SPOILERS BELOW (TEW2, SH2, MGS2)
You might not believe it, you might think it is utterly false but I think I can back it up. In fact, I dare say it is *also* a modern Metal Gear Solid 2 in many ways. Bear with me on this, give me the time to explain.
It is difficult to describe how much of an impact The Evil Within 2 has been for me. Rarely a game has absorbed me to the point where I would feel this dreadful feeling of emptiness for days after I completed it. It was an exhausting but ultimately fulfilling journey. That this game had flopped so much in sales ultimately meant that few people took the time to think about this game critically, and even fewer wrote it down on the internet. What the game said, and how we would interpret it remained uncharted territory, and there isn't a worse fate for a survival horror game than to realize there isn't a lot written about it. This crucial need for a survival horror to exist beyond the game itself, the food for thoughts needed to crystallize our experience...all things that TEW2 were denied at launch. So I'd like to start a discussion about how I felt and how I experienced the game, after I have spent much needed months to let it brew in my head.
There are many things that pushes me to make such a claim, both thematically and qualitatively, so I'll try to explain in a way that is clear for everyone. But the gist of it is that this game has the intelligence and insight to think about how a survival horror should be created thematically, and does it in a way that is utterly impressive.
Silent Hill and STEM
One crucial part of both games is that they both come from somewhere, they are both sequel but they also aren't. This history is what makes the games so much more important. Silent Hill 1 is the story of a cult, with a town controlled through the power of Alessa Gillespie. Her trauma and resentment is shaping the town to what she see fit. Harry Mason, the playable character, has no control over this town and neither has any other inhabitants of the town. Harry was removed from the picture story-wise, he was driving the story forward, but he wasn't the focus of the story.
Silent Hill 2, though, is radically different in its interpretation. They took the most interesting character of the first game, the town of Silent Hill, and shaped it to take a central focus to the plot. Suddenly, no one was at the control of the town, it was of its own mind. This fundamentally changes the dynamic the characters have with the town. They weren't seeing the product of someone else's creation, they were seeing themselves. The town decided that it would shape itself from the fear, pain, trauma and guilt of the people it chooses. James Sunderland became the central focus, both with his personal story and how it would visualize within Silent Hill. Every enemy, every area was open to interpretation as to what it says in regard to James, but also to the other characters roaming the town.
The Evil Within 1 and 2 follows a strangely similar pattern. STEM is a system that allows the connection of several minds together in a virtual world. Using the brain of an individual at its core, a world is created that is shaped by the owner. The Evil Within 1 starts from here. STEM's core is the brain of Ruvik, and he is a ruthless psychopath who shapes his world however he wants it and tries to kill everyone who is connected inside it as revenge. The main character, Sebastian Castellanos, is as useful, if not even less, as Harry Mason was to the general plot. None of what happens concerns him to a deep level. It is first and foremost the story of Ruvik, slowly unraveled through the course of the game. While Harry at least had his daughter to save as a motivator, the tiny bit of backstory of Sebastian was concerning the loss of his daughter and the disappearance of his wife through diaries, which only explained why he was so aloof and stern through the main story, but wasn't deeply connected to the general plot of the first Evil Within game.
It now comes to The Evil Within 2. STEM, just like the town of Silent Hill has been reinterpreted. The core of the system is still helmed by an individual, this time by Sebastian's presumed dead daughter. She doesn't shape its world, but is rather used as a stabilizer for the town of Union. As the core is nowhere to be found, Union starts to crumble. This is where people are able to shape the town into what they want them to. People, linked together through the STEM system, are able to directly influence this world, and make the changes they want both to the town and the people inside it. This particular difference is what makes The Evil Within 2 shine, and maybe serve as an evolution of the concept behind Silent Hill 2.
Sebastian's continuous role
What needs to be understood is that the town, instead of becoming this unknowable space that does unexplained things seemingly influenced by the people inside without their consent, is now at the service of the people. The enemy isn't just the town or yourself, it's all the people who uses it to shape their own worlds inside it. The focus is more than ever on the human side, and this is probably where TEW2 goes above and beyond to deliver an experience. This is where it gets fascinating.
