC.

Man, I hope The Evil Within 2 isn’t full of shit like that, or I’m in for one long, long game.