Video Game / The Evil Within

A mind is a terrible thing to lose.

The Evil Within (Psycho Break in Japan) is a 2014 Survival Horror game developed by Tango Gameworks as their debut game, directed by Shinji Mikami, and published by Bethesda.

The story is about a detective, Sebastian Castellanos, who is beginning an investigation of a mass homicide in Beacon Mental Hospital with his partners, Joseph Oda and Juli "Kid" Kidman. After a short venture into the building, the trio view a man on a security tape moving at insane speeds, and are drawn into a reality-altering nightmare.

Three bits of Downloadable Content have been released after the original game: The Assignment, The Consequence, and The Executioner. The final DLC is considered non-canon, but the first two are a genuine expansion on the story. A sequel, The Evil Within 2, was released on October 13th, 2017.

Neither game should be confused for the 2017 Horror Film, The Evil Within.

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The Evil Within has the following Tropes:

• Action Bomb: Haunted firemen carry a gas tank on their back. Shooting it will cause it to explode after a short delay. It will also make them switch their combat tactic to running towards Castellanos, aiming to take him out with the explosion.
• Action Girl: For a rookie, Juli Kidman is a good shot with her gun. However, it later turns out that she's no rookie at all.
• Actionized Sequel:
  • Inverted with The Assignment and The Consequence, which have relatively little combat and a much larger focus on stealth and interactive story sequences. Instead, Kidman gets far less weapons, an Enemy-Detecting Radar, and a Take Cover! mechanic.
  • Played Straight with The Executioner, which, while still featuring the resource management of the game, places you in the shoes of The Keeper, who has a much higher chance of defeating his enemies given his range of traps and melee weapons.
• Affectionate Nickname: Sebastian gets called 'Seb' by Joseph, which is turned on its head when Ruvik corners Sebastian and uses the same nickname to establish just how much control he has over everyone.
• All Just a Dream: According to Shinji Mikami himself, the game takes place within the mind of an insane individual, if not several. This is because of a simulated reality Lotus-Eater Machine sort of system called STEM, which simulates a reality within the consciousnesses of those hooked up to it. Ruvik acts as the Mind Hive for the system, called the "Core", which allows him to dramatically alter the landscape at his whims. Even worse: Sebastian and his friends may have been in a dreamworld even before you drive to the hospital at the start of the game; unless Ruvik was somehow able to kill people as a mental projection from a brain in a jar in the real world, he couldn't have killed all those people in the lobby. This is also supported by the radio in their police car going haywire and emitting the same Brown Note screech that plagues the group while they're in the dreamworld. The Consequence reveals that the STEM system in the hospital is operated by wireless transmission. Jimenez activated the STEM just as Sebastian and Co were on their way to the hospital (Signified by the squealing noise they heard on the radio), pulling them into the STEM system and into Ruvik's reality.
• All There in the Manual: The model viewer you unlock after beating the game fleshes out the characters a little more and shows the name of each monster and their backstory.
• Ambiguous Ending: The main game's end raises questions like: is Ruvik in Leslie's body? Did he die before being successfully transported into the machine? Did Sebastian even see Leslie or was it his imagination? Where is Joseph? Is Sebastian awake, or just in a another dream layer? The Assignment and The Consequence help clear most of it up.
• Amusement Park of Doom: You can almost hear Sebastian thinking "Fuck. My. Life." when he sees the giant spinning carousel with prison cages attached to the top (and snipers who use them as cover), a deadly maze filled with traps below, and two room-spanning giant blades of death that will kill anyone who isn't ducking underneath them. Complete with carnie music! It's implied that the whole nightmare is based on an amusement park Ruvik went to once.
• An Arm and a Leg: If you successfully escape from Laura the second time, she will grab Sebastian through the bars of the elevator and refuse to let go until the moving lift severs both the arms she was holding him with.
• Anachronism Stew: Deliberately invoked in some areas of the game, such as a medieval church that has electrical lights and elevators, which is pointed out by Joseph. Later justified, in that said locations are literally fantasies of Ruvik's, and don't need to hew closely to era-appropriate tech.
• And Your Little Dog, Too!: A more sinister variation; to show that he has the upper hand (and because he loves tormenting people), Ruvik sets out bait that will deliberately get his victims worked up. It's implied that this is why Joseph is constantly in danger, in order to get an emotional response out of his partner Sebastian.
• Anti-Frustration Features:
  • The game allows you to decrease the difficulty level in the mid of the game if you think it is too much for you to handle. However you cannot increase the difficulty level once you have lowered it down.
  • The game can be very scarce with checkpoints, but when reaching a sequence where you're fighting or working around multiple Haunted, you'll get a checkpoint when you've made significant progress.
  • Any time you're forced to Run or Die from a boss enemy you have an unlimited sprint gauge, and your revolver will have all the bullets it needs the few scripted times you have to shoot something to avoid immediate death, even if you were completely out of handgun ammo.
  • Failing to fight off the final boss in the main game, with the rocket launcher, and the game will have Ruvik go down in one rocket after the third death.
  • Since one of the morgue locker keys can only be obtained if you kill Laura in Chapter 10, which is basically impossible unless you've sufficiently upgraded your guns, have tons of ammo, are on New Game Plus, or all three, at least two keys can be found in random lockers, guaranteeing that you'll be able to open them all in a single playthrough.
• Awesome, but Impractical:
  • The Rocket Launcher in New Game Plus. Ridiculously powerful, but you can't move while it's equipped, it does not one-shot most bosses, and seating in a new missile takes long enough for said bosses to easily get in close to you. Using it on bosses without stunning or freezing them first is a bad idea.
  • A DLC for the game unlocks a double-barreled shotgun, an incendiary bolt and a poison bolt. They're all immensely powerful but is compensated by the fact that none of them can be upgraded (not to mention, in the case of the shotgun, it only holds two shells and can fire pretty quickly, making it recommended to go against enemies that are either standalone or in small groups when using it).
• The Bad Guy Wins: Implied Trope, as Ruvik completed his goal of getting to Leslie, which allowed him to escape to the real world in a new body.
• Bad People Abuse Animals: It's heavily implied that Ruvik killed animals in his childhood.
• Bear Trap: Some of the traps encountered in the game are bear traps. The game seems to love hiding them in tall grass and under grimy water.
• Big Bad: The overarching antagonist is Ruvik, the enigmatic hooded man responsible for pulling you into his twisted world.
• The Blank: At one point, Sebastian will run into Leslie in the Asylum. When he turns to face Sebastian, his face is a smooth, eerily-glowing reflective surface.
• Blood Bath: There's a pool in the hospital that's filled with blood and human remains.
• Bedlam House: The mental hospital seems to have been a front for scientists to randomly stick needles, barbed wire, and questionable substances into test subjects. And to ship victims to Ruvik for his "research." And eventually, for Ruvik and Dr. Jimenez to collaborate on their brain-connecting machine.
• Bittersweet Ending:
  • Sebastian manages to escape from the machine (and possibly destroy Ruvik's brain), exposing the operation to the masses. Unfortunately, it's highly likely that Ruvik managed to escape from the machine into Leslie's body, and is now free to roam the city. Alongside this, Joseph is nowhere to be found and Kidman's goals remain unknown.
  • With The Assignment and The Consequence, the STEM is revealed to have a remote signal, and that Jimenez activated it while inside Beacon Hospital, regardless of those - likely Sebastian and his partners - caught up in it, trapping them in the STEM with Ruvik. Kidman and Sebastian may have escaped, but several innocent people who were going about their day were either slaughtered or driven to madness inside the STEM.
