BAD TOUCH

This close to release you'd expect The Evil Within to look a little more polished. Waste ammo shooting a jittery cyber ghost and you at least expect something dynamic to happen when he finally backs you into a corner. Maybe Tango Gameworks are intentionally holding back on the death animations? I can't imagine the game will ship with that obscured explosion touch. I hope not anyway. Elsewhere we get a tease of the game's shape - rapid environmental changes, quick think death traps, and roaming around searching for keys. For a fan of Shinji Mikami's Resident Evil entries, that's very exciting.

CHAINSAW MAN

The latest The Evil Within footage out of Tango GameWorks suggests an experience not unlike the abortive Hallucination BioHazard draft of Resident Evil 4. Trailed at E3 2003, this unreleased build saw a poisoned Leon S Kennedy trapped in a haunted house stuffed full of spooky ghosts and creepy dolls. Players would stumble through violent figments of Kennedy's imagination as he inched ever closer to a kidnapped companion from a previous game. As well as high definition reskins of the released Resident Evil 4's siege sequences, it's encouraging to see Mikami experimenting with stealth and finding elegant ways to weave movement prompts into the title's cinemascope mise-en-scène.

E3 2013: The Evil Within

Buried under all an acre of ticker tape spam is Bethesda's Pete Hines saying all the right things about Shinji Mikami and Tango Gameworks forthcoming The Evil Within. Hines stresses Mikami's commitment to delivering a survival horror experience weighted heavily on resource gathering and unexpected enemy behaviour. The in-game footage is extremely brief, but there are already a few hints regarding the kind of interactive invention Mikami's games are lousy with.

PSYCHOBREAK

Another The Evil Within video from IGN, this time featuring Shinji Mikami and Tango Gameworks staff saying exactly the sort of things you want to hear if you're building the project up to be Resident Evil 4 part 2.

PROJECT ZWEI

Looks like Shinji Mikami and Tango Gameworks have been hard at work cooking up a spiritual successor to the director's Resident Evil instalments. Watching the later episodes of the YoVideogames Resident Evil retrospective recently had me thinking - why aren't Capcom's horror games trying to be scary anymore? Mikami's GameCube reworking of Resident Evil works hard to create a certain level of tension. Ammo is scarce, enemies take a beating, and everywhere you go is damp and depressing.

Capcom's idea of what survival horror should be has moved so far away from what Mikami and Production Studio 4 were doing in 2002 that the eleven year old game looked fresh and new again. The Evil Within debuts with a a video clip that looks like a grimecore update of the live action FMV that played on boot for the original PlayStation Resident Evil. As a proof of concept this at least looks like survival horror rather than a hamfisted suits attempt to get Gears of War kids to pony up for Japanese games.

via IGN's YouTube feed.