The Evil Within, she ain’t so pretty, but Bethesda’s third person psychological horror is certainly creepy as balls. It’s an unerringly scary game by the legendary Shinji Mikami, he of Resident Evil (and Dino Crisis!) fame, and sees private investigator and trilby botherer Sebastian Castellanos wandering ever deeper into the guts of an asylum. Try to piece together the plot from the latest trailer if you can. I think you’ll find that Acts Two and Three are very much concerned with the pervasive themes of all of your blood spilling out.
The trailer also features my favourite cinematic trope: contrapuntal music! In this instance, we hear the familiar calming piano tones of Debussy’s Clair de Lune played while a corridor literally fills with blood and a man with a barbed wire entangled safe for a head tries to bludgeon our hero to death. Those two things are opposing, and the incongruous score serves to enhance the on screen horror! Now it’s your favourite cinematic trope too.
The Evil Within launches on PC on August 29th.