At the center of this is, weirdly enough, Sebastian Castellanos. This barely-a-character from the first game immensely benefited from this history to swerve into a much tighter focus in the second game, as opposed to Silent Hill 2 who started with a mostly clean slate. His meager, but nonetheless striking backstory told through diaries in TEW1 becomes important in this sequel as he is in a quest to find his daughter inside the virtual world of STEM.
Many things are striking, and decidedly unusual when it comes to the handling of a main character in a survival-horror universe. The first is for the sequel to fully acknowledge what happened in the past games, which seldom happens in the genre as games are very self-contained, and the second is to make the experience of the previous game something that is carried through the second. Resident Evil, for example, is full of characters that never seemed to be scarred by what happened previously during their new adventures. Clock Tower has Jennifer coming back as a protagonist in the second game, but her trauma is soon waved away as a the threat of a new Scissorman appears. In the case of Sebastian, he didn't, and couldn't move on from the events of Beacon Mental Hospital. His trauma is a crucial part of the story, and the way it is handled is fascinating. This focus is even more surprising because TEW1 was in many ways a RE4 clone that didn't touch upon the mental well-being of Sebastian, and the ending didn't indicate that he would feel the after-effects of his hellish journey. He was pretty much poised to become the Leon Kennedy-like of the series, coming out unscathed of every horrific events he has gone through, but Sebastian came out as a wreck, and I couldn't even begin to tell you how surprising it was that things turned out this way.
The events of the first game have seen him deeply scarred, and the gaslighting of his experience by his peers has made matters worse as he was made to believe it never happened in the first place. In fact, one indicator he was convincing himself it wasn't true and not many has picked up is the hand wrap on his right hand that he carries throughout the game. Ruvik, the antagonist the first game, has made an indelible mark on anyone who has visited his world on their right hand. An irrefutable proof of what they experienced was real, but the constant psychological abuse he had to suffer back in the real world was such that he started to doubt it ever happened, that he was just mentally ill. This is something that follows him throughout the game even as he finds himself in another instance of STEM. Now that I know it exists, what was real ? And what was false ? If STEM really existed, have I ever came out of STEM in the first place ?
Going back to what I said previously, SH2's Silent Hill used the past and guilt of the people against them, yet it was never truly antagonistic. It could be seen as a trial by fire to overcome what ails the people who finds themselves drawn to the town. You could, theoretically, come out a stronger person out of it. It was a reflection of themselves they had to face. STEM, on the other hand, becomes more interesting than that because it is more than a reflection of Sebastian since it happens inside someone's world. This reflection can be shaped, by actual people, to show Sebastian the things they want him to see. Considering his role cannot be dissociated from his experiences, and his trauma plays a huge part in everything he does with how the world shapes itself, the implications of The Evil Within 2 becomes much more interesting to dissect at a human level.
Lingering Trauma
The trauma of Sebastian coupled with the world of STEM creates a place where his mental illness is directly used against him by the people who wishes him harm, but also by the system itself at an insidious level. STEM forces people to relive their memories that are coloured by their state of mind. Think of it like a depressed person who would block out their happy memories and only remembers the bad one but at an even worse level. Sebastian would relive his memories through STEM and only focus on the bad side, make it ten times worse than it actually was, with no hope at forgiveness or redemption. This is the kind of thing that happens to Sebastian throughout the journey. One example of this is the graffiti posted above, a nod back to his experience of Mental Beacon Hospital. He cannot be made to forget, as he needs to be fully broken.
Again, this is something that TEW2 iterates on SH2 in an even smarter way. The guilt and trauma isn't just suppressed with the goal to face them, it is processed through a system that aims to make you relive your memories, make them infinitely worse than they are because of Sebastian's trauma and coping mechanisms, and rewrite them as the new and real narrative. This is not just an exploration of a mental state, but how it evolves over time, and built upon a survival horror setting. But what is most interesting is that it works especially well because the player is the ultimate witness. The player knows about what he had lived through the first game, so his newly crafted experience of Beacon Mental Hospital, that we have to relive through differently again and again through the course of the sequel becomes evidence of Sebastian's mental state, and how his trauma is affecting every part of his being. The goal of this sequel isn't about discovering what is affecting Sebastian, which is the premise of many survival-horrors that are self-contained and has to restart from a clean slate every time, it is going the extra mile on displaying out how it affects him.
