While I loved my time with Evil Within on the PS4 enough to 100% it, enough that I had no issue doing the same again here on Steam, my revisit of a game I thought was a 9/10 at the time has led me to consider it a 7.5/10 instead. Granted, I played TEW before TEW2 back then, and never went back to the first game after falling in love with the sequel. Now, I have, and I really do have to admit that this first game had a lot more rough edges than its sequel for better and for worse.
Unique to PC, I have to comment on the optimisation. Mouse feels floaty paused and in-game, even with all sensitivity tweaks. In the starting area, the game dips to around 20FPS for no reason because you can revisit this part in NG+ and the FPS drop is completely gone. The FPS is also capped behind the scenes, and you have to change the game's launch options to even reach a locked 60FPS. Also unique to the Steam version is this game never got the Bethesda.Net exclusive first-person mode that was only given to the Microsoft Store version of the game.
Now gameplay wise, I do like the Evil Within a lot. The matches mechanic is so, so satisfying even revisiting it eight years later. Enemy AI is sufficiently aggressive and ganks you in a manner not unlike OG RE4 from 2005. Ammo is fairly scarce (unless you know how to game the drops on AKUMU, same for the green gel), and healing items aren't exactly plentiful which is good. Every weapon feels meaty and distinct and the (at the time) novel mechanic of stealth kills and melee combat was only really commonplace in the Last of Us 1. Nowadays, we have that in every "survival horror" game, but for 2014, TEW was one of the first to really jump on the concept and do its own thing.
The gameplay isn't without its shortcomings though. Zooming in your aim with the revolver just artificially makes combat claustrophobic, when it doesn't extend that degree of zoom to shotguns, magnums, rifles or your agony crossbow. And my God, the game is in love with Instakills. Instakills are bad game design, I have felt this way for 20+ years and I will die on that hill: it only serves to reward hindsight, never really making you "better". Laura grabbing you through a pillar and snapping your spine doesn't make you fight her better, you had the expectation the pillar would separate you, but not so in this game. Ruvik can teleport to you and kill you. Above 60FPS, the Haunted can combospam you from a full HP bar. And the Stamina System, while effective at making you pace your actions, has a comically long recovery period that would make Old Snake in MGS4 look like a triathlete. The puzzles, as much as I love puzzles in my survival horrors, also suffer from only awarding hindsight: buttons can instakill you, spinning valves sometimes doesn't register your inputs and you turn them slower than usual -- it's just frustrating, even for someone who's done this all before with this game.
The only time I forgive instakills in this game is AKUMU, because the entire premise of the difficulty is you need to do each chapter/checkpoint hitless, or you will die. AKUMU balances this well though as there are more traps, and thus more crafting parts. There's more enemies and some stronger variants, which means more green gel early on. The difficulty is brutal, unless you're experienced with it. Credit to Jigzaw Killer on Twitch, his strats have served me well for 9+ years and I'm sure if I revisit this game again, they still will.
This game also loses steam briefly in around Chapter 10 after you SPOILERS: kill Laura for good. Once you're in the city, you have two on rails section with a bus portended by a clunky swimming section with an admittedly novel puzzle of dropping bodies into the water. It's only in Chapter 12 when you're dropped back in the thick of it in a solo battle for survival, and the game ramps up for a pretty good climax thereafter.
Visually this has aged amazingly. It looked ahead of its time in 2014 and still does here.
Music is great, though I prefer the sequel's spin on that. The sound design in general is so solid. Matches hiss as you burn corpses, Haunted release guttural growls and snarls as you stalk around them, Ruvik has a tinnitus effect that ramps up the tension as you try to avoid him teleporting to you.
DLC's are whatever, Assignment and Consequence give Kidman more depth but they're very barebones. Executioner is a lot of fun because the game just commits to being more arcade-y, which is a welcome reprieve from how realistic it tries to be in the base game.
I do like the story, still as much as I did back in 2018. Ruvik is basically John Kramer but lord of his own twisted, morbid version of the Matrix. The tragedy of his childhood creates a good moral question of whether monsters are born or made, and Kidman's role in the mission is admittedly more interesting than original REs Ada Wong sublots - who she is almost shamelessly based on. Is it stealing if you made the series you borrow from? That's a question for Mikami, not me. The premise though is so solid, a routine murder mystery at a hospital brings you into a apocalyptic matrix simulation and a fight for survival in the real and simulated world and such a setting is a playground for the most absurd concepts possible as ultimately, reality is defined by Ruvik's own imagination. I will say I heavily disagree with a lot of fans who act as if Joseph Oda was well-written or all that likeable in this game, I didn't give a damn about him in 2018 and I still don't now.
The controls aren't the best, if you like to rebind them as I do. Your side mouse buttons aren't detected, and if you set interact to F it will also set it to Space for some reason. Now this has a benefit: you can press both to speed up your button mashing, but it's a bit annoying to see two prompts pop up for one action often. I also think 4 inventory slots to cycle through with 1, 2, 3 and 4 is a big oversight considering you can have 9 weapons if you play NG+. Healing items also use one of those slots, so you can either have 4 weapons or 3 and a heal. Some might argue this is a good trade-off that benefits the game, but it's not quite as eloquent on a keyboard as it is on a dpad which you can quickly tap away at. To that end, I think going up to 4 slots is less an intentional choice by Shinji Mikami, and more a limitation of a console DPad only having 4 directions.
I'd give this game a 7.5/10 in 2026. The PC port is pretty average, and it's missing content the f*ing Microsoft Store of all places has. First person would have been a lovely way to revisit this game when going for 100% for the 2nd time, but alas, it's not to be. It's definitely worth playing to see what the guy who gave us OG RE4 can do with a new IP, and it's basically required to understand wtf is going on in TEW2, directed by Jon Johanas.
I still maintain the sequel is superior in almost every way, except for its omission of matches. That being said, TEW1 still dookies all over the pretentious slow-walking first person horror outlast clones only soylennials would denigrate their steam libraries with. Those games are the equivalent of watching a youtube video with Google Lens, and about as interesting as doing that, too.
I think I am getting rather fatigued with finding games that I loved on console just got woefully neglected/sidelined on PC.
