The Consequence picks up directly after the conclusion of the previous DLC pack, The Assignment, and once again explores the story Juli Kidman and where she was during a large portion of The Evil Within’s main story.
Once again she is stuck in a nightmare world of the STEM System that blends reality with fantasy, complete with added lashings of gore, horror, and awful lot of scares. Much like in the previous DLC pack, Juli finds herself unarmed for most of the game and expects you to rely on stealth and cunning to evade the monsters.
In fact, “much like the previous DLC pack” is a phrase I could use an awful lot as there hasn’t been much change with the mechanics here –Â the cover system and controls are still a bit useless, the story is still excellent, and the walking nightmare that is the Claudia Schiffer Beast (which can be briefly seen in the video below) returns to scare the crap out of you.
If anything The Consequence is even more terrifying than its predecessor as unseen things groan and clank off camera and the landscape frequently warps and distorts. Tango Gameworks use every trick in the book to ramp up tension including odd camera angles, blind corners and narrow corridors, and I am not ashamed to admit I had to take a number of breaks from the game just to calm down.
There are a couple of new features thrown in to liven things up but to me they seemed to pulled from a list of things that were perhaps prototyped, and subsequently cut from the main game. Right at the very start Juli loses her torch but there is a convenient and limitless supply of glow-sticks. Rather than do the sensible thing and have a little rave, Juli must light the path forward by tossing a glow-stick in front of her. This doesn’t add much to the atmosphere and simply serves to slow down your progress through the game.
There are also ghostly vignettes which show meetings between Juli and her boss, or of Sebastian’s adventures in the main game. These progress the story but once again slow down the pace, and also destroy some of the tense atmosphere. However, the DLC does a nice job on interweaving Juli’s story into that of the main game, sometimes reusing locations and letting you follow a ghostly Sebastian through sequences you would have played as him.
Guns are more prevalent in than in the previous DLC pack, and the shooting gallery sequence from The Assignment is discarded in favour of a sequence in which you must shoot barrels to destroy groups of enemies, whilst later on Juli gets a shotgun and must tackle even more waves of deformed beasts. Annoyingly our heroine still has butter fingers and carelessly drops the weapons out of reach which seems a little unlikely, if I were trapped in a nightmare about to eaten by a thing with more teeth than Janet Street Porter I would weld a gun to my wrist.
Sadly Juli is still about as fit as 240lb chronic asthmatic who smokes 20 cigars a day, and for reasons that defy logic she can still only run for about five seconds before stopping and getting her breath back. She simply stops, you can’t move her in any direction whilst she pants and as large portions of the game involve being chased by enemies if you run out of puff you might as well hit the restart button.
She is also a bit of a wimp, to say the least, and after two hits and she’ll be downed, although if you can find somewhere to hide your health will regenerate. This results in many restarts and almost trial-and-error gameplay in which you have to work where you can run and where you can hide.
Much like the main game, the annoyances and niggles can for the most part be overlooked, it’s hard to be concerned about reused locations when something with more legs than necessary is trying to bite your feet off. Juli’s lack of fitness and terrible hide and seek skills can be annoying but there are rarely any unfair deaths, and even if you do die there is an urge to try again and beat the sequence.
Despite being around three hours long, The Consequence packs a lot in, the end sequence is particularly spectacular with the world morphing around you like a demented vision from Christopher Nolan’s Inception. Both parts of Juli’s story, plus a third as yet unreleased DLC pack in which you play as The Keeper (the psycho with the safe on his head) are included in The Evil Within Season pass, and if that is anything like the first two DLC packs, you will certainly get your moneys worth.
As an additional bonus, completing both you The Assignment and The Consequence unlocks a harder New Game + mode, and Kurayami Mode which switches off all the lights in the game to make it even more scary. However, I don’t think that I can face that, and I’m instead going to find a kitten to cuddle whilst looking at pictures of pretty flowers in the sunshine to try and reclaim some of my sanity.
