Editorials
Hands-on with ‘Evil Within 2’, First-look at Gameplay!
When The Evil Within was announced back in 2013 with a live action trailer, I knew it was something special. A spiritual successor to Resident Evil 4 from Shinji Mikami – the series’ creator himself? I was instantly sold. While the game we got wasn’t genre-defining, I thought it was a pretty great survival horror game that did more than enough to stand out from Resident Evil. Needless to say, when The Evil Within 2 was announced during Bethesda’s E3 press conference this year, I was excited. After months of waiting, I got a chance to play the game last week, and I’m happy to report that what I got to play was a great follow-up to one of 2014’s best horror experiences.
The demo I got to play featured most of the game’s fifth chapter. Most of the psychological story had been set up and Sebastian Castellanos had already met the game’s Joker-esque antagonist, Stephano. The important thing to note is that while this game will feature more open-ended environments, the chapter I was playing is meant to highlight the improvements made on the first game’s tight corridors and overall combat.
I was dropped into Sebastian’s office, the sort of mental waypoint where you can take a breath, save your game and give Sebastian some much-needed upgrades. My Sebastian was a clean slate, and I was given a modest amount of upgrade materials to beef him up how I saw fit. After applying some weapon, speed and health upgrades, I traveled through the infamous cracked mirror into the game’s twisted world.
Immediately I was struck with strong Resident Evil 2 vibes. The level was set in a small town – just outside its town hall in fact – and it was gorgeously haunting. The entire set piece was full of deep shadows and washed in cool blues, with chunks of reality floating around in the sky above me. I took my first steps forward and stumbled straight into the demo’s first boss fight.
It shouldn’t come at any surprise, but the boss design in this game is stellar. The first one I fought was called The Guardian, and it was a hulking being made up of human corpses. It had a table saw for one hand, and it used a collection of heads that looked eerily like Samara from The Ring to see. The creepiest part was that the dominant head was constantly smiling.
The guy helping with the demo explained before I started that boxes held valuable crafting materials and ammo (sound familiar?) and that The Guardian just so happened to hate boxes. I laughed at the time, but once I started playing the first thing I did was lure The Guardian into an area of the tight combat arena full of wooden crates. Lo and behold, the boss stopped chasing me just to beat the boxes to pieces giving me some precious time to reload all my guns and circle behind it to get some cheap shots in.
That encounter highlighted a major theme of The Evil Within 2, the idea of giving you more options to survive during the game’s toughest fights. It’s hard to keep your cool when you’re being chased by a giant monster, but if you can manage to lure it into a gas puddle you can light it on fire. Or if you lead it through the trip wires scattered around, it’ll get stopped in a time warp for a generous thirty seconds. Basically what I’m saying is that these moments brought some innovation to a genre that’s been driven into the ground, and I loved it.
Fortunately, The Guardian wasn’t too tough to kill on Survival difficulty (the next notch up is Nightmare and the one below it is Casual), and I moved into the town hall where I was given the task of finding an emitter and activating it to stop the town of Union from collapsing. This was a crucial moment for me because even though I was jumping in at the fifth chapter, I knew exactly what was going on in the story which leads me to believe that hiring Deadgirl writer Trent Haaga to pen the game’s story paid off. The incapacitated character who gave me the task tossed me a walkie-talkie and sent me on my way.
The following ten-minute section was one that reminded me a lot of the first game despite some major improvements. The town hall was dark creepy and full of long corridors. These sections employed scare tactics that reminded me a lot of Layers of Fear. I would walk to the end of a hallway only to find the door locked and once I turned back around the world around me had shifted, sometimes slightly, making me wonder whether or not I was crazy. Other times the changes would be drastic. The hallways would stretch on for an eternity, blood would drip form paintings that would them slam to the ground. It was pretty cool and kept these sections interesting. Also, I really liked that when I went off the beaten path and creeped down the scarier hallways, I was usually rewarded with some good materials if it wasn’t part of the critical path.
After some exploring, I came across Stephano. He froze time just as I found the emitter and in an extremely tense moment used a giant blade to ever so slightly cut Sebastian’s face while he sat there unable to move. Texture-wise the face held up really well and the cut looked realistic enough to make me queasy. A little of the tension was lost thanks to shoddy lip syncing, but this moment really got to me so I was willing to forgive the animations’ shortcomings.
After the cutscene ended, I was introduced to the game’s second and final boss – Obscura. Imagine a lanky, creepy man with an extremely old camera for a head. Despite already being impressed by my fight with The Guardian, this fight showed the innovation that game director John Johanas’ two DLC chapters for the first game made a name for himself with. See, the emitter needed 90 seconds to activate but Obscura’s power was to stop time with its camera head. I figured out pretty quickly that this was a boss I wasn’t going to kill and that I was just trying to distract it long enough to activate the emitter. I wasn’t exactly out of ammo from my previous fight, but I wasn’t rich with it either so I equipped the crossbow and flung as many shock arrows as I could at the monster. It took a couple tries, but once I was able to beat it I let out my breath and got ready to move on. Unfortunately, the guy showing me the game tapped me on the shoulder and let me know I was done.
Even though I was already excited for The Evil Within 2, I wasn’t sure whether or not I would wait to play it since so many games are coming out around that time. This demo completely sold me on it, and I hope that the refinements on the first game’s problems on display in my demo are as apparent throughout the entire game. If you want to play The Evil Within 2 for yourself, you won’t have to wait long since it’s out this Friday the 13th of October on PS4, Xbox One and PC. Here’s hoping it makes its way to the Nintendo Switch sometime next year.
