An Evil Night

Survival horror can take after a pretty wide range of cultural inspirations. One of the more rarified ones are the writings of H.M. Lovecraft, and others going in the that same vein of cosmic horror. It wouldn’t be much of a spoiler to say that An Evil Night incorporates an interpretation of Robert W. Chambers, The King in Yellow, a story which was referred in the good season of True Detective. After all, the word “Carcosa” starts flying about pretty soon, tipping off those in the know. According to the game page, this knowledge is supposed to make one “enjoy the game even more”, though I would question that. Perhaps, if I went into the game with no such foreknowledge, the stanzas from the original tale might’ve appeared fresh and impressive, while I only felt weary recognition and regret they were wasted in such a manner.

Aesthetics (art, design and sound)



I'll let you wonder how much this relates to the overall plot.

On one hand, there are some very good CGs like above cropping up. However, the opening is ugly white text over black background, and the absolute majority of images are saved at the end for the actual King in Yellow play. The credits helpfully provide the list of everyone whose work was used. Some graphics were apparently made by the creator themselves, but I’m pretty the absolute majority comes from DeviantArt or the like. Nevertheless, they still look good. I think there were non-RTP tracks too, but don’t remember any music at all, so I suppose it was just OK. Sound design is mediocre; there are no footstep/ladder-climbing sounds, for instance and overall, it loses out considerably when compared to something like Immortal.



However, the RTP mapping remains the weakest element by far. Simply put, those squat trees might be good for many things, but portraying a so-called “Screaming Forest” is not one of them. The game apparently used some Celianna & Lunarea tiles among other things, so why couldn’t it use more fitting forest tiles is beyond me. Even that is not as important as the way the maps are designed. You are supposed to be lost deep inside this dense and scary forest, but it’s rather hard to take this premise seriously when pretty much all maps are cramped and linear, and you never feel lost, as opposed to being artificially locked in place for as long as the game wants. There’s one map where you do get an actual maze, and several routes into different areas. Unfortunately, it’s populated with the least intimidating zombies out there.

Gameplay



In one way, I suppose these undead are really realistic: not only are they slow, but they are also wholly blind (and presumably lacking most other senses too), because really, how long can something as fragile as an eye or an ear really function before the rot renders it useless? As such, so they will never even attempt to chase after you, instead always going on their preset paths, only insta-killing you if you collide into them. This obviously means that they are not scary or intimidating at all, and are just a slightly annoying roadblock, easily bypassed and neutered by saving anywhere. The other type of a monster are shadows, and to be fair, the game initially does some neat tricks with their spawning. Two appear right as you are about to leave an area, so that you barely see it in the first place. Another time, a whole bunch of them slowly fades in, barely giving you enough time to flee. Lastly, a giant one shows up near the end, and you must outrun down a winding corridor, which is not really scary, as while the path twists, it never gets any branches or dead ends, so you never need to question your decisions. And outside of chases, there's the Carcosa puzzle, which is actually pretty logical and decent, and a maze where you must bypass blades trying to tear you apart. Both occur near the end; earlier, you are simply asked to bring one item to another, even when no remotely aware person would have done this.

Storyline



The above was the moment when I stopped caring about anything that happened in the game: the time when it actively needs and expects your protagonist, named Michael, to just go ahead and stick a mysterious bronze symbol into a goddamn prism floating in the sky, even though all that he and his friend, Isaac, apparently want is to get out of that forest! It’s utterly ridiculous, and Michael is likely the dumbest, least self-aware rmk horror protagonist (or perhaps horror in general, really) I’ve encountered yet. Really, he says absolutely nothing about the time he has to wade past zombies, and clearly can’t figure out that following the instructions a creepy poem left him, referring to a “Tree of Suicides” and which is found after he’s seen the zombies, is a bad idea. The moment when he does question a third character, a sorta creepy blonde girl, about what happened, and accuses her of being too calm, after he himself followed the ritual with the orb, inspires nothing but contempt. The way you are then forced as Michael to follow the trail of bloody footprints and go into the house surrounded by bloodstains, again with nary a word from him, is just icing on the cake.



Again, the reason you first leave Isaac at your camp is to simply look over the path again, and see if you can find a way out. Any normal person only driven by this reason would have had run back to Isaac even before zombies first show up: the way you first meet this mysterious girl, one who clearly knows Isaac, before suddenly disappearing from sight, is already a large red flag worth talking over. In fact, that is exactly what I tried to do, even if the game plans for you to do nothing but go forward. As such, the first shadow creature, spawned behind your back as you leave the second forest map, persists near that exit point, but it can be easily dodged whereas it gets wholly stuck, as the screenshot above shows. At that point, you can go all the way back to Isaac at the camp, but there’ll obviously be no new dialogue, so the suspension of disbelief is already flimsy, before the orb shatters it outright.



He just came back to you twice before, but you obviously didn't notice.

The one saving grace, of sorts, is the actual King in Yellow, and his play, or rather the first act of it. The original story by Robert W. Chambers only names the city of Carcosa and the key characters, and states that the first act is “normal”, but the second act is the one that captivates a person and shreds their sanity. Here, you are shown the entire plot of that first act, often conveyed with (DeviantArt?) CGs, though I’m not sure if it was actually written by game’s creator, or is an earlier interpretation. Either way, it’s certainly the best writing in the game, even if you can see some clear parallels with King Lear. It’s certainly much better than the writing in the following flashback cutscenes, which attempt to show Michael & Isaac deserved what happened to them. However, I found it really hard to care about either them, or their crime. They lead up to the game’s five endings, which are decided entirely from Michael’s answers to three questions – one before the Play, and 1 or 2 after. I would have rather preferred the rest of the game wasn’t so strictly linear that the final minutes are the only time we can deviate from its (nonsensical) path, but I guess it could’ve been worse. I got endings 5 and 3, and those were both decently written, and would have probably had more impact if I cared about the main character. I might have tried to go for the other three endings, too, but doing so forces you to sit & spacebar through those several-minute long cutscenes again and again, so I didn’t bother.

Conclusion



In all, An Evil Night takes inspiration from a good, relatively obscure written work, but wholly fails to stand up on its own merits. It’s kinda similar to After Man in its treatment of the source material, and has a similarly unresponsive protagonist, though at least that game had some occasionally striking Snow_Owl art.