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What the hell is going on in The Evil Within, I hear you ask. I asked the same question when I finished the game and the DLCs, and the game didn't really want to give me an answer. It turns out that there is a reason for most of the things that happen in the story and they are explained inside the game! Very briefly, and not very well. But most of the weird stuff does not go unaddressed. In this video we're going to go through the game chapter-by-chapter and I'll give you a brief look at what's going on and why. First, though, a primer on The Evil Within's overall story in chronological order.
As a child, Ruvik, born Ruben Victoriano, was the newest member of a rich family who lived in a mansion in the woods outside of Krimson City. Their estate sat just a stone's throw away from the nearby villages of Cedar Hill and Elk River. Ruvik's parents were more rich than god, which brought the ire of the villagers, who saw them as pompous and egotistical.
Ruvik was a weird child. He found himself interested in taking apart animals and poking at their brains and meaty parts to find out what made them tick. In his interactions with the family doctor, Marcelo Jimenez, Ruvik found a link between his experiments on animals, and ones that could be done to humans.
However, he remained generally harmless until he was a young teen. Tension between the villagers and the Victoriano family was constantly boiling and ready to spill over. They made a plot to scare the family, possibly to get them to move away, and burned down the barn. Unfortunately for the future residents of The Evil Within's universe, Ruvik and his sister were playing inside.
Ruvik and Laura were both burnt and horribly disfigured, but neither died. Laura was left in a vegetative state (according to the Krimson Post, anyway) and Ruvik was kept hidden in the basement of the mansion. His father, a god fearing and yet vain man, didn't want either child's fate to be revealed to society for fear of harming the family's reputation- so, he left Laura at the hospital and told Ruvik she had died in the fire.
For years Ruvik was kept in the basement, all the way to his young adulthood, with his only contact with the outside world coming from Jimenez. Deeply disturbed by the burns and his captivity, Ruvik's desire for knowledge of the human mind spiraled out of control and he became a ruthless sociopath. One day he snapped, sneaking out of the basement in the night to murder both of his parents. Sacrificing the family car, he made their deaths look like a simple automotive accident.
Jimenez continued to visit, at first unaware of Ruvik's deed but then curious as to why the family had stopped their generous donations to Beacon Mental Hospital, his workplace at which he was now the head doctor. After learning the truth, Jimenez struck a deal with Ruvik: Jimenez would supply him with patients from the hospital to pick apart if he continued to share his research.
Around the same time, Jimenez was contacted and inducted into the shadowy organization MOBIUS, a radical cabal whose goal is to unite all of humanity into a single mind with a machine known as STEM. Or at least, it was now that Jimenez had made them aware of its existence. See, over the next couple years, Jimenez had been stealing Ruvik's research into linking minds and passing it off as his own unbeknownst to both himself and MOBIUS.
STEM is a system developed by Ruvik alone that could induct the brain functions of any group of people into a single hive-mind entity, creating a shared consciousness. The center of the hive-mind could then control all of the functions of the slaves' brains, including memories, dreams, and even potentially motor skills.
Despite the macabre experiments, Ruvik's intentions were as pure as they could be given the circumstances. He wanted to use STEM to reconnect with his sister. MOBIUS, however, wanted it for their own purposes. They abducted Ruvik and forced him to complete a test prototype of the machine in their own laboratory. This first version of STEM could only work with humans that were physically linked to it and thus it needed a revision.
In the lighthouse atop Beacon Mental Hospital, a final version of STEM was created. This one had the ability to broadcast a wireless signal that could pull anyone within hundreds of miles into the shared consciousness. The caveat of this was that the brains could not be made slaves to the host wirelessly, and thus it could not become more powerful just by bringing people in alone; they still needed to be connected physically for that to happen.
However, Ruvik made an alteration to the system in secret which rendered himself the only one able to be used as a host brain. MOBIUS responded by killing him and taking his brain, permanently affixing it to the machine so that testing could continue. They had basically played right into his hands. Because you see, Ruvik had become even angrier at the world, even more crazy and sociopathic, and now that MOBIUS had taken advantage of him he wanted his revenge. Now the permanent host, Ruvik could change and alter the shared consciousness experienced by people inside STEM to his will, rendering the machine effectively useless for controlling people.