  • Further still, at the end of The Consequence, Kidman ends up with a strange mark on her arm (which Ruvik may have put there) and no memory of how she got outside of the STEM. We hear The Administrator's voice over hers one final time, implying she might not have escaped after all. Also, Kidman saves Sebastian by declaring him dead, but we can see the organisation carrying away Joseph in the background. He's thus probably alive, but now at the mercy of Mobius.
• Body Horror:
  • Many of the enemies are twisted and warped in visceral ways, and they seem to favor mutilation. In general, the game has a theme of driving objects into the brain while its owner's still alive and wrapping skin in barbed wire - tightly. Even the upgrade system appears to be sticking things into Sebastian's brain.
  • At one point in the game Sebastian himself has to stick needles into brains as part of a puzzle; what makes it truly squicky is that the decapitated heads still look around while you operate on them.
  • Blow part of a zombie's head off and you may notice their brain is covered in barbed wire.
  • Ruvik himself counts, as he is covered in burns and part of his skull has been replaced with glass, exposing half of his brain.
• Body Motifs: There's a lot of focus on images of the human brain.
• Bond One-Liner: Sticking around to finish off the Sentinel has Sebastian quipping "Bad dog." after it keels over.
• Book Ends: Sebastian begins the game by entering Beacon Mental Hospital with his two partners. Sebastian re-enters the hospital in the final chapter of the game for the final show-down with Ruvik. The game concludes with Sebastian finally leaving the hospital, albeit having lost both of his partners.
  • When Sebastian leaves the hospital in the first chapter, Joseph is missing. When Sebastian leaves the hospital yet again in the final chapter, Joseph is missing once more.
• Boom, Headshot!: If you land a critical with a gun then the enemy's head will erupt in a fountain of blood. The same effect can be achieved if you or Joseph use an axe on an enemy. However, not all headshots are critical hits, and it's just as possible to just shoot off half of the target's head and have them still come at you, albeit damaged.
• Boring, but Practical: The Handgun. It may not look like much, you'll never have a lot of ammo due to limited capacity or carrying ability, but if you can shell out the 33,500 Green Gel necessary, you can upgrade your Critical Hit % to 50%. Since a critical hit on a Haunted's head blows their head apart and instantly kills them, you can save a LOT of ammo, matches, and health this way.
• Boss Battle: Several; all of the "oh dear god run for your life" variety.
• Bragging Rights Reward:
  • You get superweapons for New Game Plus; they're overpowered and ruin the balance of the game, but this is after you already beat it. You have to beat the game (without using any of these rewards) to unlock them: a machine gun, a rocket launcher, and insta-kill brass knuckles.
  • In The Executioner, you can unlock unlimited ammo for all of your weapons after fully upgrading them, and doing certain tasks. These tasks are very difficult, meaning that if you completed them, you probably didn't need unlimited ammo anyway.
• Brain in a Jar: Ruvik was reduced to this at the hands of Mobius. It's explained that he had rigged STEM to only activate when his brain was connected to it and destroyed the notes that would let them rebuild it otherwise, so he could keep his private fantasy world generator all to himself. Mobius instead went, "Hey, we just need your BRAIN" and ripped it out and attached it. Unfortunately, Ruvik's brain is more conscious and in control of the dream world than they thought it would be, so STEM is still nothing but a useless reality-warping nightmare-generator.
• Brain Washed: Implied by Tatiana that Sebastian's memories aren't all that he thinks they are.
  Tatiana: "Memories are vague things indeed. It can be easy at times for memories to be distorted by others. That is why they must be cherished..."
• Broken Bridge: Happens frequently.
• Brown Note: Occasionally there will be a screech that causes the protagonists to be hit with a splitting headache, and seems to progress their mutation into a Haunted (Joseph and Sebastian briefly turn after experiencing one, but are able to revert back to normal afterwards). Juli, however, is immune to it.
• Cannibal Larder: You'll find yourself trapped in one during the first 5 minutes of gameplay. It gets worse from there.
• Chainsaw Good: Ha ha ha...no. No, it isn't. Not when your enemies have it. Though one retrieved from a dead monster does serve as a brief quest item. Though this trope is invoked in The Executioner DLC, where you can get one as a weapon.
• Checkpoint Starvation: It's really not as bad as most sources would say, but checkpoints generally only happen after you've made a significant amount of progress in the game or before a boss fight.
• Controllable Helplessness: And at one point, said monster slices your leg pretty badly, forcing you to limp around as he pursues you.
• Cop Killer: Ruvik is seen killing several responding officers in the introduction sequence.
• The Corruption: The process in which a person turns into one of the Haunted: first they start coughing up blood, then their skin begins to bleed and pus, then they lose control of themselves and attack anyone in the vicinity, until eventually they become the glowy-eyed not-zombies you fight in the game. Joseph struggles with it for most of the game, and Sebastian starts to fall prey to it too.
• Creepy Child: As a boy, Ruvik enjoyed dissecting things a bit too much.
• Creepy Circus Music: Chapter 10 features a colorful carousel-like contraption blaring a jaunty accordion tune through what sounds like an old Victrola. Said contraption also has several cages dangling from it holding mannequins and a massive razor blade (or blades, on higher difficulty settings) spinning around it, right at neck level. You later hear the same tune coming from a normal, benign merry-go-round in Chapter 11.
• Creepy Doll: One loading screen features a bunch of bloody mannequins, whose eyes move slowly around.
• Crutch Character: Or rather Crutch Weapon. Pre-ordering the game nets you a double barreled shotgun that you find shortly into the second level (aka the first level with serious combat). It serves as a serious boon early on when you'd otherwise just have your revolver. However, it cannot be upgraded, and as soon as you find the standard shotgun, the double barrel shotgun's usefulness quickly comes to an end.
• Cute Kitten: "Save Cat" in The Assignment. When you save the game, a black cat with a red ribbon round its neck appears for Kidman to stroke. Once you save the game, you can choose to let Kidman continue to stroke the cat for a few moments before getting back to the action.
• Crystal Dragon Jesus: An odd non-fantasy example. A religion is brought up a few times throughout the game, most notably in Kidman's memories of growing up, that bears many similarities to Christianity, yet it's never actually named, only referred to vaguely as "the church." Even the symbol is similar to the crucifix, but with more arms on the sides.
• Damsel in Distress: Happens twice to Juli; first when she's trapped in a box slowly filling up with water, and again when she's surrounded by Haunted and needs Sebastian's help to escape. For the most part though she can take care of herself, and it's actually more common for her co-worker Joseph to be the one in trouble. However, it's subverted as shown in The Assignment and The Consequence, as she was never actually a damsel in distress.
• Deadly Nosebleed: Given that nosebleeds only happen if someone's reverted back from being a Haunted, this could be an inversion.
• Death of a Child: It's revealed in notebooks you find lying around that Sebastian and Myra lost their five-year-old child in a house fire. In the same vein, young Ruben and Laura are trapped in a barn that's set on fire by begrudged townsfolk; Laura dies, while Ruben is left very badly scarred (both physically and mentally.)
• Degraded Boss: The Keeper returns two more times late in game, and even brings a buddy in the last fight. He isn't any less lethal or easier to kill, but there are only a few extra safes in the meat locker where you have to fight him (and you only need to kill him once before you can escape) and none at all the last area where you face two of him, so once you drop them both they can't respawn. Inverted, however, with the last appearance of the Sadist, who's a lot tougher than he was when you previously dealt with him.
• Department of Redundancy Department: There's four difficulty settings in the game; two of them are titled "Nightmare", where enemies are stronger and more resistant, and "AKUMU", where anything can kill you in literally one hit. However, the term "akumu" is Japanese for nightmare, meaning there's two difficulties of the same name.
• Developer's Foresight: If you blow open a Haunted's head to get a good look at its brain, then you can see it's been wrapped in barbed wire.