James Howell in his 'A Memory of Fire' analysis of The Evil Within 2 had this to say:
Silent Hill never once claimed to be wrong about what the characters experience, it only tries to become the trial to overcome. Face yourself, and you'll come out of it alive. The Evil Within 2 brings doubt on top of this premise. What if it isn't true ? What if what's being shown is not really what happened, and only you, the player, is able to make what's right from wrong ? It's in this interstice between truth and lies that TEW2 manages to offer something new to the genre of Survival Horror. It's not just about using someone's trauma against them. It's not even about discovering what the character has to face, it's about using the player's omniscience as the driving force of the game. The player, who knows what happened, becomes in a position where they don't just spectate Sebastian's journey the same way they did James Sunderland, they re-enact his life experiences like they did before. Through repetition and awareness, the player doesn't just follow what's along, they have the full knowledge of what's going on and can assimilate the differences between what they've played in The Evil Within 1 and what's happening in the sequel at a meta-narrative level, and it is a device that another mainstream and successful game has made: Metal Gear Solid 2.
Indeed, this is a similar pattern as to what happens in Metal Gear Solid 2, something that James Howell has written with much more eloquence and clarity than I could:
The story archetypes that compose The Evil Within revolves around the way he shapes his guilt to blame himself and the way he works to resolve them through acceptance and confrontation. In TEW2, his self-image is so low that he actively works to re-shape old memories in order to take the blame for things he isn't to blame for. The first instance of Sebastian's rewriting of his own memories come from the opening sequence, in which Sebastian is alone trying to save his daughter from the house fire, even though journals present in the first game tells that both his wife and firefighters were with him during this tragedy. The opening already showcases Sebastian's state of mind and his role as an unreliable narrator. What is made apparent is that his only way to cope is to blame himself even more, to the point that he distorts the truth to fit his own narrative that everything is his fault. Gradually, The death of his partner Joseph became his own fault even though he had nothing to do with it, and the disappearance of his wife was also his even though she left by herself. James writes:
This coping of Sebastian is made even more apparent when the games forces you to relive the same levels as The Evil Within 1. More than the added knowledge of the player I mentioned before, James goes on to say that the game itself incorporates "the player's memory of the first game as a game into its storytelling.".
This screen shown above comes from another memory of Sebastian within STEM. He sees himself back in Beacon Mental Hospital, at the very same spot he first met Laura, one of the antagonists of the first game. Not only that, the black cinematic bars from TEW1 that was removed in the sequel makes another appearance at this precise moment. All conditions are met to call back to your experience of the first game as a player, but how it is also different from what it once was, as the presence of the other Sebastian betrays his inability to move on.
James' interpretation of the callbacks goes much beyond simply replaying the levels of the first game, as he also finds among other things that the first memory Sebastian to relives happens in the exact same place as the title menu, and starting the game puts you beyond those double doors, which leads to the same place as the screen above shows, facing his other self from the previous game, locked away in his memories, but also in the game world of The Evil Within 1. According to James, "Sebastian takes us to a literal space that he remembers, while also taking us through the start screen of The Evil Within. He is back; so are we.".
(credit: James Howell)
The Evil Within makes it known that it wants the player to be aware of being one, and Sebastian to be the character of a video game. Sebastian's arc in the sequel cannot be dissociated from his role as a video game character, as his trauma is directly linked to the player, and the result directly crafted from our experience through the first Evil Within. We are both his savior and his tormentor, Sebastian came out alive but scarred. He needs us but he also needs to reject us in order to be able to live. Raiden's rejection of the player in Metal Gear Solid 2 was illustrated by the rejection of his dog tag with our information written on it, in order for him to write his own story. But to move away from us, Sebastian needs more than that. He needs to stop re-enacting what the player did right now, and start changing things.
