![]() ![]() Horror games are almost always made to be deliberate, often building tension with a lack of resources and dangerous encounter design. ![]() While collectibles and skill trees are often good distractions to get players through a “New Game +” run, they can only go so far. But in the horror genre, all that’s really needed is a good game and few reasons to play it again. Companies will add multiplayer to games that don’t need it or even be smart enough to offer free updates to get players to revisit their games. Replay value has become a major selling point to any game publisher. They don’t just offer another reason to play a game again they change the way you can play it. ![]() This dramatic shift is exactly why bonus weapons are so important. What once was a game of tension and careful planning is now a carefree rampage where players are free to roam wherever they wish, as long as they have enough ammo. Even fearsome bosses and enemies players were previously forced to run away from simply withered away under the power of the rocket launcher. No longer did players need to slink through encounters or try to conserve ammo when they could just destroy any enemy in their path. ![]() Such powerful weaponry changes the way The Evil Within plays entirely. Those up to the challenge could unlock Brass Knuckles, which provided a powerful boost to Sebastian’s melee attack, for beating the game on Nightmare difficulty. The more intrepid players who finish the Archive and find all Map Fragments are awarded a High Power Sniper Rifle, an Automatic Handgun, and a Burst Handgun. Simply beating the game gives the player a Rocket Launcher and Assault Rifle, each with limited ammo. Playing through The Evil Within recently, I had completely forgotten about the several bonus unlocks granted for besting the game’s challenges. Games such as Silent Hill: Homecoming and Resident Evil 5 kept the tradition alive, offering various weapons and costumes for meeting certain conditions, but it wasn’t enough to stem the tide of developers turning what once would have been included in the base game into DLC. The Dead Space series, one of the best horror series of the Xbox 360 and PS3 generation, was particularly prone to this practice, turning specialized weapons and armor across all three games into DLC and pre-order incentives. In the post- Resident Evil 4 era, the practice of developers including special weapons and items dramatically decreased, most likely in favor of providing them through paid DLC or pre-order bonuses. It was a different method of unlocking entirely, but one that still offered players a way to experiment with the pacing and structure of the game. With the advent of the PS2, some games such as The Suffering would hide their wildest contraptions behind secret codes. Some games would unlock costumes or other items, but the overall theme was consistent do a good job, get a cool thing. Silent Hill would let players get a Katana or a laser gun on a second playthrough for meeting certain conditions. Resident Evil granted an infinite-use Rocket Launcher for completing the game in under three hours. Since Resident Evil released in 1996, special items granted upon completing the game have been all but a standard for survival horror games. But The Evil Within gets one more crucial element of classic survival horror right: The Bonus Weapon. The Evil Within has clearly studied each and every one of these titles, and while it doesn’t pay perfect homage to the kind of scares they delivered back in the day, it does a good enough job of reminding horror fans why they fell in love with the genre in the first place. Series like Silent Hill and Eternal Darkness used more psychological methods to get under players skin, twisting reality against the player and forcing them to adapt. Games like Resident Evil 2 and Siren didn’t skimp on their difficulty, providing a sense of tension that other games’ encounters just didn’t have. While nowadays the classic horror games of the PS1-PS2 era are characterized by their poor controls and obtuse puzzle design, in their time they were known for much more. For the most part, the game delivered on the gameplay front, and despite a lackluster story and a mishmash of genre cliches, fans of classic horror games devoured The Evil Within whole, and it’s not hard to see why it gets the basics right. Shinji Mikami’s long-awaited return to the horror survival genre promised fans a true old-school horror experience, filled with unrelenting challenge and non-stop scares. The Evil Within was a divisive game when it released in 2014. ![]()
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