In this day and age, the word “troll” is often used to describe various online nuisances. Yet as abundant and irksome as the modern troll can be, they aren’t usually as fearsome as their mythological counterparts. I’m not talking about the small and gentler versions that have become more common to see in media. No, there are much bigger and scarier trolls out there—and André Øvredal’s movie Troll Hunter is one of the best places to find them.
It doesn’t take long for Troll Hunter (or Trolljegeren) to dump the Blair Witch Project-esque setup and aim for something a lot fresher. The trajectory of the story is augmented by Otto Jespersen’s character Hans, the titular Troll Hunter. The second he comes barreling out of the deep, dark woods and shouts “troll” at the camera, this movie takes a turn into what feels like uncharted territory. Not only subject-wise, but also conceptually.
For fantastical and made-up subject matter in cinema, found footage is a fast way to add a guise of believability. After all, what we accept to be the most crucial aspect of documentaries—the truth—rubs off on pseudo-documentaries, despite our understanding of the pretense involved. That is what Øvredal delivered with Troll Hunter: a movie so convincing that some viewers wondered if trolls really do exist. So, had this been straightforwardly made, it likely wouldn’t have been as effective. Conventional narratives would be more inclined to treat something like trolls as flat out unreal, and never try to convince the audience to think otherwise.
Hans petrifies the three-headed Tusseladd troll.
The viewers, like the characters trailing Hans, are quickly thrown into the deeper end of that extraordinary story. They have to process all this new information while staying on the go. So, although there is no significant amount of meandering, narratively or physically, there is still a good amount of atmosphere, not to mention tension building. It’s never anything frightful, but then again, Troll Hunter isn’t your standard offering of horror; it’s more on the low end of the dark fantasy spectrum. We aren’t ever spirited away to a faraway world—we stay in rather familiar surroundings, as well as dip into those less so. The outcome is a movie where you’re constantly more in awe than in terror.
As fantasy fiction might do, Troll Hunter prefers not to deal with incredulity. There is no time to waste on doubt, as interviewer Thomas (Glenn Erland Tosterud), soundperson Johanna (Johanna Mørck), and cameraman Kalle (Tomas Alf Larsen) all follow Hans around, recording whatever this character is willing to reveal about his bizarre job. Of course, the Troll Hunter himself is not an open book; in that respect, the diegetic documentary fails to fully capture and unpack the more interesting of its two subjects. Yes, all those giant, monstrous trolls are indeed incredible, but understandably, your mind wanders to their pursuer. What kind of person signs up for this gig and then chooses to stick with it for so long?
Reviews have called out Troll Hunter for its lack of character development. In regard to Thomas and his fellow documentarians, that criticism is valid, but bear in mind, they aren’t the focus of the story, either. Meanwhile, Hans is a well-crafted character. At least better than first realized. Before he was introduced, Hans had already grown tired of the troll grind. Fed up with that low compensation for his services, resentful of the bureaucracy, and wanting to expose his employer on a large scale, Hans’ discontent is glaring.
Then there are those finer details about the Troll Hunter, such as that indifference to both the natural splendor of his everyday surroundings and the affections of an obviously smitten colleague, that also suggest some level of despondency. So it is fair to say this movie doesn’t feature any sizable growth for its characters; however, the namesake isn’t underwritten. No doubt, putting a real-life character like Otto Jespersen in that role is partly why Hans is so fascinating—maybe even relatable.
Otto Jespersen as Hans the Troll Hunter.
There is always a small risk whenever using the term “mockumentary” to describe a found-footage movie, as the word could imply humor where there is none. In the case of Troll Hunter, the term’s usage is appropriate. Some folks have claimed the English-dubbed version has the more comedic tone, however, the Norwegian cut isn’t exactly humorless. Apart from the trolls’ absurd appearances, this is a movie where the characters nearly choke on the monsters’ farts, and Christians are like walking targets. Hans’ complete apathy towards everything is another cause of laughter. Overall, the comedy is intentionally dry and inconsistent. Unfunny, though? Absolutely not.
In a movie where endemic creatures are maltreated, as well as disavowed from living freely and peacefully, it’s hard not to notice the ecological message buried beneath the story. In addition to that is the unmistakable political satire. There is this whole business about intrusive and unsightly power lines—like trolls, they’re big blemishes on the land—that leads to what is perhaps the movie’s funniest moment. The scene in question is that one where certain electric lines, the ones secretly being used to keep the trolls at bay, go in a loop and don’t actually send power to any residents. Yet the monitors of said lines don’t find this at all weird. So it stands to reason that Øvredal was having a go at those who accept the government’s doings without question.
Looking past the fact that trolls aren’t actually real, this movie is an enlightening source of information. And not just for international audiences; Norwegians, too, get schooled about their homeland’s own mythology. It’s also evident from everything on screen that Øvredal and his crew were enthusiastic about the topic. The creature designs are the most indicative of that zeal; those imaginative yet myth-accurate manifestations are equally amusing and grotesque. One second you’re laughing at their phallic noses, the next you’re white-knuckling during a hairy sequence. Most surprisingly is how well the trolls’ visual effects hold up after fifteen years. It’s not all spotless, but on the whole, they remain impressive.
Vouching for a mockumentary about trolls isn’t easy, but those who do come around and give it a shot will more than likely be grateful for the recommendation. For Troll Hunter is a real find in that vast and varied genre we call “found footage“.
A bridge troll reaches up for food and finds Hans decked out in armor.
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