Sebastian's rejection happens through a series of events but one in particular is the highlight of this game. I've previously said that other people can shape the world inside STEM, and this is precisely what Theodore does. He manipulates Sebastian into numerous guilt trips in order to break him even further, but his gradual acknowledgment that things aren't his fault allows for the strength to fight back against Theodore and at the same time his self-image. This happens in a literal way, as Theodore sends him against his worst nightmares by facing the bosses of The Evil Within 1 through a boss gauntlet. But when the player is given control for Sebastian to re-enact the events of the first game, he suddenly stops running against The Sadist and decides to fight back, to the point where he takes The Sadist's chainsaw from him and slashes him into two. This gauntlet sees Sebastian taking apart the notable bosses of the first Evil Within, as to finally confront his pain and guilt, with the strength he gained from the reconciliation of the player and the character, this time not by being dependent of the player but by taking control and for the player to follow his lead. The repetition is no more, and he faces his memories in order to be rewritten as they once were, but with the strength to not be stricken with guilt over it.
James says:
This, is also another thing that I believe The Evil Within 2 manages to do better than Silent Hill 2. It is not just a romanticized version of mental illness that ends with death. Sebastian is allowed for the room to breathe, think and handle his illness. He makes mistakes but is allowed to make amends. He is given the ability to heal both by himself and through the help of the player. Psychological horror doesn't just end with gloom and doom, it doesn't have to demonize mental illness as something you will never be able to move away from, as if you'll always be fundamentally broken and your only respite is to end yourself. Sebastian's journey is one of healing and fulfillment, not one of victimization and despair. To be able to pull something like that in a survival horror and even more, to be successful at it, is something I deeply enjoy. Especially as the Silent Hill fanbase has been trying to tie the "In Water" into an established canon, something that still makes me feel uncomfortable, as if the only way to forgive yourself is to end your own life. This is why I consider it a modern Silent Hill 2 the most, because its handling of the tropes are now reused in a way that is more current to our times. It doesn't ape what came before, it understands and transforms it into something that feels contemporary.
Sebastian's interaction with his daughter is also interesting to see. From a man who painfully made peace with the idea that he'll never see his daughter again, to him progressively grasping the surreal idea that she is still alive and has to find her in a surreal world. It's the kind of honest reaction that you see in a person that cannot just instantly act as if nothing happened after years of separation. It's an emotion and feeling that needs to grow back, an awkwardness that has to be conquered. The idea of a physical and mental barrier that separates him from his daughter is interesting. I liked that about it, it didn't feel stale, it didn't feel like the usual kind of video game dad stories, it felt very believable.
All in all, it was an emotional journey that I am extremely glad to have played and I couldn't be more sad to see that it flopped. The real crime is that I got it only for 20€ when it's worth 60€ and more. An incredible crop of a game that is a reinvention of the psychological horror genre for me. It doesn't just carelessly reuse tropes, it understands them, assimilates them and then puts them into the game in a way that fits the themes. It's a game done with a certain kind of intelligence that I don't think many survival horrors takes the time to display. I do not want to bog down my thread even more as I wrote in a frenzy, but the gameplay system is equally incredible, and as you might have surmised works incredibly well to fit the themes of the game. I'd compare the open-world to a conductor guiding you through the world, you know something is going to happen, you just don't know when. I am now convinced that open-world works extremely well for the survival-horror. Don't knock it until you try it.
I hope it'll allow for some of you to reconsider the worth of this game, or maybe to be interested into playing it. It's very much worth it, it's not often I praise a game like this, but it deserves every praise it gets, and I'm sad it doesn't have the same kind of discussion that Silent Hill 2 got throughout its lifetime.
Also! Many thanks to James Howell's analysis that shaped much of my critical thinking about the game. His analysis is pure genius and you will not be disappointed by this read that goes into much more detail than I ever could. It's not just a must read, it's a defining point of any critical writing of the game just like his MGS2 analysis from 11 years ago. Go and read it.
