The Evil Within 2 review — a survival horror game without enough horror

While The Evil Within 2 doesn’t reinvent the survival-horror wheel, it’s a fairly enjoyable experience. Tango Gameworks developed it and The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim publisher Bethesda is distributing it. It picks up three years after the events of 2014’s The Evil Within and plunges (now retired) detective Sebastian Castellanos into yet another virtual nightmare. This time, he’s searching for his daughter Lily, who was kidnapped and installed as the core.

As in the first game, STEM is the culprit. It’s a system that connects thousands of people’s minds using a core mind (in this case, Lily) to host them. While hooked up to STEM, everyone can live in a simulated town called Union, which is supposed to be a kind of suburban utopia.