This past summer, I was invited to Dallas for the annual QuakeCon gaming celebration, and while there, I entered the haunted city of Union in an immersive demo for the new video game The Evil Within 2. After surviving the demo, I had the chance to sit down with some of the creative team from The Evil Within 2, including Tango Gameworks Studio Director Shinji Mikami (also known for his work on the Resident Evil video game series), Game Director John Johanas, and Writer Trent Haaga (Cheap Thrills, Deadgirl).
Continue reading to learn about expanding the world of the 2014 game, bringing back Sebastian Castellanos as a main character, and the emotional journey behind the surreal scares of the sequel, which is out now on PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC.
So, how did you all get involved with The Evil Within 2?
Shinji Mikami: Well, at first, when we finished making The Evil Within, we discussed what's next, what we should do, and we said, "Well, why don't we make some kind of sequel to this?" And we decided to do it, and we decided to modify the approach a little, because in the first one it's a straight pathway that you keep moving on and so forth, but we wanted to make it a much wider map this time. And some of the points we wanted to change, based on the reflection of our first video, which is to change the letterbox shape into something else, and to make a story that was easier to understand, and then also to create different levels of difficulty so that a wide range of players can play.
Were there any other characters or stories that were decided between, or was The Evil Within 2 always meant to be about Sebastian?
John Johanas: From the beginning, there were some various concepts, but Sebastian was always at the center. That was a character we wanted to come back to, because we thought that even though he was in the first game, we didn't get a good chance to really explore his character and who he was.
The Evil Within has atmospherics and it also has vibrant visuals. How important was it to blend these two different horror mediums into one video game package?
John Johanas: That brutal imagery is present in the first game, and it's sort of an identifying feature of what The Evil Within is, and while the first game was heavily featured on the core elements and this torture feel, we decided to go with a more, for example, psychological approach this time, in how we present things. Maybe dial it back a little bit and focus more on the other villains that will appear in our game. We've featured one character named Stefano, who focuses on the beauty of death and things like that, so a more artistic approach, and less focus on torture and more on the surrealistic experience, and balancing that with what you saw if you played the demo, a town that is grounded in reality, this thing that feels real, and then you'll dive into some sections that feel like they're in some other world.
The Evil Within 2 has a very literally cerebral, intricate premise. What are you doing to welcome new players into the story? How will people get involved with this if they didn't necessarily play the first game?
John Johanas: Yeah, it is a little bit complicated, I won't deny that. But we do ease you into this complicated scenario that we've built upon, and most people who play the game, granted, there's a lot to take in, but we introduce it in a way that's appropriate for even people who haven't played the first game, so they will understand the situation.
Having played the demo, I really enjoyed the non-linear aspects, I can go and check out this house versus that one, I can go stealth versus not, but from a storytelling perspective, and planning the player experience, how difficult is it where now we don't have the straight path for players who aren't getting some information that others are?
John Johanas: Constructing the whole thing was challenging, but that's why we made a focus to keep the element of the main core of the plot for events. For example, Sebastian finding his daughter, that's kept relatively simple. So it's something that you can follow and go through the game with, but all the vignettes that will branch out from that, we have to take into account that the player may not see that, and that's where we dive into leaving it up to the player element.
The first game, everything was left to the player. We didn't really piece it together, and because of that, a lot of people didn't get the full extent of the story. So when creating this one, we wanted to make sure that people got that core element of the story, and no matter what you do, you'll always follow on that path to get to that story and completion, but all the exterior details, like the small stories that occurred in this world, and the people involved in it, we leave it up to the player to find the answer to that, and it's up for them to explore and find it.
Trent Haaga: From a writer's perspective, it was really exciting. Normally, when you write a movie, we have a very small window, and we're controlling exactly who you see and what they say and what information to pass out, so it was really fun to be able to write something where you go and meet a character and he maybe sends you off and you can go do something, but what if the player decides to come back and talk to this guy when they haven't achieved the next goal? We need to write scenarios for that that can be triggered if the player doesn't do something, and that was kind of like writing a choose your own adventure book, in a way, instead of writing a screenplay. It was a really fun experiment for me to do.
You mentioned before how between these games there's been a definite tone shift, in terms of how you guys are approaching the horror in the story. In terms of that, was it important to incorporate more fun, mainline kinds of horror things, like the possessed demons and that kind of stuff, as opposed to the sort of more Clive Barker-esque stuff from the first game?
John Johanas: Yeah, I don't think we specifically sat down and made it deliberately like that. This time, as we talk about, for example, Stefano, an artist, how can we make designs that reflect the characters that are in this game? And for the most part, that's how we centered our designs around the enemies.
What draws you to horror, and what keeps drawing you back? Why is this kind of project important to you?
Shinji Mikami: So, some people love going to haunted houses, other people may get a thrill from riding a jet coaster, and I love getting into horror games, and that's how I am. What I don't like the most is the ferris wheel, it's really scary and no thank you for that.
John Johanas: When you're making something like horror, I grew up making horror games, but when you make something, it's like the goal is to get that kind of visceral response out of an audience. And especially nowadays, when you can watch people play on YouTube or Switch or something, and you get to see people emotionally affected by the things you make, it's rewarding in a different way, especially for someone who makes horror games, to see that what you make literally had an effect on how someone's experiencing something, and it's much more extreme than in other formats of games.