You might not believe it, you might think it is utterly false but I think I can back it up. In fact, I dare say it is *also* a modern Metal Gear Solid 2 in many ways. Bear with me on this, give me the time to explain.
It is difficult to describe how much of an impact The Evil Within 2 has been for me. Rarely a game has absorbed me to the point where I would feel this dreadful feeling of emptiness for days after I completed it. It was an exhausting but ultimately fulfilling journey. That this game had flopped so much in sales ultimately meant that few people took the time to think about this game critically, and even fewer wrote it down on the internet. What the game said, and how we would interpret it remained uncharted territory, and there isn't a worse fate for a survival horror game than to realize there isn't a lot written about it. This crucial need for a survival horror to exist beyond the game itself, the food for thoughts needed to crystallize our experience...all things that TEW2 were denied at launch. So I'd like to start a discussion about how I felt and how I experienced the game, after I have spent much needed months to let it brew in my head.
There are many things that pushes me to make such a claim, both thematically and qualitatively, so I'll try to explain in a way that is clear for everyone. But the gist of it is that this game has the intelligence and insight to think about how a survival horror should be created thematically, and does it in a way that is utterly impressive.
Silent Hill and STEM
One crucial part of both games is that they both come from somewhere, they are both sequel but they also aren't. This history is what makes the games so much more important. Silent Hill 1 is the story of a cult, with a town controlled through the power of Alessa Gillespie. Her trauma and resentment is shaping the town to what she see fit. Harry Mason, the playable character, has no control over this town and neither has any other inhabitants of the town. Harry was removed from the picture story-wise, he was driving the story forward, but he wasn't the focus of the story.
Silent Hill 2, though, is radically different in its interpretation. They took the most interesting character of the first game, the town of Silent Hill, and shaped it to take a central focus to the plot. Suddenly, no one was at the control of the town, it was of its own mind. This fundamentally changes the dynamic the characters have with the town. They weren't seeing the product of someone else's creation, they were seeing themselves. The town decided that it would shape itself from the fear, pain, trauma and guilt of the people it chooses. James Sunderland became the central focus, both with his personal story and how it would visualize within Silent Hill. Every enemy, every area was open to interpretation as to what it says in regard to James, but also to the other characters roaming the town.
The Evil Within 1 and 2 follows a strangely similar pattern. STEM is a system that allows the connection of several minds together in a virtual world. Using the brain of an individual at its core, a world is created that is shaped by the owner. The Evil Within 1 starts from here. STEM's core is the brain of Ruvik, and he is a ruthless psychopath who shapes his world however he wants it and tries to kill everyone who is connected inside it as revenge. The main character, Sebastian Castellanos, is as useful, if not even less, as Harry Mason was to the general plot. None of what happens concerns him to a deep level. It is first and foremost the story of Ruvik, slowly unraveled through the course of the game. While Harry at least had his daughter to save as a motivator, the tiny bit of backstory of Sebastian was concerning the loss of his daughter and the disappearance of his wife through diaries, which only explained why he was so aloof and stern through the main story, but wasn't deeply connected to the general plot of the first Evil Within game.
It now comes to The Evil Within 2. STEM, just like the town of Silent Hill has been reinterpreted. The core of the system is still helmed by an individual, this time by Sebastian's presumed dead daughter. She doesn't shape its world, but is rather used as a stabilizer for the town of Union. As the core is nowhere to be found, Union starts to crumble. This is where people are able to shape the town into what they want them to. People, linked together through the STEM system, are able to directly influence this world, and make the changes they want both to the town and the people inside it. This particular difference is what makes The Evil Within 2 shine, and maybe serve as an evolution of the concept behind Silent Hill 2.
Sebastian's continuous role
What needs to be understood is that the town, instead of becoming this unknowable space that does unexplained things seemingly influenced by the people inside without their consent, is now at the service of the people. The enemy isn't just the town or yourself, it's all the people who uses it to shape their own worlds inside it. The focus is more than ever on the human side, and this is probably where TEW2 goes above and beyond to deliver an experience. This is where it gets fascinating.
