The Evil Within gameplay trailer is bloody, disgusting
It Mikami feel sick.
'Butcher can't start an E3 demo strung upside down in some kind of dark, blood soaked slaughter house,' you might say - well clearly in Shinji Mikami's The Evil Within game you can.
That's Shinji Mikami who created Resident Evil, in case you don't know.
These days he works for Bethesda, his new Japanese studio Tango Gameworks bankrolled by Bethesda's parent Zenimax.
The E3 2013 demo is talked over by Bethesda's mouthpiece Pete Hines as part of a PlayStation Livecast presentation.
It begins as I mentioned: main character Sebastian, a detective, is strung strung upside down alongside half-a-dozen or so corpses in a dank and dark and blood soaked interior.
A hulking and equally grimy brute is his apparent tormentor, glimpsed at the beginning dragging a body into another visible room where a slab/table awaits.
What Sebastian does next is probably a nicer surprise to see in the video itself - particularly the ending. But it doesn't look easy.
"It is a game that we want to be difficult," affirmed Hines. "We don't want it to feel like oh this is just really easy and I can make mistakes and I'll be fine. Part of the survival aspect and the horror aspect is creating that tension."
So it is that you'll be defenceless for the whole first part of the game. "You just have to think your way through the areas that you're in." (Psst: why doesn't Sebastian keep the knife?)
"It's Shinji - he's not the father of survival-horror for no reason. The guy's got some pretty twisted, warped ideas on how to scare people."
Pete Hines
Even when you're armed, bullets will be sparse, and shooting enemies - even in the head - won't necessarily kill them. "You can shoot a guy's legs and he'll fall down on the ground. Now maybe you took him down and he's going to stay there," said Hines, "or maybe he's just faking it and waiting for you to get close so he can jump at you."
The story, beyond Sebastian being called the scene of a heinous murder and waking up in body-strewn asylum, is a secret. On suspicions of enemies having a supernatural bent, Hines remarked: "It's Shinji - he's not the father of survival-horror for no reason. The guy's got some pretty twisted, warped ideas on how to scare people.
"Things like blood and guts and gore: that stuff is in all kinds of games now so it doesn't have the same impact - you aren't scared or frightened just by 'oh there's blood'. You have to figure out new ways to shake people up."
The Evil Within is built on a repurposed id Tech 5 engine and is due out on PC, PS3, PS4, Xbox 360 and Xbox One next year. The demo was running on PC, Pete Hines confirmed to Eurogamer this afternoon.