• Dirty Business: Kidman hesitates and begins to cry when about to shoot Leslie in the back of the head, showing that while she really doesn't want to kill such an innocent, she has to in order to prevent Ruvik from escaping the STEM system.
• Distressed Dude:
  • Joseph takes this role in the chapters that he is present; he's thrown into dangerous situations and it's always Sebastian who must rescue him. Played for laughs when Joseph loses his glasses, and it is Sebastian's job to retrieve them. It is later strongly implied that Ruvik places Joseph into these situations to evoke a response from Sebastian.
  • Leslie is being hunted down by Ruvik and by Juli, so spends most of the game hiding or running away in fear.
• Downloadable Content: Three DLC packs: The Assignment and The Consequence will explore what Juli Kidman did during the events of the main game. In the third DLC, the player takes the role of The Keeper.
• The Dreaded: Ruvik is too deadly to be fought, and must be eluded. He simply "phases out" when you shoot at him, and even trying to get close to him results in an instant death.
• Driven to Suicide: Joseph tries to shoot himself to avoid turning into a Haunted. Sebastian tackles him before he can. His speech afterwards implies that this may not be the first time he's thought of it either.
  Joseph: "Sebastian... You ever have the urge to just jump when you're on a high place, or the subway rolls by?
• Dropped Glasses: Played for laughs. Hesitant, dread-filled laughs.
• Early Game Hell: In Chapter 1, you have no weapons at all and must limp or sneak your way past a chainsaw maniac who will kill you in one hit. In Chapter 2, you get a gun and may find a couple of bullets for it if you're lucky (and you still need to rely almost entirely on stealth to make it through, if you can't lead a few into the ambient booby-traps). Chapter 3 takes place in a small but intricate maze of a village full of Haunted who would like to stab you, guarded by a sniper in the center of town, but stealth and smart maneuvering can let you backstab a few or throw them into traps, and exploration rewards you with some significant new weapons. As you progress you also find green fluid to upgrade yourself with and you can start carrying more than five measly bullets at once. By the end of the game you'll probably have an impressive arsenal at your command and the enemies that gave you so much hell before are not nearly as threatening. The Chainsaw guy from chapter 1 comes back several times as a miniboss.
• Easter Egg:
  • In The Consequence, Kidman can stumble upon a hidden room where Spotlight and some Haunted are dancing, re-creating a scene from the music video for World Order's "Have a Nice Day".
  • There's another amusing one towards the end of The Consequence: shooting Ruvik's brain brings up a goofy photo of Sebastian, Juli and Joseph before fake credits start to roll before abruptly stopping.
  • Playing The Consequence in Kurayami difficulty ^note in which the only light source within STEM is Kidman's flashlight/the chemical lights has an amusing one at the end of the sequence where Kidman must locate the generator to turn the lights back on. This being the pitch-dark Kurayami mode, not only do the lights stay off... but the voice of Shinji Mikami is suddenly heard, mockingly saying "You thought the light would turn on? Well too bad!" in Japanese. Nice trolling, Mikami!
  • During Chapter 4 in the main game, you can shoot the Haunted who attempts to throw the woman on the bonfire, thus saving her. If you follow her as she runs away into a cabin, she'll disappear and leave 2000 green gel points behind.
  • During the same chapter, in the same location, several hanging bodies can be found. If you go out of your way to burn all of them, an enormous pig will appear out of nowhere next to the bonfire. It doesn't attack and completely ignores you, but killing it will net you 2000 green gel points.
• Eldritch Location:
  • At least part of Sebastian's adventure takes place in a strange reality that's accessed through a mysterious mirror... and it's unclear whether this is real, or something that's happening in Sebastian's head. Or, according to Word of God, in someone else's head that he's going through.
  • Another example: Sebastian, at one point, finds himself in a tranquil field of sunflowers, with a barn in the distance... except that the sky is a stark, harsh yellow, and the barn is in complete silhouette. Clearly, something isn't normal here.
  • The game more or less starts out this way, when you find yourself waking up in an elaborate slaughterhouse beneath the hospital with impossible, impractical whirling blade hallways. There is no possible way this thing could actually be beneath the hospital, no matter how unethical they were.
• Enemy-Detecting Radar: Included in The Assignment without an in-story justification, mainly to make the more stealth-focused gameplay viable.
• Escort Mission:
  • Finding Joseph in the lower levels of Beacon leads to Sebastian having to escort him through several areas crawling with The Haunted. Luckily he has decent health, will actively try to avoid getting hit, and usually packs a custom .45 caliber M1911A1 with infinite ammo, meaning that for many of the fights you can just draw enemies away from him while he blasts them to pieces. Later segments have him either wielding a long-handle axe or a Sniper Rifle from a safe area. Plus, you can infinitely heal him, so even if he gets hit, you can usually get him back up, if you're fast enough.
  • In a couple of areas Juli will also be part of the group; unlike Joseph she doesn't have a health bar, and she's often only with you for a few minutes before you're separated again.
• Establishing Series Moment: Waking up in a literal human slaughterhouse with a merciless sadist wielding a chainsaw. Dark, bloody, disgusting, and very tense, it sets the tone for the rest of the game.
• Evil Is Visceral: The game frequently focuses on how badly warped the monsters are, and the horrific results of the experiments that created them. A sizeable portion of the environments you go through reflects this, with all the blood, guts, meat and brain tissue you'd ever need, and then some!
• Expy: Many characters from this game seem rather strongly inspired by characters from Resident Evil 4, one of Shinji Mikami's previous works. Sebastian, Juli, and Jimenez have similar personalities or character roles as Leon, Ada, and Luis respectively. This even applies to some of the enemies; the Sadist is similar in function and appearance to Dr. Salvador, for example.
• Fake Memories: Crops up a lot in The Assignment and The Consequence. Juli Kidman sees things and interacts with things that Sebastian and Joseph never saw, even when she was in the exact same room as them. One time she's arguing with the Administrator from her point of view, while it's really Sebastian. Later on, it's hinted that the Administrator may never have been real at all, which makes every time we flashed back to Mobius in the DLC may have been a falsified, warped or otherwise distorted version of events.
• Fan Disservice:
  • Reborn Laura is completely naked (not that anything is visible), aside from a pair of shoes. She's also covered in burn scars and pulsating flesh and has four arms with huge clawed hands.
  • Shade (aka Spotlight) has a nice pair of legs. She also has a huge, sharp-toothed maw inside her torso, is covered in blood, and, well, has a spotlight for a head.
  • Ruvik isn't wearing a shirt under his coat, and ends up losing it at the end of the game. However he is covered in multiple burns and scars, and the top right half of his skull has been replaced with a clear artificial plate, exposing his brain.
• Fanservice: After you get Kidman out of her water prison her bra is visible through her wet shirt. There are also a few instances where the camera will be suspiciously low, thus bringing her tight jeans into main focus. This is especially noticeable when she walks up to the administrator to give him the final headshot.
• Final Boss: The Amalgam, driven by Ruvik, is the final boss.
• Final Dungeon Preview: In the very first chapter, Sebastian explores a sewer underneath Beacon Memorial Hospital and some of its basement level while trying to escape the Sadist, totally unarmed and severely wounded to the point he can only limp around. Later on, in the final chapter of the game, you return to the hospital and even some of the same rooms, significantly better equipped for the challenges ahead. It's no easier than the first time even with guns, unfortunately.
• Fire Keeps It Dead: Fire not only is extremely effective on almost every enemy, but it also prevents enemies from rising to fight you in the first place. The reason is connected.
• For Science!: The following exchange embodies this trope:
  Dr. Jimenez: You can show me your experiments. I can show you "things".
  Ruvik: You wouldn't like them. You'd think they're gross.
