The Evil Within is out today, and as mentioned in our review, it’s a brutal horror experience in the early hours. Enemies easily outnumber your bullets, so you’ll have to sneak, hide, and stab your way until you amass enough resources to truly tear into the hordes of STEM. To make the first half of the game a little easier, we came up with 10 tips to help you make the best of your limited supplies.
Use weapon parts to upgrade the shotgun
You can upgrade a few different weapons in The Evil Within
2, but we recommend focusing on the shotgun first and foremost. Its combination
of power and spread make it the most useful weapon in the game. This is
especially true early on, when your aim is unsteady and enemies far outnumber
your shells. Upgrading the magazine and reload time are nice, but raw power
will be important to taking down bosses and later enemies more effectively.
Spread your Green Gel upgrades out
When looking at the upgrade tree, it might be tempting to
see one of the more powerful later upgrades (like the ability to use your
stamina to slow down time while shooting) and make a beeline for them, but
you’re better off making minor quality-of-life improvements across the board.
Giving minor boosts to your health, stamina, and other benefits is not only
cheaper, but it will also help you conserve healing syringes and ammo you’d
otherwise spend because you missed a shot or didn’t have enough health to survive
another attack. Depending on how much you explore and how many enemies you
kill, you won’t be able to gather enough Green Gel to unlock every upgrade
path, so gunning for those larger upgrades will leave you deficient in key
areas. If you’re looking for suggestions for what to spend your points on...
Emphasize stamina over health
Rather than invest a ton of Green Gel into health upgrades to extend your health bar or have healing items recover more health, you’re better off spending that Gel on stamina upgrades. Building your stamina bar up once is nice, but the real boon comes from increasing the rate at which your stamina recharges. You spend many of your early hours running from monsters in the more open areas than fighting them, and you’ll often run out of stamina. If your stamina recharges faster, you can more easily run from enemies, slow down when you’re far enough ahead, gain stamina, then continue running.
Upgrade your sneaking
If you’re not running from enemies, you’re probably sneaking by them, so the faster you sneak, the better. If you fully upgrade your crouching speed, you move about as fast as you do while walking normally, which can mean the difference between stabbing an unsuspecting enemy and having them turn around and spot you. Silencing your footsteps also means enemies who see you will take a little longer to go on high alert, making it easier to hide and elude them again.
Steady your aim
At the outset, the aiming in The Evil Within 2 is pretty
lousy. Your hands tremble enough to make you miss shots you probably shouldn’t
have, which is frustrating. You should fix this after you put a few points into
stealth and stamina, as later encounters will test your ability to gun down
enemies quickly, and missing a shot could get you brutally murdered.
Look for locker keys
The Evil Within 2 is a bigger game than its predecessor, featuring
open areas with lots of resources to scrounge up. While it’s always a risk to
explore with so many enemies around, it’s worth it to find locker keys, which
open up compartments that can offer large bounties of weapon parts, Green Gel,
and more. Many of these keys are hidden inside statues, too, so you’ll know
them when you see them.
Do the side quests
As early as chapter three, you’ll get a bonus objective to tackle along with your story quest. You get more throughout the entire game (though not many), and it’s worth it to pursue them. Some provide cool scenery, but a few others offer large caches of supplies and other long-term bonuses. They feature some interesting story moments, too, so they’re worth seeing through.
Tackle the gun range early
At some point in your time in STEM, you’ll come across a character who’ll offer you the chance to take part in a shooting gallery minigame, and you should tackle it as early as possible. You can earn various medals across multiple difficulties and games, and doing well will reward you with huge bounties of weapon parts, locker keys, and Green Gel that should give you an upper hand in the early hours of the game.
Space out your coffee and health upgrades
One minor addition to The Evil Within 2 is coffee. In most safe houses you’ll find a coffee maker which offers you one cup of joe that fully restores your health. It takes a while for it to brew and percolate, however, so you’ll want to space out your uses. Coffee recharges over a long period of time, so it’s best to use it only when you really need it. Additionally, expanding your max health will completely heal you, so keep that in mind when upgrading it and don’t use syringes if you think you’ll want to upgrade your health soon.
Abuse stealth and safe rooms
As you’re working through your way through the massive hub areas, it pays to play it a bit dirty. You can sneak up and stab stronger enemies, but it won’t kill them, and more likely than not, they’ll spot you afterward. However, if you can run away and hide from them, you can simply repeat the process for some easy kills. If you’re near a safe room, you can book it back there to immediately scare them off, then exit the room as they’re walking away to sneak up on them again. Bigger enemies drop large amounts of Green Gel when killed, which makes this approach worthwhile early on.