Mikami has clearly been liberated by not having to worry about the Resident Evil universe, with all its characters, conflicts and interlocked timelines. As a measure of how determined Evil Within is to conform to survival horror principles, the only way you can be sure that most mutants won’t get up after you knock them down is by burning them – and in your base state, you can carry a grand total of four matches. The enemies will be pretty familiar to Resident Evil fans, despite the game’s more supernatural focus, and as the action progresses, they increasingly resemble what Frankenstein may have come up with if he’d had access to modern medical technology. If you crave fast twitch gaming, you’ll be disappointed: The Evil Within is all about making the most of limited resources, nailing headshots and working out the correct tactics to take down the mini-bosses and the major bosses (both of which are plentiful and satisfyingly bizarre) as well as assorted groups of mutants. The Evil Within is pure, unadulterated, first-principles survival horror, with an equal emphasis on both the survival and horror parts. The good news for those who like their gore-laden adventures untainted by the merest hint of compromise is that he has now gone right back to his roots.
He effectively invented the enduring survival horror subgenre with 1996’s Resident Evil, but he also sowed the seeds of what purists see as its downfall, by moving 2004’s Resident Evil 4 (the last game in the series on which he worked, and a game that truly deserves the epithet “seminal”) in a more action-oriented direction. Shinji Mikami is universally acknowledged as one of the games industry’s true luminaries. Bethesda PC/PS3/PS4 (version tested)/Xbox 360/Xbox One £45 Pegi rating: 18