Come with us as we drop down the rabbit hole and explore the story behind The Evil Within ahead of The Evil Within 2's expected release on October 13, 2017. If you want to know what happened in the first game without playing through it yourself, we have the details.
Of course, it should go without saying, but, all the spoilers for The Evil Within lay ahead.
It all started at the hospital ...
Detective Sebastian Castellanos and his partners are called to the scene of a mass murder at Beacon Mental Hospital. Upon arriving at the scene, there are bodies everywhere, with blood and gore splashed all over. When Sebastian finds a lone survivor, there is also a video feed.
Sebastian rewinds it to see what happens. There is a video of a squad of policemen shooting at an unseen enemy before being cut down where they stand, a hooded figure standing there. The figure looks up and then appears behind Sebastian, which is when everything goes to hell. Quite literally.
Sebastian is attacked and knocked out, and when he wakes up, it's in a nightmare. There is a cleaver wielding psycho, and humans hanging next to him like sacks of meat. He manages to get himself down, steal a key, and then run to escape the beast of a man behind him, but the asylum is not what it should be.
Sebastian has fallen into a nightmare somehow, and it is just, all, bad.
Descent into madness
It doesn't take long for Sebastian to escape from the Asylum, but he's faced with a world that is not quite right. A massive earthquake rumbled through Krimson City, sending Sebastian tumbling once again. He comes to in a dark forest, with looming trees and unnatural enemies lurking in the darkness before coming to a town.
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Filled with enemies, including a chainsaw wielding psychopath locked in a barn, Sebastian has to make his way through the town. While trying to do so he comes across Dr. Marcelo Jimenez who is in the town searching for his patient, Leslie. It's the doctor who identifies that hooded stranger as Rurik, though he's thin on any other details.
The doctor helps you open a gate. Once you do this you'll be able to head out of the town following the good doctor into more chaos.
The evil within STEM
This insane world that Sebastian and his partners are stumbling through is more than it seems. It's obvious from the weird time jumps and disjointed world that something here is very, very, wrong. That's because the world that Sebastian is running through is actually a shared consciousness powered by a machine called "STEM."
Rurik was originally a man named Ruben Victoriano. Ruben was intelligent but disturbed, and after a tragic accident, he killed his beloved his sister. The accident left him horribly burned, and he was further damaged. Eventually, he killed his parents, taking control of their vast fortune and donating large chunks to Beacon Mental Hospital in return for patients he could experiment on.
STEM had been intended to be a way for Ruben to reshape his reality, so he could return to his sister Laura. However, Doctor Jimenez had taken interest in STEM and revealed it to the shadowy Mobius organization, which wanted to use the machine for its own purposes.
Mobius killed Ruben but was forced to leave his brain animated, as a brain is necessary to run the STEM world. This left Rurik in charge of the world, filling it with the terrible creatures that Sebastian keeps running into. Mobius intended to use Leslie as the new brain in charge of STEM, a less willful mind that would be theirs to mold a new world with.
Juli's ordeal
The Assignment is DLC for The Evil Within, but the events occur at the same time as the main game. They follow the events that are inflicted upon Junior Detective Juli Kidman. While Sebastian knows her as a junior detective, the truth is that she is a Mobius agent who has been sent into STEM to retrieve Leslie.
When she initially falls into the STEM world she is in a forest, where she is attacked, causing her to fall off of a cliff. It's soon after this that she's trapped by Ruvik before being saved by Sebastian and Joseph. Both Juli and Joseph fall through the floor, where she is attacked yet again.
She manages to escape, find Leslie and bring him to the church where things go bad yet again. Rurik possesses Leslie, forcing Juli to point her weapon at them. Ruvik and Leslie disappear, and the Administrator begins to admonish Juli reminding her that they need Leslie alive, while she argues that they have no clue what Ruvik is capable of.
She then flees, seeing a variety of memories of Sebastian and Joseph from their earlier days, as well as seeing how Ruvik was mistreated by Mobius during his time with them. Eventually, she meets back up with Sebastian, attempting to escape the STEM world.
A return reality
As Sebastian fights through horror after horror, he is putting together the clues of Leslie, Ruvik's past, and the STEM machine from fragments of documents he comes across through his travels. Eventually, he winds up helping Doctor Jimenez to use Leslie to get out of the STEM world, along with Juli and Joseph.
In retaliation, a beast from Ruvik's subconscious destroys Doctor Jimenez and scatters the rest of the group across the landscape of the STEM world. Through a back and forth, Sebastian finally finds Leslie and tries to get him to the lighthouse. Ruvik attacks again, and in the end, winds up absorbing Leslie as they are all pulled back out of the STEM world.
Sebastian wakes up in a bathtub watching as SWAT bursts into the room. Though it's never explicitly laid out, it's implied that Ruvik has taken control of Leslie's body in our world, in order to get revenge on Mobius.
What comes next?
The Evil Within and its associated DLC, The Assignment, are just the first chapters in the story. The next will begin on October 13, when The Evil Within 2 is expected to be released on Xbox One and PC, with a new journey through terror for Sebastian Castellanos. It should cost $19.99.
