It wasn't easy.
I recently played a video game, Control, which I hated. Now I must write, in my long and roundabout way, about why I hated Control.
I found Control difficult to play.
Control is a third-person shooter staged in a federal office building overrun with paranormal forces. The protagonist Jesse Faden, a mysterious bureaucrat, battles against mind-controlled shock troops which seem no more or less substantial than moths. But I found the moths difficult to suppress in swarms.
For the past couple years, I’ve humored so many other critics arguing about difficulty, as a characteristic akin to spiciness, in video games. These critics obsess over the Dark Souls series, which I haven’t played, as that sort of beige high-fantasy pseudo-antiquity bores me to death. For “difficult” single-player combat in video games, I prefer zombies, and I prefer guns. I prefer Resident Evil. I prefer The Evil Within, which I also found difficult to play. I prefer “survival horror,” a subgenre defined by the player’s reliance on sparse resources — crappy weapons, limited ammunition, low health — emphasizing the asymmetrical design in most combative video games, which pit the player against countless enemies who must ultimately lose despite their many theoretical advantages against a single character. Resident Evil, The Evil Within, and other “survival horror” games encourage the player to proceed through the premise, and its constraints, with semi-realistic trepidation. The original Resident Evil unleashed the player in a mysterious mansion populated by zombies and mutants.
Curiously, Resident Evil gave the player a grenade launcher in the game’s first act. You’d think giving the player a grenade launcher so early, after they’ve fought just a few, geriatric zombies in bright, dignified hallways, would empower the player to maximum confidence. But, initially, the grenade launcher leaves the opposite impression. Upon recovering the grenade launcher from a corpse on the Spencer Mansion’s outdoor balcony, the player must nervously wonder (1) what unseen opponents must require a grenade launcher to overcome and (2) how many grenade rounds they’ll have to spare, if any, when the time comes.
Resident Evil is a 23-year-old video game series which has over the decades unraveled as tacky, chaotic nonsense. It’s tough to pinpoint when. The Resident Evil games were always pretty silly. The critics might blame Resident Evil 4 for prioritizing the player’s combat-readiness over the player’s puzzle-solving finesse; but the critics adore Resident Evil 4 for other reasons. They might blame Resident Evil 5 for turning zombies into sharpshooters; but they might also defend Resident Evil 5 given its great co-op mode. They might blame Resident Evil 6 for transforming a violent but quiet puzzle game series into Gears of War.
I blame Resident Evil 3, the game which punctuated the alleyways in Raccoon City with red, explosive barrels. The player’s aim snaps to these barrels, as a sort of magnet, whenever the player switches the protagonist Jill Valentine, a commando resurfacing after her star turn in the original game, into firing stance while near such a barrel. The player’s aim snaps to these barrels even when the player would rather Jill Valentine train her gun on some other, closer, encroaching target, such as a zombie. The snap urges the player to shoot the barrel, thus incinerating a dozen zombies or a pack of rabid dogs all together at once. Never mind the lone zombie who has wandered too far from the red, explosive barrel as he’s now standing on top of Jill Valentine, who can’t be bothered to shoot the zombie as she’s rather busy targeting the red, explosive barrel. Senselessly, Jill Valentine has died.
The first two Resident Evil games play as puzzle games which celebrate guns. Resident Evil 4 plays as a gun game which celebrates puzzles. Resident Evil 3 plays as a puzzle game which celebrates guns, and actually hates puzzles, but doesn’t celebrate guns as gracefully as the game’s most flamboyant effects — big explosions around every street corner in Raccoon City — would ideally require Jill Valentine to perform. In other words, Resident Evil 3 does some half-assed imitation of Resident Evil 2 (where so many puzzles seem essential to the level design) while also poorly telegraphing Resident Evil 4 (where so many explosions seem essential to the combat style). In Resident Evil 3, the player’s empowerment is flashy but unrefined and, worse yet, inconsistent with the game’s overall design. The red, explosive barrels in Resident Evil 3 belong in Resident Evil 4.
