The scene is immediately otherworldly, a decrepit, blood-splattered alternate asylum lit by a flickering fluorescent bulb, too at odds with the game’s previous environment to be in any way grounded in ‘reality’. A giant, hulking butcher in a stained wife-beater and apron lumbers in and cuts down one of Sebastian’s hanging fellows, dragging him off to a well-worn butcher’s block to gut him with an indelicate squelch. “When Sebastian wakes up, he’s hanging upside down in a meat-locker, the lair of a madman, surrounded by victims of a similar fate. Peering at the screens, Sebastian sees a hooded figure slaughtering helpless police suddenly, the figure appears behind Sebastian, and he’s knocked unconscious. Sebastian makes his way into a video surveillance room, where a wounded doctor mumbles something I half missed (although I have a feeling that was the point), “it was him, it couldn’t be,” perhaps. So you’ll see something of a wave, you’re drifting from one end to the other end – from cinematic elements to purely gameplay elements and back and forth.” Venturing into the asylum’s vast, high-ceilinged lobby, someone remarks that the place “smells of blood.” Bodies of cops, doctors and patients slump on chairs and against walls. So once you get on more of the action elements you want players to focus on that. We want the controls and the way players interact with the controls and the game to feel scary and cinematic, but not cumbersome. 'We want the game to be scary so we want to support that throughout the game experience, but we don’t want to go so far as to impact on the flow of gameplay.

“We’re paying a lot of attention to the theatrical and cinematic aspects of the game,” says Mikami. The camera, naturally, sits over Sebastian’s shoulder. Like Mikami’s last foray into the genre, Resident Evil 4, The Evil Within is deeply cinematic, but while RE4 was presented in 16:9 (letterboxed on the GameCube within a 4:3 frame), The Evil Within has a true cinematic 2.35:1 aspect ratio, resulting in a low-sitting camera which displays an enormous amount of the environment at any given time. There are no signs of violence but every single car is empty. The asylum, all Gothic architecture, looms. The parking lot is littered with police cars. He and his colleagues – a man called Joseph and a female detective they simply address as ‘Kid’ – arrive late to the scene. “So through the story you learn a little bit more, and then a little bit more, but the more you learn, you also realize there’s far more mystery out there to unfold.” The game’s prologue sets up protagonist Sebastian, a chiselled but otherwise nondescript detective called in to investigate a homicide at an inner-city asylum. ““Thematically, it’s less about having twists and turns and more about maintaining an air of mystery,” explains Mikami.

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