  Dr. Jimenez: In science, one must do any number of things a lay person may find... disgusting. I've done things many others would consider... distasteful.
• Foreshadowing:
  • If knowing The Reveal from the DLCs, then the intro of the actual game has a very blatant one: when the machine's signal comes in through the radio, everyone but Kidman cringes in pain.
  • There's a save point early in Chapter 15 you can find in Beacon's vestibule that has a suit jacket hanging near the desk. Look closely at the lapel and you can see a pin with the Mobius logo on it. You can also see this logo on a large metal door a little while earlier.
• Genius Loci: Since Sebastian is slogging through other peoples' (mainly Ruvik's) mind and memories, it frequently morphs and reacts to his presence or actions.
• Gothic Horror: A very strong element of the game. Many of the game's environments and settings are deliberately designed to evoke older sensibilities of horror, with dilapidated asylums and underground crypts instead of modern mansions or old mining spaceships. This is reflected in the weaponry as well, with a major emphasis on non-automatic weaponry such as shotguns, revolvers, and rifles.
• Gorn: The game is dripping with blood and gore (sometimes literally). Giant pools of human blood, exposed brains, human slaughterhouses, and the sheer amount of blood for the final boss alone make it one of the goriest games ever.
• Grand Theft Me: Ruvik's plan is to possess Leslie's body, and he may have succeeded.
• Greater Need Than Mine: When Sebastian and Joseph are being assaulted by Ruvik in the church, Sebastian opts to use a health syringe on Joseph rather than focus on his own safety.
• Grief-Induced Split: Sebastian and Myra separated after their daughter died in a house fire. Myra became obsessed with the idea that she was kidnapped and the fire was staged to cover it up. Sebastian's belief that his wife was clinging to denial led to their estrangement.
• Guide Dang It!:
  • Most of the keys for the morgue lockers are in locations you would never know to look unless you use a walkthrough, which can lead to a little frustration if you're trying to get them all in a single playthrough.
  • The game suggests that Laura is only vulnerable to fire, but neglects to mention that she is not, in fact, Immune to Bullets despite seemingly shrugging them off. You're supposed to light her on fire and then pump her full of lead while she's thrashing and screaming; simply burning her repeatedly without using firearms will drag the fight on for a ridiculously long time.
• Guilt by Association Gag: Played for Drama. After escaping his basement prison, Ruvik not only killed his father (who arguably deserved it for treating him as dead and not telling anyone he was alive), but also killed his mother, who didn't have anything to do with his imprisonment and didn't even know of his survival.
• Heroic Sacrifice: The barn being on fire, Laura pushes her brother out of the window in order to save him at the cost of her own life. Unfortunately, this and his imprisonment through his own father drove him off the deep end.
• Hoist by His Own Petard:
  • Kneecapping the many Haunted that are equipped with lit dynamite causes them to trip and blow themselves up with their own explosive. Those carrying molotov cocktails get it even worse, owing to their deathly aversion to fire courtesy of Ruvik, which doesn't even kill them immediately unlike the dynamite.
  • Sebastian himself can be on the receiving end of this by throwing grenades too closely to himself, getting caught in the blast radius of his own Rocket Launcher or shot Agony bolts of certain flavor.
  • Ruvik's habit of leaving various tools and weapons around to instill false hope into his prey serves as the catalyst for his own downfall. Particularly notable when Sebastian clocks him in the face with the lantern that Ruvik himself laid out for the detective to collect, evoking his pyrophobia and causing him to go One-Winged Angel.
• Hub Level: "The Asylum", an off-color version of Beacon Hospital's nurse station that can be accessed by staring into various broken mirrors scattered throughout the game. Not only is it the only place to save, but there's a rather creepy nurse keeping it safe. It also has lockers with ammo and items but you need to find the keys for each. It's also one of the few areas that is always safe. Usually.
• Humanoid Abomination:
  • Ruvik. Aside from being absurdly powerful and essentially implacable, he's also a Reality Warper that can summon monsters. He also turns into a humanoid cloud of blood particles to pursue Sebastian at some points. In the final battle he assumes an even ''worse'' form to fight Sebastian.
  • There's also the Sadist (the most normal-looking of the lot, albeit still being bloody, scarred, and wearing an iron mask), The Keeper (who looks completely human except for the safe in place of a head) and Laura (who has two more arms than she should and gets around on all fours).
• Idiosyncratic Difficulty Levels: There are 4 difficulty levels in this game, each with their own description:
  • Casual - For the weak and fearful. Auto-aiming enabled by default and slightly more ammo than normal.
  • Survival - Standard difficulty. Challenge and overcome your fears.
  • Nightmare - True to the word. Prepare to Die.
  • AKUMU（悪夢） - One hit and it's all over. Worse than Nightmare, this is pure hell.
• Improbable Weapon User: The Keeper, in addition to his hammer, swings around a sack with nails sticking out of it. The character viewer implies that this sack holds the head of one of his victims. For all the weirdness of it, the sack with a nail filled head turns out to be surprisingly effective weapon.
• Incest Subtext: Laura was very protective of her brother Ruben (who is known to the player as Ruvik) with... an interesting amount of detail dedicated to a description of the former through various notes left throughout the game by the latter. Even more so as the Laura creature Sebastian encounters throughout the game is a case of Full-Frontal Assault. It's even noted in-universe by Jimenez that Ruben has a "near incestual" love for his sister.
• Infinity -1 Sword: All the bonus weapons have enough drawbacks to keep them from replacing your regular loadout. The Rocket Launcher is slow and keeps you pinned in place while you use it, the Machine Gun eats up ammo and isn't any good for long-range enemies, ammo drops are extremely rare or flat-out nonexistant (that's right; no infinite ammo, either) and they cannot be upgraded. Meanwhile, the Burst Handgun is powerful but a serious ammo hog, and the Brass Knuckles are a better melee weapon than your bare hands by a huge margin, but are still, you know, a melee weapon.
• Injured Player Character Stage: In the first chapter, Sebastian is injured, and can only limp around (as well as being unarmed). This forces the player to learn the stealth mechanics.
• Interface Screw:
  • Using full health kits—particularly in a dangerous area—isn't recommended, since the overdose of medication can cause hallucinations. Thankfully, using smaller health kits doesn't cause this effect.
  • Whenever the Keeper regenerates, the screen stutters and leaves brief after-images when Sebastian moves around (a similar effect happens in the Asylum when it's in its unsafe monochrome state).
• Invulnerable Knuckles: Sebastian can punch through boxes, vases, and mannequins without (seemingly) causing any harm to his hands. Invoked big time when melee is maxed out; Sebastian can literally punch the FACE off a Haunted and brush it off as no big deal.
• Karma Houdini:
  • Played straight with Ruvik, who basically gets off scot free if his possession of Leslie was successful.
  • Subverted and played straight with Juli, who despite being somewhat of an antagonist, never really does anything wrong to Sebastian, and even covers for him in the ending. On the other hand, she doesn't seem to face repercussions for shooting Joseph (even if it was an accident).
• Kaiju:
  • Played straight with Heresy, complete with it rampaging through the desolate streets of Krimson City, and chasing after a bus the trio are driving, in a homage to both Kaiju films and Jurassic Park.
  • Also played straight with Ruvik's final form.
• Kill It with Fire:
  • Enemies need to be burned in order to keep them down.
  • Laura's only vulnerability is to fire based attacks, from fiery weaponry to explosions.
  • This is also Ruvik's one psychological weakness, hence why it is so effective.
  • When Sebastian first sits in the upgrade chair the entire room, including Nurse Tatiana, bursts into flames. Fortunately it's just a hallucination.
• Knee-capping: A strategy that the loading screens advocate for, as shooting the target Haunted in the leg will cause him or her to fall on the ground, enabling a match-based fire kill.
