Bethesda announced a sequel to Shinji Mikami’s 2014 horror game The Evil Within at E3. Rumors about the project have been circulating for several weeks prior, after a related job description was posted to the internet, but now the title has been officially confirmed via a chilling reveal trailer.
The trailer reintroduced the character of Sebastian Castellanos from the first game, as well as the shadowy Mobius organization. Soon enough, Castellanos is forced to return to STEM, a machine that’s capable of merging several minds into one — with some pretty unsettling effects.
Castellanos’ journey starts off with a recreation of the fire that killed his daughter, and things only get worse from there. He is trapped in a depraved art gallery where corpses hang from the ceiling in bags, and a mechanical monster begins scuttling up and down the walls, no doubt with malicious intent.
The clip then returns to another scene featuring Castellanos’ daughter, who finds herself among a group of horribly mutated humans. A man standing at the head of the group summons flames that engulf her body. The trailer ends with quick cuts of some of the monsters players will face in the game — and they’re as varied as they are horrible.
Horror games are back in vogue at the minute, thanks in no small part to the refreshing first-person action of Resident Evil 7. Mikami has played a huge role in the success of the Resident Evil franchise, so it’ll certainly be interesting to see how The Evil Within 2 develops some of the ideas at play in the first game.
The Evil Within 2 is set to make its debut on October 13, 2017 — which just so happens to be Friday the 13th. Mikami’s latest slice of nightmarish horror action is set to be made available across PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC.
Keep up to date with the latest E3 announcements and reveals here.
Acer’s Predator Atlas 8 finally has a US release date and price, several months after the company first showed off the handheld in May. The highlight is the Intel Arc G3 Extreme chip inside, which has been adopted by only a couple of other consoles besides the Atlas 8. This version will go on sale exclusively at Best Buy on November 1 for $1,299.99.
Acer originally said the Atlas 8 would arrive in North America in October, but left pricing open at the time. The launch came amid the ongoing DRAM crunch, which has made memory more expensive across the PC industry and complicated pricing for hardware makers.
Gaming laptops and I have a complicated relationship. One of my first gaming rigs was an Acer Predator that was already outdated when I bought it. I was a broke college kid, and that was the best I could afford. So trying out high-end gaming laptops is always fun. But ASUS' ROG Zephyrus G14 is a lot more than a laptop that can run AAA games. It is portable, so you're not lugging around a 2.5kg machine everywhere you go. It is built well, none of that plastic chassis, and can even function as a normal laptop outside of just gaming.
Google Play is borrowing one of the Nintendo Switch’s most useful little tricks. A new Sidekick tool called Playbacks captures a short clip after something interesting has already happened, sparing players from running a screen recorder throughout an entire game.
Playbacks is part of Google Play Store v53.8 and keeps saved clips on the phone. Google first announced it earlier this month, but the new Play Store update marks its arrival for players. Anyone who has watched a perfect win vanish because the record button came too late already understands the appeal.