The video game designer Shinji Mikami worked on Resident Evil all throughout its formative decade. Mikami directed Resident Evil 4, and then he left Capcom, and then he directed other video games, including The Evil Within, which Mikami billed as “a pure form of survival horror.”
While Capcom ruined Resident Evil and its subgenre with militaristic gameplay, Mikami insisted, The Evil Within would mark a return to form. "The gameplay you see in the survival-horror genre has changed with the times, and I think right now it leads more towards action than it did before,” Mikami told Famitsu. “It's hard to strike a balance, but with this game, we're trying to place our weight primarily on the horror aspects."
Meaning to underscore the tension between horror elements and action elements within these games, Mikami also underscored the critical tension between The Evil Within and other survival horror games, including Resident Evil, The Last of Us, and Alien: Isolation.
Ultimately, The Evil Within elaborates on the critical tension. The Evil Within repurposes some enemies and environments from the better Resident Evil games: the zombies and the Spencer Mansion from the original title; the zombie cremation mechanic from the remake; the Spanish village, the chainsaw butcher, the plagas parasites, and the cabin siege from Resident Evil 4.
But The Evil Within distinguishes itself from Resident Evil in crucial ways. For one, technically, The Evil Within fucking sucks. Notoriously, The Evil Within subjects the player to several, crazy-making peculiarities in its programming and design. There’s imprecise controls, unwieldy inventory, obstructive letterboxing, long load-times, merciless checkpoints, sluggish character animations, deceptive hitboxes, poor hit detection, erratic damage penalties, and one-hit kills from several opponents, including the game’s very first enemy in the tutorial introduction.
The protagonist Sebastian Castellanos, a beleaguered detective, turns out to be a weak, exhausted man bearing weak, exhausted guns against quick, attentive, resilient enemies. In The Evil Within, Sebastian Castellanos is the moth.
Upon beating The Evil Within for the first time, the player unlocks a maximum difficulty setting, titled Akumu. In Akumu, Sebastian dies in a single hit. There’s a notorious section in Akumu playthroughs of The Evil Within where Sebastian and his junior partner, Joseph Oda, must hack the complex electronic locks on two doors — the first upstairs, the second downstairs — to escape a burning house as a zombie horde converges upon them in close quarters. Joseph hacks the locks while Sebastian repels the zombies, who spawn infinitely into each room until the player clears each doorway. Since Sebastian dies in a single hit in Akumu playthroughs, and since the game’s programming permits the enemies to hit Sebastian by chance and accident, the burning house illuminates the game’s many errors at once, rapidly, at maximum brightness, as the player scurries, once and again, between the zombies and the flames.
The player’s failures in The Evil Within often don’t register as imperatives toward improvement so much as they register as glitches and pranks. I combine “glitches” and “pranks” to synthesize (a) the technical shortcomings, e.g., deceptive hitboxes, and (b) the deliberate provocations, e.g., bomb traps with trick fuses, which together amount to the singular experience marketed, somewhat misleadingly, as The Evil Within. I say “misleadingly” to concede the key context — Mikami’s interviews, Mikami’s resume, Mikami’s magnum opus in Resident Evil 4 — which informed the critical expectations for The Evil Within upon the game’s release. To this day, The Evil Within suffers comparisons to Resident Evil 4 despite The Evil Within striking me as Mikami’s imperative for the player to stop playing Resident Evil 4.
In Resident Evil 4, Leon Kennedy’s “walkspeed” is a smooth jog. He’s on a mission. He’s in a hurry. Alternatively, Sebastian Castellanos plays as Mikami’s imperative for the player to slow down. In Resident Evil 4, Leon Kennedy arrives in a Spanish village where zombies (a.k.a., ganados) converge upon him in the town square. With his sidearm, his combat knife, and his martial arts training, Leon Kennedy must suppress the hostile villagers in order to advance deeper into the village, where he hopes to recover the U.S. president’s daughter, Ashley Graham, who has been abducted by … etc., etc. Quickly, powerfully, Leon Kennedy conquers the town square. The ganados withdraw. The player proceeds deeper into the village.