• Kung Fu-Proof Mook: Some late-game Haunted wear steel masks, making them immune to headshots and forcing you to pull out a heavier weapon to deal with them.
• Land Mine Goes "Click!": There are scores of explosive traps all over the place, and most have a flashing red light and a beep that kicks on just before they go boom, giving you time to duck under their sensor and disarm them. You can also use explosive harpoons as proximity mines against enemies, an incredibly useful thing to have in some situations, like dealing with Invisible Haunted (narrow doorway + proximity bomb = "Gotcha, asshole!").
• Leaning on the Fourth Wall: In The Assignment, Juli gets an "infusion" of something meant to protect her from the corruption of Ruvik. When she asks how it will protect her, the administrator says, "more accurately, it will hide you." Hiding, rather than direct confrontation, is how most of Kidman's DLC missions go.
• Light Is Not Good: Given that the hospital is named Beacon, and is home to visceral experiments, this motif is in effect throughout the game:
  • Ruvik wears a very identifiable, barely stained white robe, along with having very pale skin with white hair. The character's very first action shown in the game is to slaughter a number of security guards.
  • A bystander in the second chapter looks into a light from a faraway lighthouse, and becomes one of the first Haunted Sebastian faces.
  • Julie Kidman throughout The Assignment and The Consequence ends up having to avoid an enemy with a spotlight for a head, and the final act of the former features the Administrator chasing Kidman, while a bright light emanates behind him, with the results being fatal if he catches her.
• Lighthouse Point: Beacon Hospital's namesake is the light beacon on the top of it. It is also where Ruvik's STEM machinery is located.
• Lightning Reveal: One loading screen has a dark window that occasionally shows a monster illuminated behind it when lighting strikes. Sometimes it will show bloody handprints smeared all over the glass, and other times there's nothing there at all.
• Luck-Based Mission: There's a neat subversion in Chapter 8. One puzzle involves inserting a plate into a locked door with the correct side facing outward to avoid a horrible death via impalement. A note you find in front of it mentions a random, 50/50 chance of success, as there are no hints as to which side is correct. The poor woman who wrote the note didn't survive her attempt, which in fact is your clue: the side with her blood spattered on it was already tried, so the clean side is the correct facing.
• Mad Scientist: Someone's been doing some crazy experiments with the brain.
• Made of Iron: Sebastian can take a lot of abuse, especially in cutscenes. Seeing as this literally is taking place in everyone's minds, his durability is justified.
• The Maker: Ruvik created the STEM system and is responsible for it's current state.
• Make Me Wanna Shout: During the climax when Juli is about to shoot Leslie, the latter starts panicking and screams loud enough to break all the glass in the buildings nearby and disorientate everybody. This doesn't make the situation much better, as Juli ends up shooting Joseph instead in the ensuing panic. He gets better, as revealed by the ending.
• Malevolent Masked Men:
  • Mooks later in the game sometimes wear creepy white masks; they serve a practical purpose, as it's harder to score a headshot without breaking the masks first.
  • The Sadist also wears an iron mask that covers his mouth.
• Man on Fire: You can't throw a match at a living zombie, but if they're on the ground, even when stunned, one match will finish them off as they light up immediately. There are ways of lighting other living enemies on fire, though: use a match on a haystack and kick the haystack in the direction of an enemy, swing a torch at one, or, if you're clever, lighting a corpse on the ground and letting the flames set the enemy on fire too. The last one has an achievement for burning up multiple active enemies this way (and one boss fight also requires this).
  • Happens to Ruvik himself near the end of the game, where Sebastian smashes a lantern into his face, resulting with him dropping Sebastian and catching on fire. Thanks to Ruvik's fear of fire, things start going south for him rapidly.
• The Many Deaths of You: There are many ways for Sebastian to bite it. Gutted by sharp blades, falling prey to death traps, head smashed in by a multi-armed Stringy-Haired Ghost Girl... yeah. If you die, the game's going to make sure that you feel it.
• Market-Based Title: The game is called "Psychobreak" in Japan.
• Mental Monster: Played With in regards to the many monsters Sebastian encounters. The Symbolic Mutilation-ridden, zombie-like Haunted and Alter Egos are in reality the twisted, corrupted minds of those trapped inside the STEM system. Played straight with other monsters such as Laura, who are born from the Dark and Troubled Past of the Big Bad in control of the system.
• Mental World: Almost the entire game takes place inside Ruvik's mind, which is linked to the STEM system, which is designed to connect the minds of multiple people, and has access to the memories who have ever been connected to it. Since Ruvik is the core of STEM, he is able to manipulate the landscapes created by STEM.
• Menu Time Lockout: Downplayed. Time does not freeze when you access your inventory ring, but it does slow down drastically, giving you enough time to do what you need so long as an enemy wasn't charging towards you at that moment.
• Mind Hive: A variation. The STEM network has the combined memories of every person connected to it, even those who died while connected. Therefore, the entire Eldritch Location that is where the plot takes place amounts to an example of this trope, only controlled by Ruvik. To make matters worse, not only is the entity mostly controlling STEM a psychopath, but most of the (previous) test objects that entered STEM were mentally ill people, justifying why everything is so horrific and disturbing.
• Mind Screw: A large portion of the game is several layers of insane stuff happening at once. Some notable examples:
  • Sebastian is captured by the Sadist at the beginning of the game, and enters a huge facility of some kind underneath Beacon Mental. The sheer size of the place makes no sense relative to the rest of the Asylum.
  • At approximately the halfway point, Sebastian encounters the Keeper, aka Boxhead. After killing him, the body disappears- and when Sebastian passes by another safe, a strange metallic sound plays as the Keeper materializes from the safe.
  • There are multiple times where Sebastian will fall through a hallway and smack into the ground, only for the camera to rotate and show that he wasn't being thrown down a hallway, but instead through it, and that gravity has now re-adjusted itself so that the floor he just smacked into is now a wall facing his back.
  • Sebastian disconnects himself from the STEM machine three times, each time waking up in a new reality.
• Model Museum: One of these is available after completing the game for the first time, showing models for just about every weapon, monster and character in the game along with brief descriptions. The Downloadable Content campaigns add dozens of new models to the viewer, though they must be unlocked by finding hidden collectibles.
• Money Is Experience Points: In The Executioner, tokens can be used to upgrade your stats as well as buying ammo for your weapons, although they eventually become useless as you can unlock infinite ammo.
• Mood Whiplash: After spending the majority of the game seeing unspeakable horrors, Sebastian finds Juli and Leslie in a colorful playground full of bubbles. Juli even tells Leslie that she'll protect him. Then, Leslie almost takes a bullet to the brainpan and Joseph actually takes one in the chest.
  • In The Assignment and The Consequence, the unsettling, foreboding atmosphere can be temporarily broken if you go out of your way to hunt for unlockable character models. In order to get the models, you must locate several snails hidden throughout the DLCs, and focus your flashlight on them until they transform into the Tango Gameworks logo. What really makes this a Mood Whiplash is that the snails moan suggestively while you do so.
• Morality Chain: Laura is this to Ruvik. Once she is declared to be dead, Ruvik goes off further into their madness.
• Mysterious Backer: Mobius is the backer in "The Assignment" for Juli Kidman. Also an Ambiguously Evil Nebulous Evil Organization.
• Mysterious Watcher: In chapter 9, a man can be seen watching Sebastian through one of the library windows of Ruvik's mansion. It's notable that no reference to this man is ever made in official game material and he is not commented on by Sebastian - he just watches you until you get too close, and then walks away and disappears. A body wearing the same shirt can be found near where the man stood watching Sebastian, but upon a more detailed inspection it's easy to see that the body doesn't belong to the man who was watching you. He's seen again in a way that obviously implies that he is, or will be, an important character. He pops up again in The Assignment as a corpse, just after the second boss fight with Spotlight. If you walk around the room, you will find him lying there.
