That’s because even though Evil Inside claims to be a psychological horror game, there isn’t much psychological horror going on here. Meanwhile, each loop of the house veers harder and harder into the supposedly scarier bits of the game as the story escalates and things are revealed to you, but unfortunately, Evil Inside even fails at scaring you all that affectively. There are a couple of puzzles here and there, but they range from simplistic and completely forgettable to frustratingly opaque. There are rooms and a basement connected to hallway, and at times you head to the upper floor as well, but the house is, by design, limited in size and scope. The design o the house will be familiar to anyone who’s played P.T., from the L-shaped main hallway to the balcony on the upper floor that looks down on the house’s entrance. He’s now trying to contact his dead mother through an Ouija board, which, in terms of the game’s structure, materializes as you walking through his house across a bunch of different loops, each ending with finding another piece of the Ouija board, and each beginning at the beginning of the same corridor. You play as Mark, a man whose mother was supposedly murdered by his father and thrown into a well. "The similarities between the two are so blatant and so numerous that Evil Inside can feel like not just something that’s hugely influenced by P.T., but something that’s straight up ripping it off."īeing a carbon copy of P.T. would have been acceptable if Evil Inside was good at its job – P.T. is an excellent horror experience, after all – but this is a poorly made game that fails at most of what it tries to do. Hell, even its name is basically just another way of saying “Resident Evil” or “ The Evil Within“. From its narrative premise to the imagery it uses to try and scare players, from its looping claustrophobic hallway setting to even the design of the hallway, Evil Inside suffers from a crippling lack of originality. The similarities between the two are so blatant and so numerous that Evil Inside can feel like not just something that’s hugely influenced by P.T., but something that’s straight up ripping it off.
To put it bluntly, this is a poorly made replica of P.T. that borrows from Hideo Kojima’s seminal horror demo liberally, but fails to do anything nearly as well as it needed to.
Unfortunately, JanduSoft’s first person psychological horror game Evil Inside is one of those examples that can and should be criticized for lifting things straight out of better games. Everything’s been done before, and so what audiences expect isn’t something that’s completely new, but something that builds on things that have been done before, implements existing ideas in new ways, and puts its own unique twist on them. In games, like in any entertainment medium, it’s impossible to do something that is wholly, entirely original. The criticism that a game is too similar to something that came out before it can often fall flat.