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Why Was Every Monster In The Evil Within Some Kind of Mutant?

Why Was Every Monster In The Evil Within Some Kind of Mutant?

I have a question for you, and if you saw the title of this article you probably know what it is. Why is it that every monster in The Evil Within was some sort of horrible mutant?

Caution, there are going to be a lot of The Evil Within spoilers coming up. So if you haven’t beaten the game, turn away now.

Anyway, The Evil Within eventually is revealed to take place in someone’s mind. It’s kind of like a darker and more evil version of Inception . Everybody and everything inside the game is just a mental projection. That’s why the environment can constantly change, the laws of gravity can be broken, the enemies you fight can get up after you kill them, and more.

But, even though Shinji Mikami is known for being the creator of Resident Evil , why do all the enemies have such a Resident Evil vibe to them? In fact, a lot of things have a Resident Evil vibe to them and it’s a bit out of place.

Why Was Every Monster In The Evil Within Some Kind of Mutant?

For example, the game uses fire as the final destroyer of basically anything. When you burn an enemy, you know it won’t get up again. Normally this feels like a sort of zombie trope right? But the game explains it by saying that Ruvik, the main villain, was in a horrible fire as a child. So he doesn’t have the capability to control any source of fire in his mental world because he is too afraid. But then, why are there fires in his mental world to begin with? Why all the matches and torches? If Ruvik has control over the mental plane, why not erase the sources of fire to begin with?

Then, there’s the big question. Why is every enemy some sort of mutant? When the game starts, all the enemies that we see are strange “undead” style shamblers, many with their heads cut open. This can be explained by Ruvik’s obsession with the brain and with the dissecting of human bodies. So I’ll give the game that one.

But what about everything else? What about the strange spider lady made out of blood? What about the multi headed dog zombie thing that you fight in a parking garage? What about the strange one hit kill shark dolphin zombie that lurks around in lakes and flooded areas? What about the strange lanky shamblers with two heads that vomit acid at you? What about the weird octopus tentacle beast? What about the weird multi-headed insectile beast thing that you fight with a rocket launcher as the final boss?

There is no explanation for why these enemies exist? Ruvik didn’t have some preoccupation with zombies or mutants. In a Resident Evil game these enemies make sense, because some sort of virus is mutating your enemies’ flesh. But in this game? The only thing that would really make sense is that Ruvik was a big fan of the Resident Evil franchise. Maybe that’s why his mind is populated with zombie mutants.

In fact, the whole idea of people “turning” seems like kind of a weak concept in this game. The idea is that Ruvik slowly gets control of your mind and turns you into a monster. But, it’s not completely clear why he can’t do that from the get go and, once again, if he can, wouldn’t it be better if he just made these people act like usual? If the idea is “when you die in the dream you die in real life” it would be a lot easier to make someone turn around and fire a bullet into the back of their partner’s skull than to grunt, groan, turn into a zombie, and slowly shamble toward them.

Don’t get me wrong. The Evil Within is an awesome game. But I feel like there was a lot of missed potential here. The things we can dream up are pretty scary. The world of the mind is filled with a ton of abstract incomplete thoughts that we just sort of accept as fine and normal. Instead of every environment being a bloody doctor’s office, the game could have walked us through fractured and broken fragments of the main characters’ memories, in ways more than just giving us journal fragments or letting us see ghostly re-enactments of events that happened in the past. Dreams and memories are filled with people without faces, places without details, and lots and lots of darkness. They are filled with broken and fractured remnants of what we once saw and experienced. They are, frankly, scary without mutant zombie gore.

What do you think? Do you think the mutant zombies of The Evil Within were somewhat out of place with the game’s theme? Or do you not really care and wave it off as a habit of the creator of Resident Evil ? Let us know in the comments.

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