The Evil Within's The Consequence Review: Pretty cool!

There are mild spoilers ahead! Nothing major though.

What a time! Last year this little indie joint came out at the helm of a young upstart named Shinji Mikami. It got mixed reviews, often with people really liking one aspect of the game with others really disliking the same aspects. The reception was mixed but it ended up being my favorite game of last year!

It's not the perfect game. In fact it has quite a few issues. The controls are stiff and the animations are often disjointed, leaving the player in a standstill during certain actions that can spell doom. It's also not scary. It was said to be terrifying but aside from one, maybe two instances, I can honestly say I was never afraid.

Don't get me wrong, just because it's not scary doesn't mean it's not creepy. It does the creepy-and-super-fucking-tense atmosphere thing really well.

But we're not here to talk about the base game, we're here to talk about The Consequence, the second episode of Joli Kidman's stand alone adventure showing her side of the events that happened during The Evil Within.

I didn't get to talk about the first one because I ended up being swamped with games to play and also I had that whole podcast thing that ended up falling through. But I won't make that same mistake twice!

I'll also try to leave as little spoilers as I possibly can.

 The episode begins with Joli Kidman waking up in a bed and not knowing what the fuck is going on, which is not surprising because that's kind of the staple of The Evil Within.

Not a chance, Kid. Not, a chance.

She soon realizes it's not over and ends up back in the mental hospital that we are so familiar with. Nurse Tatiana even makes an appearance! She's my favorite!

Once out of her cell you can walk to Sebastian's cell, prompting her to say probably one of the best lines of dialog I've ever heard. "Sebastian's not here. He must be somewhere else." This chick is supposed to be a detective? No shit?

Anyway, since everybody knows shit fuck, Kidman gets back to it with a trusty flashlight at her side and still no gun to shoot guys with. So it's a straight to stealth and sneaky tactics as you pass by unseen from the hoards of the Haunted.

The gameplay, like the first episode, is focused mostly on stealth. You are extremely fragile and also have limited stamina, which means you can't really get hit and running away is a risk all on it's own. You have to play fast and loose if you want to avoid enemies once you get caught because of that.

Kidman at one point loses her trusty flashlight(Not so trusty flashlight?) and finds... GLOW STICKS! That's right, Kidman picks up an infinite amount of glow sticks for you to throw around and light up the often pitch black areas. It's actually an interesting idea that adds interactivity to something as simple as walking down a hallway. Though you don't have them for long, it's actually pretty fun to toss them around and see the pretty lighting engine do its work.

A while into the chapter, Kidman finds a gun, and it surprisingly doesn't turn into a huge shoot out sequence right away, though there is one of those later. Ammo is limited and you don't really get much of an opportunity to use one as you eventually discard the weapon.

The gun comes in handy against the first boss, the weird BioShock looking lighthouse bird with stripper legs. Though the boss battle itself isn't very fun.

The boss can stun you with its lighthouse face by slowing you to a crawl, and once it catches up with you it swallows you whole with it's scary alien mouth that looks straight out of Dreamcatcher, which was a pretty cool movie so it was great to see something like that in a video game.

In a game about trial and error, you have to feel your way around and figure out things on your own. This can apply to tactics, weapons, items, even mechanics. Once she stops shining you with her red lighthouse face and loses her aggro, you have to sneak around and shoot her once or twice. Though it doesn't really seem like it does anything at first, all you have to do is shoot her 10 or so times, give or take, and she's done. Ammo isn't plentyful but there's more than enough to be found in the room you fight her in.

The first thought would be to, of course, shoot her in the right in her stupid lighthouse face and kill the light or something, but she's really agile and fidgety and so it was tough to line up a shot. With the natural reticle movement adding additional difficulty.

Creepy, and teeming with frustration!

Eventually, after the boss is defeated, you will go outside and on top of some buildings. Once outside, Kidman notices that it looks like the fucking apocalypse rolled in, as buildings collapse and crumble in the background. Oddly enough, she remarks 'Whoa, this can't be real", I guess completely forgetting that she is, in fact, in a crazy Matrix-like shared consciousness dream-simulator.

Moving on a little through this level, you see an opportunity to push an enemy off of a ledge. When doing so Kidman says probably my second favorite line of dialog in any game. In the most deadpan and monotone voice, she says "Looks like he's not coming back from that". After pushing an enemy off of a sky scraper. Like what the fuck HOW ARE YOU A DETECTIVE.

As the episode goes on you pick up files and documents as well as ghosty not-really flashbacks showing characters having conversations with other characters and revealing the overall story behind The Evil Within, somehow making it seem entirely less insane. Whereas the collectibles from the base game painted it as incredibly vague, both The Assignment and The Consequence explain everything in pretty clear detail. Not much is left to the imagination after playing them. Though there are some mysterious details left, well, mysterious, the DLC's do a great job of getting down to the nitty gritty and spelling shit out. The episodes delve well into the characters and their motivations as well as the reason the events taking place were happening to begin with.

Near the end of the episode you find a haunted with a sawn off double barrel shotgun. Upon trying to stealth kill him, a cool little animation plays out of the haunted avoiding your attack and trying to blast you in the face, with you then countering him, stealing his gun, and pushing his shit in. It actually managed to startle me as I thought I had learned the hard way that you can't stealth kill him, but oh boy, you totally can.

Now that you've got this sick double barrel shotgun, you're near the end of the game. It becomes a bit difficult as you only have one shot before you have to reload and you have to reload a lot, and there are a lot more enemies now. They will run at you and try to grab you so it can become pretty frantic. Ammo isn't so scarce as enemies usually drop some upon death.

As you make you way towards the actual end of the game, you come into contact with the final boss, fucking Slenderman.

Also don't turn around if you hear static

The boss battle is pretty interesting. Much, much better than the travesty of the base game's final boss. This one actually requires you fight it instead of just waiting for a magical hummer to fall out of the sky.

The boss has multiple stages, first multiplying and requiring you to wait for one to charge up, then shoot it. This stage of the boss is tricky because they poof out of existence and reappear in a very close proximity to you, making running away a challenge. If you run out of ammo you can pull out your flashlight and shine on some Mobius logos to forge some straight out of the ether.

The next stage of the boss is a little janky, featuring really fast enemies that zip around at breakneck speeds, straining the limitations of your stamina bar. Since your health recharges when standing still, and even faster in cover, it can be a challenge to know when a good time to recharge is. I didn't die once during the battle thankfully, but it did come close.

I'd say the last boss battle is a lot easier than the first, but definitely more fun. The places you fight him in are really different from any location from the entire DLC and it really gives a since of the bizarre without being so over the top gory.

The downside would have to be poor dialog. Aside from Daniel Riordan's performance as Marcelo Jimenez. His delivery and accent is always on point. Good to know that he's the one narrating a lot of the collectibles you find. Though it can feel out of place when you've got the monotone Jennifer Carpenter leading your experience.

And as for the story, a majority of it is cleared up from character narration and strange ghostly flashbacks as I discuss above. Aside from that, it also brings some revelations of its own which are way too big to post here.

I think it's well worth the price, though unlike The Assignment's puzzle like encounter, it's a lot more straight forward. So I think if you didn't like The Evil Within and want to try something really different, The Assignment is probably more your speed, but you might as well get the season pass which comes with both packs and a forthcoming DLC where you play as the Safe Headed Killerman guy whose name I forget. But that's not to say The Consequence is bad, because it's not. It's just that The Assignment does more to change up the formula.

I give it:

4 out of 5 Joabastian Mogrellanos!