• New Game Plus: In addition to unlocking the Nightmare and AKUMU difficulties, beating the game will allow you to play through it again with all the weapons and upgrades you had at the end, and unlock two new weapons: a machine gun and the rocket launcher you used against the final boss.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: Zigzagged with Sebastian preventing Juli from killing Leslie. It's possible that Ruvik was therefore successful in possessing Leslie's body (which would also count as Being Good Sucks, as if he wasn't so set on saving Leslie, this would not have happened). Yet at the same time, his protecting Leslie saved both his life and Juli's, since killing Leslie would likely have had terrible repercussions: with his only method of escape lost, Ruvik would likely have gone AM on the two of them, and would have spent the rest of their lives inventing newer and more horrific methods of torturing the two of them in retaliation.
• No OSHA Compliance: Early on Sebastian finds himself being pursued by a chainsaw-wielding lunatic through a series of hallways in a butcher's factory—and one of them involved spinning grinders on either side, with no fences to prevent the careless from getting minced. Justified, because you're going through the mind of a lunatic.
• No-Sell: Kidman would seem to be this, as she appears to shrug off the sonic headaches that plague Sebastian and Joseph throughout the adventure. Justified; Kidman was injected by MOBIUS with some kind of serum to shield her from the harmful effects of the STEM.
• Nothing Is Scarier: The game makes effective use of this. Throughout the game, you'll hear noises that you most likely will never uncover the source of, the monsters have a tendency to just suddenly appear and then disappear the moment you look away, and you'll never know if the enemies you encounter are truly dead thanks to the overall surreal setting.
• Not Using the "Z" Word: The zombies are called "Haunted" by the model viewer but given no name by the characters in-game; just "them" or "those things!" Justified because they're not undead, they don't resemble any familiar zombie archetype, and nobody tells them what they're actually called.
• Numerical Hard: Present, in that monsters get stronger, you get weaker, and ammo gets less plentiful on harder difficulty settings. The game goes the extra mile by adding in more obstacles the harder you go (ex: On Casual, you can go left or right in an adjoining room to escape the Sadist in Chapter 1. On Survival and up, you might discover to your horror that the left path is now blocked off by crates).
• Off with His Head!:
  • One of the death animations involves Sebastian getting his head chainsawed off (in a clear nod to one of the ways Leon could die in Resident Evil 4).
  • The Haunted use a guillotine to lop off the head of a hapless NPC, and attempt to do the same thing to an incapacitated Joseph.
  • The Keeper can do this to its own safe-head, in order to respawn using a safe in a different location.
• One-Hit Kill: Loads. The Haunted can be OHKO'd if you score a critical headshot, or if you attack them with an axe or torch. Conversely, many of the bosses have an attack that can kill Sebastian in one hit, ramping up the difficulty of boss fights. Playing the game on difficulty AKUMU will make every enemy do this to you.
• Optional Boss: It is possible to kill the bloody, long-haired girl (a.k.a. Laura Victoriano) in your last encounter with her, but even on Casual difficulty it takes a lot of firepower; more than you're likely to have on hand in your first playthrough. The game itself even tries to talk you out of attempting it. Now, New Game Plus, on the other hand...
• Our Zombies Are Different: "The Haunted" seem to be totally normal people who have mentally succumbed to an evil force that's turned almost all of them into monsters. They have glowing eyes and many of them have a lot of impalements or barbed wire wrapped around them (which, in the cutscene where they first appear, is shown manifesting and wrapping around them). They're also smart enough to use weapons.
• Parking Garage: The boss fight against Amalgam Alpha takes place in a ruined parking garage.
• Platonic Cave: The entire setting; the mind of Ruvik himself.
• Poor Communication Kills: As a result of not explaining goals and the reasoning behind a Shoot the Dog action, Kidman accidentally shoots Joseph when he lunges at her to stop her from killing Leslie.
• Portmanteau: Ruvik's name is revealed to be this. Ruben Victoriano.
• Public Domain Soundtrack:
  • The music playing during your very first encounter with the sadist is J. Sebastian Bach's "Air on the G String".
  • The music that plays whenever a save mirror is nearby is Claude Debussy's "Clair de Lune".
• Puzzle Boss: Laura can only be destroyed by fire, and can appear near pools of blood (most often near a corpse). Burning a corpse keeps her from blood-teleporting to your location, but in the proper boss fight with her you need to rely on a bunch of fiery environmental hazards and quick thinking to kill her for good (for example, don't burn a corpse until after she's next to it, and she'll light on fire herself!)
• Rare Candy: Angel Statue keys, the only way to open up the lockers full of valuable ammunition and green gel in the Hub Level. They're almost all very well-hidden and each can only be used once. Less well-hidden but even rarer are the medical kits, which restore 100% of your health and add a small permanent boost to your life meter. And when we say these can only be used once, we mean it; keys and medkits you've already picked up don't reappear in a New Game Plus.
• Reality Is Out to Lunch: Many impossible things are happening on top of one another. While you don't see things phasing in and out of existence before your very eyes, Alien Geometry likes to kick in with regards to a lot of areas when your back is turned. You have no idea why looking at cracked mirrors brings you to the save point/upgrade system asylum or why injections to the head you get there make you stronger. People don't just become zombies, they become cracked abominations covered in barbed wire that grows out of nowhere. There are numerous reports as early as Chapter 1 that the doctors were experimenting on a kind of shared consciousness involving nightmares, but the end result seems to be that all of reality has become one GIANT nightmare.
• Red Shirt: Poor Connelly only makes it one chapter, two if you count killing his Haunted form in the forest.
• Religion of Evil: Ruvik's family belonged to some sort of cult with pseudo-Christian trappings. Very little is revealed about it, only that Ruvik's memories of his time in the cult are extremely grim.
• Removing the Head or Destroying the Brain: Besides setting them on fire, the only ways to permanently kill common Haunted are by blowing their heads off or killing them with stealth attacks (since you'll be stabbing them in the head in the process).
• Reviving Enemy:
  • Haunted will sometimes get back up again after a while if they aren't burnt with matches (which the player has a limited supply of).
  • The boss battle against the Keeper can revive anywhere one of his safes is, and will even rip his own head off and kill himself just to respawn closer to Sebastian.
    • This is actually a good thing, as the Keeper drops Green Gel each time he dies. And he deploys traps that can be scavenged for ammo to kill him again. Talk about a renewable resource! Note that the number of safes, and consequently the number of respawns, is limited.
• Rule of Cool: The simplest explanation for why the player character, a modern detective, dresses the way he does and still carries a revolver.
• Scars Are Forever:
  • Played with with Ruvik. Although he ends up heavily scarred from being set on fire, he did have the option of having skin-regeneration treatments, but chose not to.
  • Ruvik tells Juli that he has left his mark on her, and that she would never be rid of it. When she leaves STEM she ends up with a scar on her left hand.
• Scenery Gorn: After first escaping the mental hospital and finding the city being wiped out. The fight with Ruvik gets this pretty good too, what with a Battle in the Center of the Mind over an apocalyptic wasteland filled with all sorts of viscera.
• Schmuck Bait:
  • If you hang around during the intro level and wait for the Sadist to return to the corpse he was working on, you can try and do a stealth kill on him. This works about as well as expected. As it turns out, the Sadist can be killed in Chapter 1, but it requires backstabbing him sixteen times in a row (at least on Nightmare difficulty). During his Boss Battle later on, he can be killed properly.
