Game Review: An Evil Existence (Xbox Series X)

The work of a solo developer, An Evil Existence is a game with ambition and that’s about it. A game that gets steadily worse, the longer you play and eventually leaves you feeling annoyed that you even bothered spending the two-ish hours it takes to fully complete it.

The opening of the game talks about two twin children, who were a bit mad. They killed and ate people before being caught and locked away. However, they escaped their incarceration and disappeared. The disappearance of the pair has remained a mystery to date and it’s up to you to solve it. Your part of an investigation team looking into the case and have arrived at the family home of the killers.

Now, this is where things get particularly confusing as it is made immediately clear that the house is still occupied. Yet, the character you play and the camera guy have no problem breaking in. Even when seen from the window by someone. It’s a pretty dumb start to the game. Call it, an early warning sign.

Almost immediately, things go wrong though and you’re alone. Forced to explore the house and litany of other locations to survive. Forget the story. It no longer matters. There’s no coherency after the beginning of the game and no way to fill in the blanks, such is the limited gameplay.

Why are you being chased through the house by an old man and woman? The game never makes it clear who they are, we’re simply guessing that it’s the parents of the murdering youngsters. Talking of which, why are they locked up in some sort of giant underground prison that also has a school house and church? What is the deal with the ghost nun? How are all these areas connected?

None of it makes any sense so don’t bother trying to make it. This developer played a ton of Resident Evil games, mainly 7, and tried to copy that. Just worse. So much worse.

Gamplay is a joke. You’ll start a level and have no idea what you need to do. Most of the areas are very small and with only a handful of things to interact with. but thanks to the bland and ugly designs, finding them is a massive headache. There’s some attempt to craft puzzles but they lack any kind of creativity and are only there to slow you down briefly.

Every single area feels like a slog because of this but also because the game has terrible pop-in, really long load times, frame drops and even occasional freezes. It’s not a scary game at all, doesn’t even have atmosphere, but that is made all the less impactful when the visuals are tearing up in front of you constantly.

The worst thing about An Evil Existence though? The thing that really makes this a bottom of the barrel experience? It’s combat. Goodness, is combat bad in this game.

Now, thankfully you only have to do it a couple of times but the execution couldn’t be more off. There’s no skill, just hammer the buttons over and over again while the enemy you’re meant to be hitting does the same stupid reaction over and over again until they eventually fall. The hit detection is way off and there’s absolutely no weight to the few weapons you use.

It’s a real struggle to find anything positive to say about this game. If it was free to play, we wouldn’t be kind to it. Putting it simply, An Evil Existence is one of the worst games we’ve played in a very long time and not worth a single penny of your money.