I'm behind of writing reviews for my played games so the next few will be super casual toss offs of point form thoughts I have on the games without any coalescing ideas or theme to the written reaction
- I like how every chapter that is set in either the residential area or business district has that classic Shinji Mikami difficulty curve: you enter into an area with hostilities that are initially overwhelming and full of enemies outgunning you that, once you hit a certain point in the process of depopulating the arenas while hoovering up items, later shifts from constant anxiety to a power trip where you are totally stocked and at your most powerful. This happens both grandly over the course of the game, going from a barely causing basic mobs to stumble with your peashooter to harpooning former bosses from a block away with smiting crossing bolts, but also with each addition of enemies and area complications into the sandbox of the open world chapters. It's fun, you never fully lose either the empowering or disempowering play periods.
- I wish the stealth had a greater spectrum of tools available to it. The enemy hearing is finely tuned but their sightlines are totally wack - they see with a periphery of 180 degrees and since you can't stealth kill them from anywhere but directly behind them, the herky jerky movement they prowl around with seems like they have been given the more powerful movement mechanics afforded by the engine. I know there are traps you can set, and once you can do your crouch charge and corner kills it works a bit more seamlessly, but it feels underbaked considering how easy it is to kill mobs later on in the game with your expanded 'loud play' expanded arsenal offset by a barely expanded equivalent stealth repertoire.
- Having only played the opening chapter of the first game, I like how The Evil Within 1's iconography is not treated as former set dressing, cadre of the adventure, essential source book text, or a particular serial past its screen. Instead of having it be "last time with Sebastian", the events and actors of the previous game are renewed here for depth that can be assumed without familiarity but which treat the past as a surmounted but lingering height still fogging Sebastian's horizon. It matters more to his character than it does to the player; in our interactions with those returning elements, we can only use our verbs as the same tools used on everything else, but that they return for Sebastian's translative context shows a greater degree of respect for the team's previous works and their world's characters than you get in any Assassin's Creed or Resident Evil, even if those are more lore heavy with more iterations of character moments. It feels like Sebastian was seriously used by the first game that it has never felt like with Leon or Claire.
- The direction of the cinematic sequences fail to ingratiate the ancillary cast into the setting (with exception to Kidman) in any way that feels like they have agency or a relationship with the space. Obviously their being planted within safehouses don't allow them privileges to roam, but given that we see four of the cast whose catalystic placement within STEM instigates the course of the game's events, I would have thought that in the moments the game focuses briefly on that cast, they would have a more entrenched feel within the system. These are characters who know the simulation from many angles, angles which could be used to highlight their expertises (manipulations to the world minor and nebulous/good to offset those of Myra/Stefano/Theodore) and their personalities (Hoffman could be tweaking the holism of the community environment whereas Sykes could be shorting the graphical fidelity to realism to belie the code within). I guess I just wish they didn't feel like pins falling to Sebastian's plot weight rolling like a bowling ball through the plot.
- The foley is mostly great but something about the shotgun sounds feel totally off - the revolver's punch sounds enormous and juicy with echoes reeling off of it, the twang of the crossbow is sufficiently responsive and thunky without superseding the obvious intimacy of a non explosive propellant weapon, yet the shotgun is a hyper compressed .wav file that hardly feels like it plays when firing. I don't know, it felt weird to me.
- The RPG skill mechanics fall off at the end; your economy scales weapons faster and loadouts wider than Sebastian can keep up with them so by the time you're improving healing from 125% efficacy to 150% efficacy, you're never rolling less than 6 health kits anyways so the usefulness of them expanding out doesn't really matter. The same goes with stamina, health, reticle sway, etc.
- OK, speed round: I like the flippant dialogue accompanying the score attack minigames matching how tangential those are, even lampshading the plot a bit. I really don't like Kidman's outfit; the jeans, jacket, and one glove combo is just atrocious and underbaked even next to Dadbastian. Why do you go to the business district so many more times than the residential area? I actually prefer the res area, but once chapter 3 is over, it's bye bye. Snapping to grid should have a greater magnetism, and probably a bit of camera focusing change as well - I had trouble sometimes telling if I was pressed against a wall when it wasn't an obviously flat surface, and seeing past my own model was often difficult as well.