  • Chapter 13 has an outright hilarious example - a haunted is crouched in the centre of a room, glowing red... The player will get a bit confused and approach the haunted, only for it to rapidly stand up and run straight for you. It's at this moment that you realise the red glow came from the bombs that were stuck to the front of the Haunted. Sebastian is caught in the explosion, and suddenly, a door opens next to you with another haunted covered in bombs. Sebastian will be unable to get up in time and will be caught in yet another explosion. Some nice trolling, Ruvik!
• Sentimental Shabbiness: Sebastian Castellanos' dirty, well-worn Not-So-Badass Longcoat was a gift from his missing but presumed-dead wife. Unfortunately, he loses the coat once the plot gets started, and between the events of the first game and its sequel, it doesn't appear that he ever got the chance to recover it.
• Sequel Hook: If the implication that Ruvik managed to successfully possess Leslie's body is true, then things aren't quite over. Also, we still know very little about the Organization Kidman works for, as well as the sideplot concerning the death of Sebastian's daughter and the disappearance of his wife and the fact that Joseph's body is missing at the end. The Downloadable Content implies that Joseph might have been abducted by Mobius for whatever reason and thus still be alive, possibly giving additional motivation of Sebastian to continue.
• Sharp-Dressed Man: Sebastian and Joseph both look pretty snazzy in their ties and waistcoats; Sebastian also (briefly) has a Badass Longcoat, while Joseph has black leather gloves.
• Shoot the Dog: Kidman tries to do this to Leslie in order to prevent Ruvik escaping STEM using his body. Since Poor Communication Kills, this doesn't work out.
• Shoot Out the Lock: Big cartoonish padlocks, in fact. Or you could punch it open, saves ammo.
• Shout-Out:
  • The game's title. The Evil Within means essentially the same thing as Resident Evil.
  • The Sadist is incredibly reminiscent of Leatherface, being a deformed brute, using a chainsaw, and having a fondness for ripping people apart.
  • At one point, Sebastian is going down a long hallway when the doors at the far end open and a tidal wave of blood rushes at him. Where have we seen that before?
  • When you see the white-robed, hooded Ruvik on the asylum's roof, it seems to give rise to elements of Assassin's Creed for the color of the attire, and [PROTOTYPE] for the sheer brutality of his kills. The way of how easily he kills heavily armed men also resembles an early scene from Outlast.
  • After he escapes from the asylum at the start of the game, Sebastian jumps into an ambulance with his partners and they take off as the road starts falling apart behind them and buildings start collapsing, much like the first driving sequence in Alone in the Dark (2008). Except here, it's only a cutscene and it's turned up to eleven when it looks like an entire city block is rotating.
  • The achievement for beating The Keeper is "What's In The Box?!"
  • Not to mention there is an achievement called "Master of Unlocking" in another obvious reference to the infamous voice acting of Resident Evil.
  • The scene right after the Ambulance crash where Sebastian is suddenly being wheeled through a dilapidated hospital on a gurney is an obvious reference to Jacob's Ladder.
  • The "unable to tell what's really real" is reminiscent of Silent Hill. A more specific reference to Silent Hill 2 occurs when Sebastian falls down a vertical shaft, except the walls make it look like he's falling down a hallway in a building with the gravity sideways. The exact same thing happened to James in Silent Hill 2, during James' descent beneath the Silent Hill Historical Society.
    • Silent Hill fans probably had a flashback when they first met Tatiana. If her uniform doesn't make you think you gone to the infamous Alchemilla Hospital, then the spontaneous fire break immediately after certainly sealed the deal.
    • The Keeper is very reminiscent of Pyramid Head as an Implacable Man figure. In a further reference, late in the game you get to fight two Keepers at once. The camera angle and their apparition, each on the side of a door, are again very reminiscent of the fight with the twin Pyramid Heads in SH 2.
  • The end of Chapter 12, when Ruvik uses his powers to make the school bus the heroes are driving sail past him and through a building, could perhaps be a nod to AKIRA.
  • The Heresy boss, is a massive monster with insect-like legs and it looks just like the infected people from Junji Ito's Gyo.
  • During the open area fight in Chapter 6, it's possible for Joseph to fall over a ledge, catching himself with one hand. If you can pull him up in time, you get an achievement called "Everybody Gets One", presumably a reference to this Family Guy gag.
  • The game's Big Bad, Ruvik, is a ridiculously powerful Reality Warper and Implacable Man, takes great pleasure in torturing his victims, and has a pathological fear of fire. Just like somebody else Jackie Earle Haley played...
  • Shortly before facing her in Chapter 10, Reborn Laura can be seen crawling across the other side of a window, in a very similar manner to the first Licker appearance in Resident Evil 2.
  • Several posters for fake movies can be seen throughout the game, some of which are references to real-life movies. Black Hair Curse seems to reference Ju-on/The Grudge and The Ring, and White Fog is likely referencing The Mist.
  • Juli's boss fight against Haunted Joseph in The Assignment bears resemblance to the fight against Puppet Cybil in Silent Hill. In both cases, the bosses are possessed police officers who attack their respective protagonists using their handguns.
  • In Chapter 13, you can come across two posters from the Fallout series.
  • The earliest obvious example occurs at the beginning of Chapter 2, when you run into a recently-undead Connelly, he slowly turns his head to the camera as he's feeding on a fresh corpse, acting as an almost shot-for-shot reenactment of the first zombie encounter in Resident Evil.
  • The surreal image of Leslie from Chapter 6, where he turns and reveals a face that reflects Sebastian like a mirror, could be a reference to the great grandmother of surrealist short films, Maya Deren's Meshes of the Afternoon.
• Sibling Incest: The game's character designer implies this with Laura to Ruvik. According to Jiminez and by how Laura looks in STEM, Ruvik feels the same way for Laura as well.
• Sinister Scraping Sound: When he's not actively chasing you, the Keeper tends to carry his hammer with just one hand, letting the head scrape across the floor. This is the easiest way to know where he is when he reappears in the destroyed hotel building. Taken up to eleven at one point where he starts dragging the hammer while it has a corpse impaled on the spike. The corpse in question is impaled through the head (and if you're unlucky, the corpse can be you).
• Soundtrack Dissonance:
  • Early on, after Sebastian's first encounter with Ruvik, he wakes up to the soothing strains of Bach's Air on G String...while hanging upside-down from the ceiling. In a dimly-lit room that's a cross between a hospital ward and a slaughterhouse, with blood smearing the floor and corpses hanging nearby. And a freakish thing... with a mutilated figure and wearing an uncomfortable-looking iron mask moving around, dragging the torso of one of those bodies away for God-knows-what. Sweet dreams...
  • Another classical piece, Claude Debussy's Clair de Lune, pops up to indicate that regardless of what you've just fought through, there's a mirror for entering the Asylum and accessing the save point nearby.
• Spanner in the Works: Ruvik to MOBIUS. After he altered the STEM system to only work with his brain, they forcibly scoop it out in turn it into the core, however they didn't realize that Ruvik's consciousness would remain intact, allowing him to reshape the landscapes created by STEM to his will, making the STEM system useless to them. After that they removed his brain from STEM to try and get rid of him, only to realize that Ruvik's consciousness was still inside STEM, turning it into a nightmarish hellhole. The whole events of the game are an attempt by MOBIUS to kill what was left of Ruvik.
• Spooky Painting: One loading screen has its focus on the portrait of the Victoriano family, which shows three of their faces slowly distorting.
• Sprint Meter: Sebastian has a very short one due to him being a heavy smoker, but it can be increased through upgrades.
• Statistically Speaking: Inverted; Sebastian is strong enough to easily destroy wooden boxes and iron chains & padlocks with his bare hands, but his melee damage is pitiful unless you upgrade it.
• Stealth-Based Mission: The flammable gas section in chapter 11. Without the option to shoot anything that would cause a fire (which limits you to an ambiguous handful of your Agony bolt types,) you must avoid two Traumas and a handful of Haunted until you can shut the well-hidden gas valve and/or escape the warehouse.