Alternatively, The Evil Within recreates the Spanish village in Resident Evil 4 but quickly discourages the player from SWAT-ing the Potemkin villagers. If the player enters the village in The Evil Within with Leon Kennedy’s gusto, Sebastian Castellanos will die. His revolver is too weak, his ammunition too limited, his opponents too numerous, too perceptive, too coordinated, and too strong, his surroundings too thoroughly littered with deadly traps. Sebastian doesn’t explore the village. Sebastian survives the village. The plot then unceremoniously sweeps Sebastian Castellanos away to many other distant, disconnected settings — hospital wards, ancient catacombs, subway tunnels, construction sites, hotel corridors — though they’re also overrun with zombies, monsters, and traps.
Resident Evil trended away from the original game’s most perilous restrictions: the fixed camera angles, the sparse ammunition and medicine, the immobilized firing stance. Resident Evil 3 empowered the player with explosive barrels, special ammunition, and a new dodge mechanic for Jill Valentine. Granted, Resident Evil 3 upped the challenge in proportion. Famously, Resident Evil 3 introduced Nemesis, a steroidal zombie (a.k.a., a tyrant) who pursues Jill Valentine with greater intelligence and persistence than the previous tyrants in the earlier Resident Evil games. But then Resident Evil 4 dispensed with the symmetrical escalation. In Leon Kennedy, the longtime Resident Evil player sacrificed nothing and gained everything. Leon Kennedy’s rigid firing stance notwithstanding, Resident Evil 4 empowered the player more decisively than a Resident Evil game had ever empowered a player before.
In contrast, Sebastian Castellanos suffers the stamina of a chain-smoker in The Evil Within. Sebastian cannot jog for much more than three seconds before he collapses to his knees, ignoring the player’s urgent inputs, even as a zombie settles right behind him. It’s a fussy gameplay moment but, admittedly, cinematic: Sebastian resting, unwittingly, as a zombie sneaks up behind him. The player must be yelling in classic horror-movie fashion (“Sebastian! Move! Go! Fuck off!”) as the zombie puts a knife through Sebastian’s throat.
I keep mentioning the “zombie,” but note that the “zombie” doesn’t bite Sebastian. The zombie stabs Sebastian. The zombies shoot at Sebastian in later chapters. Mikami plays fast and loose with his genre pretensions. The “zombies” in Resident Evil 4 stab and shoot Leon, too.
It’s impractical for the Evil Within player to follow the game’s plot as such: Sebastian and his partners travel through the psychopath Ruvik’s subconscious on a whim. The major characters converge once and again in the game’s central location, Beacon Mental Hospital, but the village, the burning house, etc. — it’s a whimsical tour. It’s dream logic.
The Evil Within recalls other shooters, such as Resident Evil, Silent Hill, The Last of Us, and Doom; but also popular film thrillers, such as Shutter Island and Inception. At launch, The Evil Within forced the player into cinematic widescreen, through post hoc letterboxing, thus obstructing the player’s vision in a context-sensitive game, for the entire playthrough. Ostensibly, Mikami meant to “immerse” the player in an unrelentingly “cinematic” experience — as single-player shooters in the 2010s, such as The Last of Us, were wont to do. Indeed, The Evil Within frustrates the player as a player but also as a viewer. Ruvik’s dream logic doesn’t guide the player through any strict narrative — a story about a psychopath, a tour through his subconscious — so much as Ruvik’s dream logic isolates the player, once and again, to flog them in a proper gauntlet.
