The Beast Inside

Horror games aren’t everyone’s cup of tea. They’re usually heart-pounding experiences that seek to push the limits of fear in humans in a way unlike any other media can. An unknown creature might not actually be stalking you from the shadows, calculating your every move, but it sure feels like it. Just when you let your guard down, that’s when it’ll drive your senses overboard.

Survival games, on the other hand, are much more palatable for most audiences. They can be relaxing, realistic, or something else entirely and they’re easier to get into compared to pure horror games. Then there are titles like The Beast Inside which decides to take an expansive narrative, deck it out with survival gameplay, and then top it off with a healthy serving of horror that takes the experience to a whole new level. Though survival horror as a genre is nothing new, The Best Inside manages to make it feel personal and unique without overstaying its welcome.

A Dark Twist

Survival horror is a genre that has grown greatly over recent years with notable entries like The Forest and Subnautica. The list grows all the time and the recipe for the perfect, defining game for this type of game is constantly evolving. The Beast Inside has a lot to offer regarding its worldbuilding and story elements. The protagonist, Adam, is a well developed character that works for the CIA as a cryptanalyst and is trying to deal with the fallout of reading a mysterious journal left by a previous tenant, Nicolas Hyde. Overall, I like the concept of the story – it has its compelling moments that leave you on the edge of your seat and a lot of the cinematic sequences are admirable.

However, I slowly became disinterested in the story as the time went on, though the atmosphere created was constantly foreboding and threatening. Additionally, without spoiling too much, there were certain aspects of the ‘why’ and ‘how’ these strange events were occurring that came off as generic more than anything. It was not a bland experience, but the later portions of the game left a bad imprint as a result of some shoddy writing decisions.

Precarious Gameplay

Personally, where the story lacked in its twilight stages, the puzzle solving, survival elements, and QTE portions of the gameplay kept me somewhat invested nonetheless. None of the puzzles were exactly challenging and it didn’t quite have any ‘crafting’ elements too similar to the above titles, but I found it to be relatively enjoyable on the surface. The primary problem I had was that a lot of the design choices were not strong enough to see me through the entire 13 chapters without some mental reinforcement.

Bottom Line

Sure, the sense of terror and many of the jump scares were top notch, but none of these aspects were well crafted on their own. They were alright for the first few chapters and quickly began dragging afterwards. Though I was hesitant to let it impact the experience, I often found it weighing down my enjoyment rather than improving it.

Pros:

• Rich atmosphere
• Some unique puzzles
• Great graphical and audio design

Cons:

• Later stages of the game drag on
• Game mechanics lackluster
• Story begins degrading in later chapters