After several hundreds of tests in which patients came back progressively more gibbering and insane due to Ruvik muddling with their minds, MOBIUS put an end to Ruvik- or so they thought -by removing his brain from the machine. However, they soon learned that the shared consciousness was not defeated so easily, and Ruvik persisted even though he was no longer physically present just from the raw power he'd gained from absorbing so many slave brains. He began killing test subjects from inside STEM, to absorb them.
Jimenez was now under the gun by MOBIUS, even though it was pretty much their fault for ruining the machine like they did. To save himself, he and the Administrator of MOBIUS cooperated over the next few months to prep an operative to enter STEM themselves and find a way to defeat him for good.
A patient Jimenez knew well, Leslie Withers, was put into STEM during this prep time. He came back completely unharmed and unchanged, the first out of hundreds. Upon closer examination, he shared an almost perfect synchronization with Ruvik's brain due to their similar past and development during their youth. Thus, Ruvik could not detect him inside STEM, and he became Jimenez's method of entry.
A while later, Juli Kidman was prepped for insertion into STEM. Undercover as a detective for the Krimson City police, her goal was to enter the machine's field of influence alone and find a way to kill Ruvik inside the shared consciousness, which would basically remove his mind from the pool and get rid of him for good. However, Jimenez was so desperate to prove his loyalty to MOBIUS that he entered STEM himself with Leslie, turning the wireless machine on before he went. He made a phone call to the police station, advising of a dangerous patient on the loose, and hit the switch.
En route to the hospital, Kidman and her two superiors Sebastian and Joseph entered the machine's field of influence. She had been given an injection by MOBIUS that would synchronize her brain with Ruvik's, much like Leslie, but the other two had not and thus Ruvik snatched them up very quickly.
That's where The Evil Within really gets started.
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Now that that's out of the way and we know all the backstory, at this point in the game all of the relevant characters are inside STEM. So, Sebastian and Joseph are mistaken when they assume they were put into STEM after they were kidnapped- they actually were there the whole time. The game begins with Sebastian escaping Beacon with his buddies, Jimenez, and Leslie in tow. This turns out to have been a critical mistake later and the game would've been much shorter if he'd just turned around and gone back into the elevator instead of leaving, but we'll get to that.
We'll start with chapter two. According to the map of Krimson City, Elk River is where Sebastian and company crash-landed. At this point, everyone gets split up; Joseph is abducted by Ruvik, Kidman escapes because Ruvik can't touch her, and Jimenez and Leslie go on without Sebastian. They don't get far. Upon catching up with them, Sebastian learns of Leslie's importance and that's basically all that happens plot-wise. During his trip through the Elk River village, Sebastian kills the Sadist and Ruvik absorbs him- I assume this is supposed to be THE Sadist, as in, the one connected to STEM, and the rest are just other dudes.
In the next chapter we learn why Elk River is here inside STEM; it's not connected to Ruvik at all, but rather Jimenez and Leslie. They've been to Elk River before in the real world, as it's where Jimenez's brother's hospice is. Unfortunately they find no sanctuary there as he's already been snatched up by Ruvik. I exploded his head pretty good and Jimenez didn't seem all that upset about it.
The two of them corner Leslie and start to escort him away, but like an idiot, Sebastian doesn't stick with them and follows Ruvik. One thing to keep in mind about him throughout this analysis is that Sebastian is not a very smart guy. Believe me, it's totally intentional, and I'll explain how I can tell in just a bit.
We're in chapter five now and Sebastian has found himself in a freaky hospital-type place. As I mentioned in the relevant video, it's the place seen on the title screen. But in terms of where it is in the game world, it's the locked ward at Beacon- the one behind which all of the STEM experiments take place. Obviously the layout has been jumbled up by STEM but it's definitely Beacon, considering the keycard I picked up has the place's logo on it.
