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.

The evil inside video game