Four Times The Evil Within 2 Made Me Laugh (On Purpose)

I spent most of July battling my way through a zombie-filled virtual reality in The Evil Within 2.  The game is really good, and its third chapter is a particularly excellent example of how to train players to play your game.  The game is a very dark, serious, violent experience, but it does have some really great little moments of levity sprinkled throughout.  And no, I don’t just mean that glitch that causes a zombie to fail to chase you or the occasional jump scare where a zombie will wiggle out from under a car and then just run off into the distance (though there is a funny Easter Egg there, too).  Here are four little moments in The Evil Within 2 where this very serious game made me laugh out loud.

This shooting range is almost better than the actual game, being honest.

Winning at the Shooting Range

One of the best surprises of the Evil Within 2 is the shooting range.  Target practice turns out to be incredibly addictive.  The game offers two modes.  The first has you shooting targets in a traditional range.  Zombies and other monsters pop up as well as innocent targets you have to avoid shooting.  It’s fun but a bit difficult until you get the “synaptic focus” (aka bullet time) skill, and then it’s a snap.  The other mode is more creative.  Here you’re shooting at rows of explosive barrels that detonate every adjoining barrel of the same color.  As you blast them, more fall in to fill in the space and the colors get increasingly diverse.  You have to strategize and really pick you moment to detonate a wide arrange of similarly colored barrels to maximize the point value.  You can spend hours doing this, which makes the whole experience a little odd as Sebastian seems otherwise entirely focused on rescuing his kidnapped child.  The game makes a little nod to this; when you finally win both modes, Sebastian mutters, “I better get back to the whole saving-my-daughter thing.”  It’s small, but – coming out of nowhere – it’s hilarious.

Looks like someone forgot to turn on the oven.

The Flame Room in Chapter 14

So this was my experience with this room in Chapter 14.  You run down a back corridor to find several regular Lost trapped behind some bars.  There is a lever next to you that looks like it will open the bars allowing the Lost to attack, so I readied my guns. Instead, the lever activated some flames in their cage and roasted them.  Whew!  However, the flames started to die out before the Lost did, so I got my guns ready again for the cage to open.  Instead, more flames!  But again, the flames started to subside before they died so I AGAIN got my guns ready, but the cage didn’t open and instead they blasted even more flames.  And then, even more flames.  By the time the cage finally opened, the Lost were fried.  I loved the way this section played with my expectations; I kept thinking I’d get overrun only to have the flames spark up again and roast them.  The best part was that once I was in the cage collecting valuables, two more zombies crawled out of the dust and I had to blast away after all.

There’s almost too many boss fights in this game and Sebastian doesn’t have time to go back through the bosses of the first game also.

The Retro Chainsaw Boss

Towards the end of the game, you are forced to fight a lot of the bosses from the original title over again.  It seems like a cheat but remember (a) there are a lot of bosses unique to Evil Within 2 and (b) the game is trying to make a point here.  Your hero Sebastian is overcoming his trauma from the first game which is epitomized by these returning bosses.  And at this point in the game, he’s not running anymore.  When he finds the first boss, he’s already kind of sick of this game.  He runs down the hallway but, when the boss appears in front of him, he decides to Indiana Jones the whole thing.  Here – still in the cinematic – he simply slips behind him and stabs him in the neck.  You can see Sebastian consider running away after, but instead he decides to finish the job with the chainsaw.  To be clear, you still have two more bosses to face, but Sebastian’s no-nonsense method of dispatching the first one is both exhilarating and hilarious.  You can watch the whole encounter here.

O’Neal is pretty clear that he is NOT GOING OUT THERE.

Sebastian and O’Neal Get Meta

I have to admit, this last one I didn’t catch my first time through and I don’t want to spoil it for you.  All you need to know is that O’Neal is a character you meet who hides out in the safe house for most of the game.  While Sebastian is running place to place risking his life, O’Neal is largely in one place (until later in the game where SPOILERS: He goes insane and tries to kill you with a flamethrower in a pretty cool boss fight).  In this scene, Sebastian confronts O’Neal in one of O’Neal’s final cinematics and one of the stranger scenes in The Evil Within 2.