Shinji Mikami's survival horror The Evil Within is next week's Epic Store freebie
Alongside Eternal Threads.
If you've been looking to stock up on the spooks and scares in anticipation of this year's impending Halloween, the Epic Games Store has your back; next week's freebie over there is The Evil Within, the acclaimed horror from Resident Evil creator Shinji Mikami. And it's joined by the Eurogamer recommended Eternal Threads.
The Evil Within - which was created by Ghostwire: Tokyo and Hi-Fi Rush developer Tango Gameworks, the studio Mikami departed earlier this year - released all the way back in 2014, dragging players, in the role of rugged police detective Sebastian Castellanos, along on a positively bonkers ride through the shape-shifting likes of a dilapidated asylum, a fading mansion, a mannequin factory, and more.
It's a return to the kind of nail-bitingly tense third-person survival horror Mikami's Resident Evil games - particularly the revolutionary Resident Evil 4 - were known for, and it all plays out like an enthusiastic love letter to the horror genre as a whole, packing in everything from sadistic chainsaw-wielding cannibals to J-horror-style hair ghosts. It's great, despite a few rough edges.
"The Evil Within is a generous game, lengthy but never repetitive," Eurogamer contributor Simon Parkin wrote in his 8/10 review back at release. "But it also eschews many of the modern improvements to the third-person action game... The Evil Within does not blemish [Mikami's] record. But neither does the game enchant and disrupt in the way that Vanquish and the others managed. This is Mikami revisiting his past glories and, as such, it's both a delight and a disappointment."
And that's not the only Epic freebie coming next Thursday, 19th October. It'll be joined by developer Cosmonaut's Eternal Threads, a "single-player, first-person story-driven puzzle game of time manipulation, choice and consequence", in which players attempt to manipulate the lives of six people in the week leading up to a devastating house fire, to prevent their deaths.
"Marrying some frightfully clever time-scrolling with a captivating look into its characters' lives," Eurogamer contributor Vikki Blake wrote in her Recommended review last year, "Eternal Threads is a nosy player's dream."