At the center of this is, weirdly enough, Sebastian Castellanos. This barely-a-character from the first game immensely benefited from this history to swerve into a much tighter focus in the second game, as opposed to Silent Hill 2 who started with a mostly clean slate. His meager, but nonetheless striking backstory told through diaries in TEW1 becomes important in this sequel as he is in a quest to find his daughter inside the virtual world of STEM.
Many things are striking, and decidedly unusual when it comes to the handling of a main character in a survival-horror universe. The first is for the sequel to fully acknowledge what happened in the past games, which seldom happens in the genre as games are very self-contained, and the second is to make the experience of the previous game something that is carried through the second. Resident Evil, for example, is full of characters that never seemed to be scarred by what happened previously during their new adventures. Clock Tower has Jennifer coming back as a protagonist in the second game, but her trauma is soon waved away as a the threat of a new Scissorman appears. In the case of Sebastian, he didn't, and couldn't move on from the events of Beacon Mental Hospital. His trauma is a crucial part of the story, and the way it is handled is fascinating. This focus is even more surprising because TEW1 was in many ways a RE4 clone that didn't touch upon the mental well-being of Sebastian, and the ending didn't indicate that he would feel the after-effects of his hellish journey. He was pretty much poised to become the Leon Kennedy-like of the series, coming out unscathed of every horrific events he has gone through, but Sebastian came out as a wreck, and I couldn't even begin to tell you how surprising it was that things turned out this way.
The events of the first game have seen him deeply scarred, and the gaslighting of his experience by his peers has made matters worse as he was made to believe it never happened in the first place. In fact, one indicator he was convincing himself it wasn't true and not many has picked up is the hand wrap on his right hand that he carries throughout the game. Ruvik, the antagonist the first game, has made an indelible mark on anyone who has visited his world on their right hand. An irrefutable proof of what they experienced was real, but the constant psychological abuse he had to suffer back in the real world was such that he started to doubt it ever happened, that he was just mentally ill. This is something that follows him throughout the game even as he finds himself in another instance of STEM. Now that I know it exists, what was real ? And what was false ? If STEM really existed, have I ever came out of STEM in the first place ?
Going back to what I said previously, SH2's Silent Hill used the past and guilt of the people against them, yet it was never truly antagonistic. It could be seen as a trial by fire to overcome what ails the people who finds themselves drawn to the town. You could, theoretically, come out a stronger person out of it. It was a reflection of themselves they had to face. STEM, on the other hand, becomes more interesting than that because it is more than a reflection of Sebastian since it happens inside someone's world. This reflection can be shaped, by actual people, to show Sebastian the things they want him to see. Considering his role cannot be dissociated from his experiences, and his trauma plays a huge part in everything he does with how the world shapes itself, the implications of The Evil Within 2 becomes much more interesting to dissect at a human level.
Lingering Trauma
The trauma of Sebastian coupled with the world of STEM creates a place where his mental illness is directly used against him by the people who wishes him harm, but also by the system itself at an insidious level. STEM forces people to relive their memories that are coloured by their state of mind. Think of it like a depressed person who would block out their happy memories and only remembers the bad one but at an even worse level. Sebastian would relive his memories through STEM and only focus on the bad side, make it ten times worse than it actually was, with no hope at forgiveness or redemption. This is the kind of thing that happens to Sebastian throughout the journey. One example of this is the graffiti posted above, a nod back to his experience of Mental Beacon Hospital. He cannot be made to forget, as he needs to be fully broken.
Again, this is something that TEW2 iterates on SH2 in an even smarter way. The guilt and trauma isn't just suppressed with the goal to face them, it is processed through a system that aims to make you relive your memories, make them infinitely worse than they are because of Sebastian's trauma and coping mechanisms, and rewrite them as the new and real narrative. This is not just an exploration of a mental state, but how it evolves over time, and built upon a survival horror setting. But what is most interesting is that it works especially well because the player is the ultimate witness. The player knows about what he had lived through the first game, so his newly crafted experience of Beacon Mental Hospital, that we have to relive through differently again and again through the course of the sequel becomes evidence of Sebastian's mental state, and how his trauma is affecting every part of his being. The goal of this sequel isn't about discovering what is affecting Sebastian, which is the premise of many survival-horrors that are self-contained and has to restart from a clean slate every time, it is going the extra mile on displaying out how it affects him.