Here Sebastian encounters Joseph and eventually Kidman again. Joseph is an interesting case. Sebastian finds him connected to a STEM bath and from there things with him get a little tense. Ruvik can't absorb Joseph; I'm sure he probably wants to, but Joseph has enough sheer willpower to fight him off, particularly owed to his glasses. Some interesting information about the glasses can be found in the artbook; they are apparently a keepsake passed down from his grandfather. Maybe that's how he's able to hold onto himself so well, it's never really elaborated on, but either way he goes back to normal for the time being.
Kidman is in a very interesting position at this point in time. On her end, nothing really plot related has happened, but her anti-STEM drugs seem to have worn off and Ruvik is now able to mess with her. The gang reunites for like five minutes and is then separated again when Sebastian is yanked into the floor by Laura. Interestingly, Kidman sees something different on her end.
Now, that might be a bit confusing at first and I think that's on purpose just to make the player go "huh??" Either way, Kidman deals with Haunted Joseph while Sebastian fights off Laura. If I had to guess, I'd say that Kidman's end of the events didn't actually happen and it was just Ruvik messing with her again, and to diverge from the main plot for a minute, here's why I think that.
Kidman's whole experience inside STEM is about mistrust. Her boss, who she thought she trusted, is warped inside STEM to be a manipulative and berating shadow monster. Sebastian and Joseph, who she felt sorry for bringing them in with her, run away and turn on her. All of these are just Ruvik turning STEM into her own personalized nightmare. I think the most telling evidence is that her boss fight with Joseph ends with her killing him, but not only is he fine later, he doesn't even know it happened.
So, it's back to the main plot. After Sebastian fights Laura he encounters the first STEM terminal of the many he comes across in his journey. We visit this same room several times throughout the game. The STEM terminal itself is a copy of the original, the one at MOBIUS HQ, but that doesn't matter as much as what the room represents. Each time Sebastian is here, he witnesses a memory of Ruvik's that defines his past, sympathizes his character just a bit more. And if that wasn't obvious enough, there's the whole brain thing. This room represents Ruvik's brain, it represents STEM itself. Unlike most of the other locales in the game world, it doesn't connect to anything logically because it just plain doesn't exist.
The next chapter, chapter six, opens very interestingly. In the opening of chapter two, Sebastian is being wheeled on a gurney into the room in which you eventually encounter Laura. In this chapter he's in the room again, this time about to be given a lobotomy by a doctor who occasionally turns into Kidman for a split second. This is really interesting but I honestly have no idea what it means. It might be referring to how Kidman eventually saves Sebastian in the end; we get a similar camera angle and everything. But I can't say either way for sure.
Sebastian finds himself at Cedar Hill; Joseph is here too, and in an alternate place and time, so is Kidman. As her self-reflection there mentions, just like how Elk River's appearance in STEM is owed to Jimenez, Cedar Hill's belongs to Kidman. As a child, she used to live there with her neglectful parents. One of her least fond (and most relevant) memories of the village is the bigass church at one end of town. Kidman heads right there and encounters Leslie, escorting him to... relative safety inside the church. Sebastian and Joseph have to take the long way around and in the process discover the church's gnarly experiments. Obviously a giant dog and ten foot tall twins don't exist in the real world. I figure the twins and the dog are a creation of Ruvik's mind, a physical manifestation of the torture and experiments he performed on STEM patients and were done on himself.
Upon entering the church, Kidman finds out that it's already too late for Leslie; Ruvik already has partial control of him. She runs away and teleports ahead a few chapters- which I'll go over when she shows back up. For now, keep Ruvik's control over Leslie in mind. Only Kidman knows this, and she doesn't ever tell Sebastian even when she has the chance to. This is a really important plot point to keep in mind.
Meanwhile, Sebastian falls into the catacombs beneath the church and Joseph is stolen away by Ruvik again. Like the town itself, the catacombs are a place in the real world- at least, according to what the newspapers and missing persons posters tell us. They probably aren't filled with ancient tablet puzzles, smashing spike traps, poisonous gas, and a dude with a safe for a head... but they do exist.
Sebastian frees Leslie, but as per his M.O., he immediately runs off. Our boy is left to fight the Keeper, and he somehow emerges victorious and escapes with his life.