- I like how every chapter that is set in either the residential area or business district has that classic Shinji Mikami difficulty curve: you enter into an area with hostilities that are initially overwhelming and full of enemies outgunning you that, once you hit a certain point in the process of depopulating the arenas while hoovering up items, later shifts from constant anxiety to a power trip where you are totally stocked and at your most powerful. This happens both grandly over the course of the game, going from a barely causing basic mobs to stumble with your peashooter to harpooning former bosses from a block away with smiting crossing bolts, but also with each addition of enemies and area complications into the sandbox of the open world chapters. It's fun, you never fully lose either the empowering or disempowering play periods.
- I wish the stealth had a greater spectrum of tools available to it. The enemy hearing is finely tuned but their sightlines are totally wack - they see with a periphery of 180 degrees and since you can't stealth kill them from anywhere but directly behind them, the herky jerky movement they prowl around with seems like they have been given the more powerful movement mechanics afforded by the engine. I know there are traps you can set, and once you can do your crouch charge and corner kills it works a bit more seamlessly, but it feels underbaked considering how easy it is to kill mobs later on in the game with your expanded 'loud play' expanded arsenal offset by a barely expanded equivalent stealth repertoire.
- Having only played the opening chapter of the first game, I like how The Evil Within 1's iconography is not treated as former set dressing, cadre of the adventure, essential source book text, or a particular serial past its screen. Instead of having it be "last time with Sebastian", the events and actors of the previous game are renewed here for depth that can be assumed without familiarity but which treat the past as a surmounted but lingering height still fogging Sebastian's horizon. It matters more to his character than it does to the player; in our interactions with those returning elements, we can only use our verbs as the same tools used on everything else, but that they return for Sebastian's translative context shows a greater degree of respect for the team's previous works and their world's characters than you get in any Assassin's Creed or Resident Evil, even if those are more lore heavy with more iterations of character moments. It feels like Sebastian was seriously used by the first game that it has never felt like with Leon or Claire.
- The direction of the cinematic sequences fail to ingratiate the ancillary cast into the setting (with exception to Kidman) in any way that feels like they have agency or a relationship with the space. Obviously their being planted within safehouses don't allow them privileges to roam, but given that we see four of the cast whose catalystic placement within STEM instigates the course of the game's events, I would have thought that in the moments the game focuses briefly on that cast, they would have a more entrenched feel within the system. These are characters who know the simulation from many angles, angles which could be used to highlight their expertises (manipulations to the world minor and nebulous/good to offset those of Myra/Stefano/Theodore) and their personalities (Hoffman could be tweaking the holism of the community environment whereas Sykes could be shorting the graphical fidelity to realism to belie the code within). I guess I just wish they didn't feel like pins falling to Sebastian's plot weight rolling like a bowling ball through the plot.
- The foley is mostly great but something about the shotgun sounds feel totally off - the revolver's punch sounds enormous and juicy with echoes reeling off of it, the twang of the crossbow is sufficiently responsive and thunky without superseding the obvious intimacy of a non explosive propellant weapon, yet the shotgun is a hyper compressed .wav file that hardly feels like it plays when firing. I don't know, it felt weird to me.
- The RPG skill mechanics fall off at the end; your economy scales weapons faster and loadouts wider than Sebastian can keep up with them so by the time you're improving healing from 125% efficacy to 150% efficacy, you're never rolling less than 6 health kits anyways so the usefulness of them expanding out doesn't really matter. The same goes with stamina, health, reticle sway, etc.
- OK, speed round: I like the flippant dialogue accompanying the score attack minigames matching how tangential those are, even lampshading the plot a bit. I really don't like Kidman's outfit; the jeans, jacket, and one glove combo is just atrocious and underbaked even next to Dadbastian. Why do you go to the business district so many more times than the residential area? I actually prefer the res area, but once chapter 3 is over, it's bye bye. Snapping to grid should have a greater magnetism, and probably a bit of camera focusing change as well - I had trouble sometimes telling if I was pressed against a wall when it wasn't an obviously flat surface, and seeing past my own model was often difficult as well.