James Howell in his 'A Memory of Fire' analysis of The Evil Within 2 had this to say:
Silent Hill never once claimed to be wrong about what the characters experience, it only tries to become the trial to overcome. Face yourself, and you'll come out of it alive. The Evil Within 2 brings doubt on top of this premise. What if it isn't true ? What if what's being shown is not really what happened, and only you, the player, is able to make what's right from wrong ? It's in this interstice between truth and lies that TEW2 manages to offer something new to the genre of Survival Horror. It's not just about using someone's trauma against them. It's not even about discovering what the character has to face, it's about using the player's omniscience as the driving force of the game. The player, who knows what happened, becomes in a position where they don't just spectate Sebastian's journey the same way they did James Sunderland, they re-enact his life experiences like they did before. Through repetition and awareness, the player doesn't just follow what's along, they have the full knowledge of what's going on and can assimilate the differences between what they've played in The Evil Within 1 and what's happening in the sequel at a meta-narrative level, and it is a device that another mainstream and successful game has made: Metal Gear Solid 2.
Indeed, this is a similar pattern as to what happens in Metal Gear Solid 2, something that James Howell has written with much more eloquence and clarity than I could:
The story archetypes that compose The Evil Within revolves around the way he shapes his guilt to blame himself and the way he works to resolve them through acceptance and confrontation. In TEW2, his self-image is so low that he actively works to re-shape old memories in order to take the blame for things he isn't to blame for. The first instance of Sebastian's rewriting of his own memories come from the opening sequence, in which Sebastian is alone trying to save his daughter from the house fire, even though journals present in the first game tells that both his wife and firefighters were with him during this tragedy. The opening already showcases Sebastian's state of mind and his role as an unreliable narrator. What is made apparent is that his only way to cope is to blame himself even more, to the point that he distorts the truth to fit his own narrative that everything is his fault. Gradually, The death of his partner Joseph became his own fault even though he had nothing to do with it, and the disappearance of his wife was also his even though she left by herself. James writes:
This coping of Sebastian is made even more apparent when the games forces you to relive the same levels as The Evil Within 1. More than the added knowledge of the player I mentioned before, James goes on to say that the game itself incorporates "the player's memory of the first game as a game into its storytelling.".
This screen shown above comes from another memory of Sebastian within STEM. He sees himself back in Beacon Mental Hospital, at the very same spot he first met Laura, one of the antagonists of the first game. Not only that, the black cinematic bars from TEW1 that was removed in the sequel makes another appearance at this precise moment. All conditions are met to call back to your experience of the first game as a player, but how it is also different from what it once was, as the presence of the other Sebastian betrays his inability to move on.
James' interpretation of the callbacks goes much beyond simply replaying the levels of the first game, as he also finds among other things that the first memory Sebastian to relives happens in the exact same place as the title menu, and starting the game puts you beyond those double doors, which leads to the same place as the screen above shows, facing his other self from the previous game, locked away in his memories, but also in the game world of The Evil Within 1. According to James, "Sebastian takes us to a literal space that he remembers, while also taking us through the start screen of The Evil Within. He is back; so are we.".
(credit: James Howell)
The Evil Within makes it known that it wants the player to be aware of being one, and Sebastian to be the character of a video game. Sebastian's arc in the sequel cannot be dissociated from his role as a video game character, as his trauma is directly linked to the player, and the result directly crafted from our experience through the first Evil Within. We are both his savior and his tormentor, Sebastian came out alive but scarred. He needs us but he also needs to reject us in order to be able to live. Raiden's rejection of the player in Metal Gear Solid 2 was illustrated by the rejection of his dog tag with our information written on it, in order for him to write his own story. But to move away from us, Sebastian needs more than that. He needs to stop re-enacting what the player did right now, and start changing things.