Trent Haaga: I'm a horror guy, I have been for years. It's primarily what I make, and I think that a lot of it has to do with the fact that I love the taste of a bitter pill. This is a delivery system for maybe truths that are a little bit cynical, that we don't want to acknowledge, and just doing a sort of dank prison drama doesn't deliver the same message in the way that a bitter pill that you enjoy taking does, and that's what horror is. You've got monsters and whatever, but ultimately, this is a story about a guy who loses his daughter and is on a redemptive quest to try to get back what he's lost. That's what's underneath the middle of the bitter pill, and I love that. I love horror, because of the delivery system that it provides.
What are some of the unwelcome truths you're playing with in The Evil Within 2?
Trent Haaga: That perhaps as a result of the things that you've done, the things that you've done in the past resulted in the situation that you're at now, and coming to terms with that, acknowledging it, and being able to get over it, as a hero does, in this transformative journey, to come out successful at the other end. Human drama, wrapped inside a horror, is the best way to deliver it, in my estimable opinion.
While playing the demo here, I definitely had some fleeting glimpses of other games, like Last Of Us and Resident Evil and things like that, obviously the original Evil Within. Are there any other games that served as inspiration, or maybe some movies that helped frame the story you want to tell?
Shinji Mikami: Me, personally, the movie The Cell or Texas Chain Saw Massacre, those are the ones that personally I feel some influence on me.
John Johanas: Yeah, The Cell was also like—I don't think you got to see the full extent of how we portray Stefano in the demo, but that's a huge influence in some of the things we haven't shown yet. From a gameplay perspective, the way we approached the open world sections was not like a complete copy of those games, but the way those Dark Souls games and things like that have sort of breadcrumbs for you to find out lore pieces and things like that, without just handing it to you. We tried to do an approach like that, but not as abstract. But really, we just looked at the first game and tried to figure out how much we can refine and learn from our experiences with the first one and make it better.
Speaker 7: And to touch on the previous question, the action element completely decimated the survival horror genre. EA did it with Dead Space. Resident Evil suffered the same demise. Our developers are trekking softly with these new installments of survival horrors, especially with The Evil Within, how it mirrors other types of games.
Shinji Mikami: Yes, this is purely my personal opinion, and I feel this myself, so I can say that as far as the horror category is concerned, once you make the first version, then there's a certain pattern created by that. So you have to kind of go after that pattern, follow that pattern, and therefore there is some restriction out there. But nonetheless, you have to make sure that you create some new horror stimuli, or stimulus, I would say, and that's a difficult thing to achieve, and so I believe you have some restriction, but you need to overcome that.
John Johanas: Once you make one entry, you really sort of lose that fresh impact you get, because there's a new situation and a new whole concept to that horror genre. So usually the only way to make it bigger and better is to literally make it bigger and better, which adds more action, bigger set pieces, and I think maybe this is an interesting take, because maybe the people who played the demo saw that we actually kind of dial it back a little bit. Instead of just constant non-stop action, we have these sort of big maps where it dials down and you can just really take in the atmosphere and almost take a break before you head back into the danger zone.
Yeah, it's interesting to watch the parallel evolution. It feels like The Evil Within is expanding on maybe the ideas that you had with Biohazard 4, and Resident Evil 7 kind of came back to the original first-person ideas for the series, but the actual action is very much like the first game. How has it been to watch that kind of parallel evolution of both of these things that you helped create and fulfilling these different potentials of the horror genre?
Shinji Mikami: So, Evil Within 2 maintains this category of action adventure games, but I would say the adventure element was enlarged in that. But if we make another one, then I may see more horrors in the next one.
What would you say was the most fun part of the process, or the most fun element of the game for each of you to work on?
John Johanas: I think for me, the hardest part was making it, but the most fun was seeing it all come together. It's a very complicated thing that we're trying to do this time with these bigger maps, with lots of vignettes, and then the story, trying to make it an emotional journey as well, and lots of moving parts, that it's very chaotic, but it all kind of fits together at the end. So, while it wasn't fun doing it, it was fun seeing it come to life.
Trent Haaga: For me, there was just a lot more characters this time around, and we get to learn a lot more about all of them, including Sebastian, who was in the first game, so just being able to look at these characters that these guys have created and three-dimensionalized and tried to give each one of them a unique voice, and Stefano is, hands down, my favorite guy to create his voice and to see him really come to life. It was really fun.
I wanted to ask about player progression, and how that's changed. I got to see a little bit of it in the demo, but how significantly have things like crafting player upgrades changed from the first game to the sequel?
John Johanas: So maybe some of you got to see, for example, if you go inside the mirror, you can level up Sebastian? And compared to the first game, we wanted to really let you play in styles that you like to play. For example, we tried to make a more viable option for the majority of the game, so it has its own tier. You can level up that aspect of Sebastian. In the same way, crafting enables you to choose which weapon you want to make ammunition for. So, if you have a preference in weapons you want to use, or you feel like you know the situation coming up, you want to use this one, we allow you to do that. So kind of all the ways we've added in, whether it's crafting or leveling up weapons or leveling up Sebastian, we try to allow you to customize your experience of the way that you want to play, and flesh it out from the original, when it was really just sort of very simple parameters that you were adjusting. Now you have abilities to unlock as well, which gives a little more variation to the combat and things you can do in the game.
Are there any Easter eggs in this game towards anything that potentially might be in the future if you guys wanted to do another Evil Within?
John Johanas: I wouldn't say we're cool enough to imagine years in the future, but there are Easter eggs in this, which hopefully you will find and enjoy.
Red band launch trailer:
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