This gives you a wide horizontal perspective but the effect it creates makes you feel like you can never see quite as much as you want to, and it adds immeasurably to the sense that the walls are closing in. TEW runs in a 'letterbox' format that cramps the field of view, and the camera is zoomed pretty close to Sebastian at all times. But there's also a large aspect of TEW's design that is to do with deliberate limits and has been seized upon as incompetence, in particular the black borders and the positioning of Sebastian's body on-screen.
Certain criticisms are fair: the texture pop-in is noticeable, Sebastian's positioning for disarming traps and picking up items is often fiddly, and there's no denying that at certain points the camera is less than helpful. The obvious questions being why and, in the light of the somewhat divided critical reception, was it too late?Īs should be clear from the above I'm something of a fan of Mikami's work, and found a lot to love in TEW.
Yet he has gone on the record as saying that TEW will be his last game as director and, if we take that at face value, has chosen to once again enter the world of survival horror. Years later when Resident Evil badly needed a new start Capcom once again called in Mikami, and with Resident Evil 4 he moved the emphasis firmly away from horror to survival, popularising the over-the-shoulder perspective that still dominates third-person games to this day and crafting one of the best pure action games ever made.Īlong the way Mikami has directed other absolute gems, prime among them God Hand (for my money the best third-person fighting game ever) and Vanquish (the best third-person shooter ever). Resident Evil wasn't the first survival horror game, with titles like Alone in the Dark and System Shock pre-dating it, but it is the one that popularised the term and was successful enough to inspire other developers to follow in its wake (Silent Hill, another influence on TEW, is just one of them). TEW is a determined and sometimes grim-faced trawl over the moments and games that made this man's career, ranging from frame-by-frame remakes of moments like Resident Evil's first zombie head-turning to chapters that resurrect unreleased games (Chapter 9, more on which later).Īnd in this TEW is also the story of a genre. But with that said there's one very important point about the story: this isn't really about Sebastian Castellanos as much as it is Shinji Mikami.
There will be spoilers ahead for certain TEW locations and characters. So what's Shinji saying?Ĭlick to once again enter the world of survival horror. This is not just a loose reinvention and homage to Resident Evil, but one that absolutely goes for the throat in the latter stages, offering up parallels so stark the comparison is direct rather than implied. It was always clear from TEW's title that this in some way marked a return to those roots, but about halfway through I started thinking that someone at Capcom had really pissed Mikami off. Shinji Mikami, the director of The Evil Within (TEW), directed both Resident Evil and Resident Evil 4 when at Capcom.