Beyond The Evil is a bite-sized horror adventure that gets the job done, even if its story and controls could use more work
Beyond The Evil is fine. It is a short first-person horror game where you wander around, investigate your surroundings, and solve a bunch of puzzles to move forward. There is a mystery at the center of it all, but by the end I was more confident in my ability to open a combination lock than explain what I had just investigated.
You play as an investigator who gets pulled into a case, and there are clearly events unfolding around him. He talks and reacts to some of the things he encounters, which gives him a little more presence than a completely silent protagonist. But I never felt like I got a good handle on who he was, why he had taken the investigation, or what exactly was going on.
A mystery does not need to explain everything immediately, of course. But it does need to give me enough to care about the questions it is asking. Here, I often felt like I was moving from one objective to the next because the game needed me to, rather than because I was invested in uncovering the truth. There is a story here, but the way it is presented left me scratching my head for reasons that had nothing to do with the puzzles.
Those puzzles make up a big part of the experience. You explore an area, look for clues, and figure out the right combination for a keypad or lock so you can continue. They are generally simple enough to work out if you pay attention, and there is a nice little moment of satisfaction when you put the numbers together and open the way forward.
The downside is that this formula comes up often enough to feel familiar pretty quickly. If you enjoy poking around environments and working out codes, it is a perfectly serviceable way to spend a short horror game. If you are hoping for a wide variety of elaborate brainteasers, there is not a whole lot here to keep surprising you. In Rays of the Light also mixes a walking simulator with logic puzzles, though its narrative gave me more to think about between them.
And if you just want to see where the game goes without dealing with the combinations, a helpful person in the Steam community has shared the codes. Personally, I would give the puzzles a shot first. They are manageable, and figuring them out is a good chunk of what you actually do here.
I played on PC using the ROG Xbox Ally X, and the game ran fine at Medium settings. It looks okay on the handheld, although nothing about its presentation particularly stood out to me. The performance was not what got in the way of exploring. The controller interactions, on the other hand, could be quite janky.
You have to be pretty precise when aiming at certain things you want to interact with, which makes a simple action feel fussier than it should. Inspecting an item can also involve holding one button to rotate it and then pressing another to interact with it. It works, but the whole process feels awkward on a controller, especially in a game where looking at and handling objects is something you do so often.
Beyond The Evil is inexpensive, but it is also short, so how much value you get will depend on what you want from a small horror adventure. I had an okay time working through its straightforward puzzles, and it ran well enough on the Ally X. Still, the unclear story and clumsy interactions kept it from leaving much of an impression. If you are after a brief, undemanding investigation with some locks to crack, it might be worth a look.
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