Chapter eight mostly serves as a short interlude between chapters seven and nine. However, Jimenez does fill Sebastian in on what STEM is all about so there is some plot development.
The next chapter takes place in the Victoriano mansion- obviously, this bit of STEM belongs to Ruvik himself. I mentioned it in the video for chapter nine, but the well poking up out of the ground in front of the mansion is pretty conspicuous. I'd say that it's probably where the tunnels after the catacombs led out to the surface in the real world. Inside the mansion, Sebastian learns all that stuff about Ruvik's past that I talked about earlier, so I won't go over it again. Basically, now he knows as much as you do about the guy.
Underneath the mansion, Sebastian gets a very extended taste of Ruvik's love of traps and general weirdness. He also meets Ivan Diaz, a freelance reporter who was snooping around the mysterious evends surrounding Beacon. Evidently he got too close to figuring out the truth and MOBIUS kidnapped him, where he became a test subject for STEM. He continues to show up every now and then to rant about Ruvik and give helpful plot advice for the rest of the game.
Speaking of Ruvik, the mansion and its inner bowels being inside STEM are obviously brought in from his own consciousness. It's also the place where he has the most power, and here he is able to roam around and actively hunt the player as well as change the scenery at will. He smugly demonstrates this for Sebastian and then disappears, confident that he cannot do anything about it.
Not long after, Sebastian encounters Jimenez again. He explains the final link in the chain connecting Leslie to Ruvik; they share a brain activity wave pattern, which allows Leslie to synchronize with STEM just like Ruvik can. Therefore, if Leslie is properly synchronized, he can be used to manually exit STEM from inside with the others in tow. This is important because the only other way out is being released from the machine by its controllers.
Unfortunately, Ruvik's influence is just too strong, and their exit strategy does not work. Suddenly, Jimenez bites it, forever preventing us, the players, from getting a satisfying comeuppance for him. The synchronization attempt does have a tertiary effect, however, and Sebastian and company are teleported much closer to Beacon than they were before- Beacon, of course, being where the STEM machine is inside the shared consciousness as well as the real world.
Chapter 11 is mostly traversal through the wreckage of Krimson City. STEM has eroded and destroyed the landscape surrounding the hospital, making getting there a challenge. Along the way, Sebastian encounters Kidman again, who is distant as ever. She denies having witnessed anything strange, just before the inevitable happens. Sebastian is briefly taken over by Ruvik, but Kidman saves him by scaring him off. Unfortunately, from Sebastian's point of view, it looked as if Kidman shot him to save herself instead. She sets off on her own and then almost immediately jumps ahead another chapter.
Sebastian is saved by Leslie- the actual Leslie, not Ruvik controlling him -and spots Joseph on the horizon after a brief detour. The two reconvene after finding a bus that has miraculously begun working. Not a moment later, Kidman appears again, being chased by a big old poop spider man. The next chapter is all about escaping from said poop spider, driving halfway across the city before Ruvik intervenes to keep them away from the hospital.
Everybody gets separated again, and Chapter 13 is a short detour through a collapsing apartment complex. Sebastian and Joseph have a pretty straightforward time, avoiding traps and encountering the Keeper again. Kidman, however, sees some interesting things. She learns that Ruvik has infested STEM like a parasite, feeding off of the horrors inside it and growing more powerful. His goal is to leave STEM through Leslie, imprinting his mind and thus his consciousness on the poor guy. See, it was Ruvik's plan all along to absorb Leslie- he's known about him the whole time. He needed a vessel to escape through, and Jimenez served one to him on a silver platter. Kidman just barely saves him before he is consumed entirely, but then she realizes what has to be done.
Sebastian, unfortunately, doesn't. Kidman doesn't know she's talking to Sebastian when she's explaining why she has to kill Leslie, and thus she doesn't relay to him that Ruvik's trying to use him to get out of STEM. Sebastian refuses to accept this explanation, instead recalling Kidman's supposed betrayal earlier. I said earlier that he's not a very forward-thinking kind of guy and here's where it really starts to show. Kidman is doing the right thing; even if it traps the rest of them inside STEM forever, Ruvik already has the means to escape through Leslie and he will do so if he gets absorbed. It's the only way to stop him from leaving now.
