Game Review: Evil Inside (Xbox Series X)

The P.T. clone generator has been churning games out ever since the PS4 tech demo delighted and scared those who played it. Many games in similar fashion have come and gone, few have managed to capture the atmosphere and fright of it.

While some have stood out for doing their own thing while clearly being inspired by P.T. Others have looked to copy it completely but with none of the ‘wow’ factor and substituting atmospheric tension and frights for cheap jump scares.

Evil Inside falls into the latter category. A short, boorish, jump-scare-athon that desperately wants to be compared to P.T. It doesn’t deserve it.

Evil Inside puts you in the shoes of Mark, who recently lost his mother via the hands of his father, and has returned to the family home to contact her via Ouija board. A bad idea as contact is made and it turns the home into the place of nightmares but it will also reveal the truth of what actually happened.

It’s a basic story that gets forgotten about for large chunks of its short run time and then you get the ending to remind you that the story does exist.

To get there, you’ll have to laboriously make your way through the house in a constant loop. A short corridor with a few rooms along the way leading to a basement that you must pass through to start the loop again. Each time, some simple puzzles and barrage of ‘scary’ things stand in your way.

It’s never too difficult to work out what you need to do next as almost nothing in the game is interactive, aside from what you need to progress. Finding the thing you need to interact with to progress though can be excruciatingly slow. The combination of the slow movements of Mark (he has very little urgency in his step) and the arbitrary nature of the trigger means you’ll spend a fair amount of this game walking up and down the corridor clicking on everything to see if it triggers the next loop. To describe it as mind-numbing is an understatement but worse than that, it’s just not fun.

The same goes for the scares, a veritable carnival ride of horror where static things jump out at you and say ‘boo’. There’s some attempt to create tension with musical cues and sound effects but the scares never pay off. It’s hard to be immersed when everything feels so wooden. To the point where on our playthrough, several scares were missed because we weren’t looking in the right direction when they were scripted to happen.

Aside from that, most of them are just in your face jump scares of varying quality. Things like a crying baby dangling in front of you when you open the door or the sudden appearance of a clown are just funny. Especially with the dated visuals and ugly animations that litter this experience.

Though, some credit is due, as there are one or two frights that set the imagination racing and briefly lift the experience out of the doldrums. Remember, the best scares are the ones that let you imagine what could be.

The whole experience, all achievements too, can be wrapped up in less than an hour. If you’re after something immersive, detailed and thrilling, you’re probably better off going online and watching some play-throughs of P.T.