Sebastian's rejection happens through a series of events but one in particular is the highlight of this game. I've previously said that other people can shape the world inside STEM, and this is precisely what Theodore does. He manipulates Sebastian into numerous guilt trips in order to break him even further, but his gradual acknowledgment that things aren't his fault allows for the strength to fight back against Theodore and at the same time his self-image. This happens in a literal way, as Theodore sends him against his worst nightmares by facing the bosses of The Evil Within 1 through a boss gauntlet. But when the player is given control for Sebastian to re-enact the events of the first game, he suddenly stops running against The Sadist and decides to fight back, to the point where he takes The Sadist's chainsaw from him and slashes him into two. This gauntlet sees Sebastian taking apart the notable bosses of the first Evil Within, as to finally confront his pain and guilt, with the strength he gained from the reconciliation of the player and the character, this time not by being dependent of the player but by taking control and for the player to follow his lead. The repetition is no more, and he faces his memories in order to be rewritten as they once were, but with the strength to not be stricken with guilt over it.
James says:
This, is also another thing that I believe The Evil Within 2 manages to do better than Silent Hill 2. It is not just a romanticized version of mental illness that ends with death. Sebastian is allowed for the room to breathe, think and handle his illness. He makes mistakes but is allowed to make amends. He is given the ability to heal both by himself and through the help of the player. Psychological horror doesn't just end with gloom and doom, it doesn't have to demonize mental illness as something you will never be able to move away from, as if you'll always be fundamentally broken and your only respite is to end yourself. Sebastian's journey is one of healing and fulfillment, not one of victimization and despair. To be able to pull something like that in a survival horror and even more, to be successful at it, is something I deeply enjoy. Especially as the Silent Hill fanbase has been trying to tie the "In Water" into an established canon, something that still makes me feel uncomfortable, as if the only way to forgive yourself is to end your own life. This is why I consider it a modern Silent Hill 2 the most, because its handling of the tropes are now reused in a way that is more current to our times. It doesn't ape what came before, it understands and transforms it into something that feels contemporary.
Sebastian's interaction with his daughter is also interesting to see. From a man who painfully made peace with the idea that he'll never see his daughter again, to him progressively grasping the surreal idea that she is still alive and has to find her in a surreal world. It's the kind of honest reaction that you see in a person that cannot just instantly act as if nothing happened after years of separation. It's an emotion and feeling that needs to grow back, an awkwardness that has to be conquered. The idea of a physical and mental barrier that separates him from his daughter is interesting. I liked that about it, it didn't feel stale, it didn't feel like the usual kind of video game dad stories, it felt very believable.
All in all, it was an emotional journey that I am extremely glad to have played and I couldn't be more sad to see that it flopped. The real crime is that I got it only for 20€ when it's worth 60€ and more. An incredible crop of a game that is a reinvention of the psychological horror genre for me. It doesn't just carelessly reuse tropes, it understands them, assimilates them and then puts them into the game in a way that fits the themes. It's a game done with a certain kind of intelligence that I don't think many survival horrors takes the time to display. I do not want to bog down my thread even more as I wrote in a frenzy, but the gameplay system is equally incredible, and as you might have surmised works incredibly well to fit the themes of the game. I'd compare the open-world to a conductor guiding you through the world, you know something is going to happen, you just don't know when. I am now convinced that open-world works extremely well for the survival-horror. Don't knock it until you try it.
I hope it'll allow for some of you to reconsider the worth of this game, or maybe to be interested into playing it. It's very much worth it, it's not often I praise a game like this, but it deserves every praise it gets, and I'm sad it doesn't have the same kind of discussion that Silent Hill 2 got throughout its lifetime.
Also! Many thanks to James Howell's analysis that shaped much of my critical thinking about the game. His analysis is pure genius and you will not be disappointed by this read that goes into much more detail than I ever could. It's not just a must read, it's a defining point of any critical writing of the game just like his MGS2 analysis from 11 years ago. Go and read it.