The one prevailing, uninterrupted through-line in The Evil Within is the player’s own suffering. I happen to enjoy the long confrontation with the game’s rude, haphazard developers. It’s kink, I suppose. I think the game’s difficulty follows sensibly, if insufferably, from the game’s pretext. The game’s difficulty serves the game well even as the game’s difficulty serves the player poorly.
I know the game’s critics also resent the cliched characterizations and the incoherent plot in The Evil Within. Mind you, Resident Evil 4 is a video game about a U.S. cop … dispatched to rural Spain … on a solo mission to rescue the U.S. president’s daughter … from a neo-medieval cult … which offers to surrender the president’s daughter upon the cop’s arrival … in order to spread a bio-engineered parasite throughout the world … a conspiracy which by no means explains why the cultists would need to kidnap the president’s daughter, specifically … nor why the cultists would need to kill the cop dispatched to retrieve her, unwittingly, in accordance with their own plan. Mind you, Resident Evil 4 is one of the better Resident Evil plots.
Of course, Resident Evil 4 doesn’t hinge on its plot (Leon Kennedy rescues Ashley Graham from cultists and monsters in Spain) so much as Resident Evil 4 hinges on its pretext (Leon Kennedy fights cultists and monsters). This is true for many video games. In Super Mario 64, Mario rescues Princess Peach from Bowser, who has imprisoned Peach in a stained-glass window in her own castle: that’s the plot. In Super Mario 64, Mario rampages through whimsical level design, stomping his opponents, to collect stars which enable the player to unlock new levels within the castle: that’s the pretext. The plot doesn’t strictly suggest the pretext. When I told you the plot, I didn’t even begin to account for what the player spends 10 hours doing in Super Mario 64.
For all of Shinji Mikami’s cinematic insistence, The Evil Within trivializes its own plot. There’s little rhyme or reason to how, and why, Sebastian and his partners travel through Ruvik’s subconscious. Obviously, Ruvik should just insta-kill the trespassers in his subconscious. But Ruvik forcing the panicky Joseph to drive a chop-top school bus through an urban warzone is fun for Ruvik. He tortures Sebastian through whimsical violence, which the player experiences as non-sequitur direction, grotesque style, pretentious animation, adversarial programming, and punitive design. The pretext elevates Ruvik’s raison d'etre over the player’s empowerment at every turn. The developers, embodied by Ruvik, seem to be hazing the player. It’s not so empowering. Ruvik sucks, too — he speaks, dresses, and behaves as the embodiment of some quarantined subreddit — so the developers’ insult resounds all throughout the player’s experience. It’s childish. It’s unfair. It’s alienating. The Evil Within breaks the player’s patience — especially so long as the player insists on playing Resident Evil 4 when they are, in fact, playing an altogether different video game.
For the past fifteen years, Resident Evil 4 has inspired so many copycats and thus invited so many comparisons. The Evil Within inspires no one. Essentially, The Evil Within 2 disowns its predecessor: the sequel is far less ugly, fussy, and punitive, ditching Ruvik altogether.
But Control got me thinking about the burning house, among other rough sections, in The Evil Within.
There’s an office space where Jesse Faden battles a man named Salvador, a boss attended by a dozen shock troops hurling bullets and bombs. Through telekinesis, Salvador hurls debris which he also wields as a shield. Jesse can summon a shield, too, but she enjoys far less health and far less telekinetic stamina than Salvador. Jesse can take just a couple direct hits before her injuries fill the screen with a substance, an obstruction, resembling raspberry jam.
I might recognize the splatter as blood, but there’s very little blood splatter in this third-person shooter otherwise. There’s a dead guy bleeding on his office’s carpet in an early ordeal, but that’s about it. Jesse Faden doesn’t appear to be bleeding. The enemies in Control don’t bleed; when hit, they spark. This isn’t The Evil Within, where everyone’s constantly getting decapitated.
