Exploring Union can be pretty rewarding, revealing horror tableaus, collectibles, resources, and sometimes unique enemy encounters. Once friendly, decked out with lived-in Americana, it's begun folding in on itself (literally) and become pockmarked with zombies and other monstrosities. The virtual town of Union is a creepy ol’ place.

For most players, though, The Evil Within 2 will be less about the big picture and more about atmosphere, moments, and the moderate novelty of open-world survival horror. Like many horror stories, it’s all about trauma (and not particularly charitable towards mothers), and there’s a potentially touching family tragedy at the game’s heart - it’s just surrounded by opaque Japanese-style storytelling, manga-esque villains, and more “what the hell”s. The dialogue is head-bashingly awful, a combination of poor localisation and straight-up bad writing, much of it consisting of Sebastian exclaiming “what the hell?!” at every turn. There are some interesting ideas going on there, for sure - and more emerge as the story progresses - but boil away the sci-fi concepts, and you’ve got Grizzled Horror Dad Looking For Lost Horror Daughter, a tired trope if ever there was one. Problem is, the whole system’s gone haywire, so Sebastian is plugged into the system to locate and save his daughter. Whew! The technology in question: a collective consciousness network for humanity that - in this game, at least - manifests as a virtual small American town, Union, created by Lily’s subconscious. He thinks his daughter Lily is dead, but it turns out she’s just been kidnapped by a sinister corporation to form the backbone of a dystopian new technology.

The Evil Within 2 revolves around Sebastian, a video game protagonist. The Evil Within 2 revolves around Sebastian, a grizzled, angry, stubbly, alcoholic white male ex-cop who lost his family inzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

Though ambitious and consistently high in production value, The Evil Within 2 is cursed by exceptionally poor writing - and by gameplay that constantly threatens to undermine its own atmosphere. As I never played the original, I can't speak to how The Evil Within 2 succeeds in that goal, but I can speak to the game itself. Tango Gameworks’ The Evil Within landed a few years ago, receiving mixed reviews, which means its sequel is expected to right all the wrongs the original made.

The evil within 2 gameplay