• The Straight and Arrow Path: The Agony Crossbow competes extremely well with the real firearms. Some bolt types are practically necessary to get through tougher parts of the game.
• Stringy-Haired Ghost Girl: Laura, who also has lots of arms with clawed fingers.
• Surreal Horror: Appropriately so, since the setting is the various mindscapes of a murderous psychopath.
• Survival Horror: This game marks Shinji Mikami's return to this genre.
• Sword Drag: The Keeper drags his hammer when he's not aware of where you are.
• Take Cover!: A mechanic added to the "The Assignment" DLC.
• Take Your Time: In chapter 5 you and Joseph are tasked with fending off a few waves of monsters while Kidman is trapped in a Plexiglas box that's slowly filling with water. No matter how long it takes to kill them, thoroughly loot the surrounding area, and finally get around to talking to Joseph, she'll just keep treading water inside the tank, which by this time is guaranteed to be full up to the top. At this point, you suddenly have a limited time to trace the water to its source and turn it off (which only has any useful effect because it's yet another thing in the game that runs on dream logic), which requires going through a door that was just locked a moment ago. The meter in the corner of your screen depicts a tank slowly filling with water. Despite, again, the tank being already full when it starts.
• A Taste of Their Own Medicine: How Sebastian feels about Ruvik's situation, which is why he never falls for any attempts to invoke sympathy.
• Title Drop: Similar to the Biohazard/Resident Evil rename, the original name of The Evil Within in Japan was PsychoBreak. In one of the collectible notes, Ruvik mentions "breaking the psyche" of his fellow STEM prisoners so STEM can assimilate them. Also, the games does that thing where the name of the final chapter is also the name of the game.
• Too Awesome to Use: The Rocket Launcher. While powerful albeit severely underpowered for a New Game Plus reward, it only comes with a sorely limited amount of 21 shots that can never be replenished. At all. And there are so many ways to waste a rocket too, combined with the Launcher's Awesome, but Impractical nature it tends to end up as a paperweight.
  • To a lesser extent, the Machine Gun, due to its practically non-existent ammo drop. Rarely ever will there be enough ammo found in a whole playthrough to manage a single reload of it, and seeing how most of the things it can do the other firearms could do better, it tends to go unused.
  • The Magnum. Being the game's resident Hand Cannon means ammunition for it is not easily come across, and is practically non-existent for a good three-fourths of the plot. While it busts down bosses like nobody's business, the scarcity of Magnum shots means it doesn't see much use elsewhere.
• Too Spicy for Yog-Sothoth: Sebastian. In spite of the fact that Ruvik succeeded in devouring the minds of everyone else plugged into the machine (with a grand total numbering potentially in the upper hundreds), Sebastian proves to be simply too much for Ruvik to handle. Ultimately when Ruvik, while piloting the Amalgam, finally succeeds in eating Sebastian, so much damage has been done already that Ruvik and the Amalgam explode, completely unable to handle him. Even with the power of hundreds of devoured minds behind him, Ruvik simply is no match for the willpower of a single police detective. It should further be noted that while Kidman had a vaccine against getting corrupted and Joseph was close to becoming a Haunted multiple times, it only happens once to Sebastian and he stays sane enough during it to warn Juli to run from him. Ruvik never happens to have any control of him again afterwards.
• Trial-and-Error Gameplay: Much of the game relies on you avoiding traps, surviving ambushes, figuring out boss weaknesses and general stealth (though the last part shouldn't be too much of a problem when playing on a New Game+).
• Trick Arrow: The Agony Crossbow, in addition to regular arrows, can fire off various utility bolts like Shock bolts, Flash bolts, Explosive bolts, and Freeze bolts.
• Unexpected Gameplay Change:
  • The very end of Chapter 12 has you take control of Kidman to drive the school bus she, Sebastian, and Joseph are in while plowing through a horde of Haunted. This doesn't last too long though. See Shout-Out above.
  • The final DLC, The Executioner, is a first person Beat 'em Up in the perspective of the Keeper.
• Unexplained Recovery: Sebastian gets a chainsaw to the leg in the first chapter and spends the rest of the fight with the Sadist limping away in obvious pain. Once he's safe in an elevator, however, he's completely fine and can run the rest of the way out of the hospital. Since he's already in the dreamworld at that point, there could be some Your Mind Makes It Real shenanigans afoot.
  • Same with Joseph who gets shot in the chest. While the next part focuses on getting him first aid he still seems a little too well for a wound that had Sebastian panicking mere moments earlier. Again, Your Mind Makes It Real. This is taken even further when he gets shot again by Kidman, yet is secured by Mobius and thus most likely still alive.
• Useless Useful Stealth: Inverted. If you're smart with your upgrades, your life won't be quite as dependent on the stealth mechanics as it was early in the game and you can stand your ground in fights more easily, but you'll still want to use sneak kills as much as possible because they save ammo and are cool as hell to successfully pull off.
• [Verb] This!: Sebastian says "Take this!" in his final encounter with The Keeper before he drops a ceiling of spikes on his head.
• Videogame Caring Potential: There's a moment at the start of Chapter 4 where you come across a Haunted carrying a normal, human woman to a blazing pyre while she cries out for help. If you're quick, you can pop the bastard before he tosses her in and be rewarded with some green gel in the spot where she runs to and disappears.
• Villainous Breakdown: If you happen to get close enough to the thing that Ruvik has become to pursue you, you can hear enraged screaming in both his adult and child voices such things like "I WILL SHOW YOU PAIN!" Also a more minor version near the end, after Sebastian smashes a lantern in Ruvik's face, he starts yelling and screaming in pain which eventually turns into frothing-at-the-mouth fury, even if it is for a moment.
• What Happened to the Mouse?:
  • Leslie's fate after Ruvik's successful Grand Theft Me. Was his consciousness wiped out when Ruvik took over, or does it still exist somewhere inside STEM?
  • Joseph's body is conspicuously absent after we see the outside of the STEM system; we see Connelly and Jimenez but no Joseph. When Kidman's associates ask her what to do with Sebastian (presumed dead), she says to leave him along with 'the other two', likely meaning Connelly and Jimenez. So either Joseph wasn't there for them to find or they've taken him (or his body) away for reasons unexplained. Hmmm...
  • In The Consequence, one can see Mobius agents dragging Joseph's living body away.
• Where the Hell Is Springfield?: The game takes place in Krimson City, the location of which is deliberately kept vague. 80% of the characters have Spanish names, which would suggest it takes place somewhere in Spain (rather like Resident Evil 4), although everyone seems to be speaking English.
• Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds:
  • Played With for Ruvik. Watching his Morality Chain die cranked up his insanity to Ax-Crazy levels. He attempts to invoke feelings of sympathy for this, but the fact that he was a Self-Made Orphan (who killed his mother who had nothing to do with his father imprisoning him), underwent a wide variety of Cold-Blooded Torture Mad Scientist schemes even as a child, and seeks to steal Leslie's life to come back makes it somewhat harder to feel sympathy for him, but rather sympathy for only his Morality Chain.
  • Played straighter with Laura, said Morality Chain. The version of her present to the player is all that is left of her by Ruvik's imagination, twisted horribly into a monster. Her only crime that led her to this state, even in his own head? Being seemingly killed in a fire. Though Reborn Laura (the monstrous version) is not her, it's easy to apply the same characterizations, especially with how in order to stop her from attempting to kill Sebastian, he has to repeat the events of her supposed death several times.
• Your Mind Makes It Real: If you die within any of the dreamworld layers, you die in the real world. As are the fates of Oscar Connelly and Marcelo Jimenez.

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