The raspberry jam splattering across the screen as Jesse Faden takes hits in Control strikes me as a counter-productive flourish designed to caution the player (“bro, you’re about to die, bro”) while further muddying the piss and shit that’s already flinging back and forth across the screen (“bro!”) as the player fights Salvador and his hellspawn. This isn’t The Evil Within, where piss, shit, and raspberry jam is the whole point. This isn’t Doom!
Jesse Faden battles Salvador and his minions in a room which the designers have flooded — very stylishly, if unhelpfully — with red light. The red light doesn’t illuminate the pitch-black architecture which the player must utilize, as cover, to block the incoming gunfire, bombs, and debris.
Jesse Faden taking as few as two hits will spill the raspberry jam, blinding the player, who is then left to wonder where the opponents are and what the opponents are even doing; what the player should be doing to withstand, much less advance; which combat principles are even being drilled here; why the combat mechanics seem so numerous, convoluted, erratic, and unreliable; etc. Senselessly, Jesse Faden has died.
I was never quite sure what Control meant for me to do. What’s the Salvador battle’s core challenge? I don’t know. I can tell you exactly how I survived the burning house on my Akumu playthrough in The Evil Within: seven flash bolts, two shock bolts, one explosive bolt, no guns. In Control, I defeated Salvador through vague persistence. I can’t even tell you what Salvador looks like. He’s a small man who spins large rocks at a distance. Jesse Faden and her standard opponents are similar to one another in size, but I can only ever recall the opponents in Control as figurines, mass-produced; as countless moths.
Having nonetheless enjoyed a third-person shooter as notoriously fussy and overwhelming as The Evil Within, I was perplexed by my own resentment against the combat challenges in Control. In fact, The Evil Within is 100 times more frustrating to play on the standard difficulty compared to Control — but Control frustrates the player in a far more tangential fashion. There’s nothing about Control which suggests chaotic and masterful combat as its ideal challenge. Notwithstanding the game’s heavy-handed plot, Control barely suggests combat at all — much less, Doom-scale combat — in its pretext. Ostensibly, Control compels the player to explore a fantastical building defined by its bewildering details, its little mysteries, its larger mysteries: that, I supposed, was the pretext.
The critics emphasized “eerie,” “weirdness,” “SCP,” “X-Files,” “psyche,” “brutalism.” The game emphasizes “shootouts,” “explosions.” What happened here?
It’s hard for me to imagine something more pointless and despoiling than the frequent shootouts in Control: imagine reading the Bible with quicktime events. The difficulty in the game’s combat doesn’t really have anything to do with anything. It’s just there. It’s misplaced. It seems, to me, to belong in some other game. Rather, Control belongs in a gallery. It’s a beautiful game staged in a beautiful building, The Oldest House, home to so much charisma and mischief in its design — a bit like the Spencer Mansion, actually. You’d think Control would forge its difficulty into its brutalist architecture — as far more sophisticated puzzles than the Oceanview Motel offers, perhaps. You’d assume this brilliant, mischievous building would impose challenges more interesting, and more challenging, than making Jesse Faden tug a light switch three times, not just one time, in order for the light switch to do what the player needs the light switch to do. Instead, Control overburdens its cluttered, third-rate combat system. For unclear reasons, Jesse Faden must become Albert Wesker.
There’s just one great combat sequence in Control: the ashtray maze, where Jesse Faden must shoot her way through a surreal, transforming hotel. It’s easy to complete the ashtray maze. But here, Control enhances the player’s empowerment with a catch. The player gets to do all sorts of flashy, violent bullshit to complete the ashtray maze in a hyper-cinematic gameplay sequence, but they’ve really gotta nail the gameplay principles to make the architectural elements and the cinematic elements sing, together, in tremendous harmony. But then, inevitably, Control culminates with big, red, messy shootouts in arenas which prove no less vague than the battle with Salvador despite the game’s subsequent elaboration on Jesse Faden’s telekinesis.
To improve upon the player’s empowerment ad nauseam, Jesse Faden must learn how to shoot, toss, block, dash, hypnotize, and fly. It wasn’t easy.