The Epic Games Store is bleeding money, but it’s also still bleeding free games, and a couple of good ones are on the line right now. This week you can pick up The Evil Within, the hit survival horror game headed up by original Resident Evil director Shinji Mikami, and next week it’ll be the sequel, The Evil Within 2. This is the first time that either of The Evil Within games have gone free on Epic, so you’ll probably want to grab them while you can.
The Evil Within “[goes] all-in with the awful quite early,” PC Gamer brand director Tim Clark said during a “first impressions” gameplay video that’s now nearly a decade old. (Man, time flies.) Former associate editor Tom Marks, who joined him on the journey, concurred: “Tyler and I played Alien: Isolation before, and it was an hour long of not much happening and really slow, subtle build-up,” he said. “This is three minutes and we’re already in a slaughterhouse.”
So that’s what you can expect from The Evil Within: awfulness, fast—but in a good way, if you’re into that sort of thing.
The Evil Within 2—which was actually not directed by Mikami, but rather his Tango Gameworks cohort John Johanas—is largely more of the same, but it “improves on its forerunner in almost every way,” we said in our 80% review. I think, though, that it’s the words of former PC Gamer editor James Davenport in his classic tale of the milk-wife monster boss that really sums up the spirit of the thing:
“You’re in the evil Matrix where everything is made of digi-milk. The lead character’s wife is made of milk too, and she can wield the digi-milk like a milk sorcerer, a milkromancer, if you will. At one point you must fight the milk-wife, and it’s one of the most ridiculous scenes in a videogame ever contrived. It’s dumb and it rules.”
These are not the only free games this week and next: The Evil Within this week is accompanied by Eternal Threads, “a single-player, first-person story-driven puzzle game of time manipulation, choice and consequence” that’s actually quite good, and next week The Evil Within 2 will be joined by Tandem: A Tale of Shadows, a highly-regarded puzzle-platformer about a girl, her teddy bear, and a quest to solve the mystery behind the disappearance of a famous magician.
The Evil Within and Eternal Threads are free now and will remain so until October 26, at which point The Evil Within 2 and Tandem: A Tale of Shadows will go on the block until November 2.
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