Sebastian doesn't get this memo. Jimenez explained to him that Leslie was the crew's only way out, and so that's as deeply as he's willing to think about it. While Jimenez was correct, he also didn't tell Sebastian the whole deal with Ruvik absorbing him. Basically, Sebastian is still in the dark about Ruvik's true intentions, and this critical lack of understanding inadvertantly results in his escape from STEM.
Ruvik gives Leslie an escape route and Kidman blows away Joseph in the confusion, while Sebastian is sucked into the floor and separated from the rest once again. It's left ambiguous whether or not Joseph dies from the shot; at the end of The Consequence you can see his body being dragged away offscreen. Kidman says "leave that one, and those two" at the end of the main game; here she is referring to Sebastian, who she wants them to think is dead, and possibly Jimenez and Connelly, who actually are dead. That leaves Joseph unaddressed. So for all we know, he could be alive! I guess we'll find out in The Evil Within 2... Aww...
Sebastian travels through the sewers in a big long detour that really didn't need to be in the game and finally makes it to Beacon, alone. There he traverses the place through the locked back rooms and discovers that he really should have just turned around and gotten back on the elevator in Chapter 1. STEM is here, and it's particularly grody looking. He follows Leslie into the observation chamber, the tippy top of the lighthouse, and there he encounters Kidman for the last time. Sebastian shields him.
She tries to get him to understand why killing Leslie is the right thing to do, but he's not hearing any of it. Sebastian, through and through, is a man of cold hard and very fallible logic. To him, what he sees is what is there. From his perspective, Kidman shot him, shot Joseph, and now wants to kill Leslie, who- as far as he understands it -is his only way out of the STEM hellhole. The two stand off for a few moments too long and Ruvik takes his opportunity to strike. Kidman and Sebastian are separated as he finally achieves his goal of absorbing Leslie, and then he gains near total control of the shared consciousness.
While Sebastian watches the world transform into brain meat before his very eyes, Kidman is dealing with her own issues. She finally overcomes the fear instilled by her nightmare boss creature and exits STEM's influence, finding herself back in the real world.
At this point Sebastian and Ruvik are the only people still inside STEM- Ruvik because he has to be, and Sebastian because Kidman hasn't released him yet. So, the only thing left to do is for them to duke it out. Ruvik can't take over Sebastian because, like Joseph, he was able to fight the influence off. So he has to kill him.
Now, the end of the game is gonna make a lot more sense after I explain the following point: remember that STEM is the collective consciousness of everybody attached to it. Elk River was the product of Jimenez's memory, Cedar Hill was Kidman's. Without anybody else to get in the way, Sebastian and Ruvik's consciousnesses can create anything. And so, Sebastian becomes the big action hero and survives increasingly improbable attacks from Ruvik because he now has enough influence that STEM is giving him what he wants. Ruvik turns STEM into a nightmare and himself into a monster, but Sebastian sets up the dominos that lead to him winning the fight.
I'd like to thank something awful poster Fish Noise for this next part because I'm quoting him almost word for word here. Through and through, Sebastian has a real thick skull. So while Ruvik is altering STEM at will and conjuring up nightmarish monsters from his own psyche, Sebastian is squinting at hazards and toaster mazes and going "there must be a power switch somewhere". He sees monsters and says "I don't know what that is but I bet guns work on it", and habitually reaching for a gun he's used to always having on him and so it's suddenly there. Basically he's a tactical realist that nobody wants to watch horror movies with.
And so, he defeats Ruvik symbolically. He's basically just playing out his power fantasy at this point, becoming the hero that from his standpoint would be the logical conclusion to his journey. From his perspective- and from the player's -Ruvik is the final boss and he must be defeated. Little does Sebastian know, he's already left.
But as we see in the real world, beating Ruvik for good is not what caused him to wake up. Kidman is. MOBIUS is hauling ass out of there because the police are on their way, responding to the emergency call received at the very start of the game. In the confusion, Kidman is able to fool the MOBIUS operatives- one of whom is Sebastian's wife, Myra -into thinking Sebastian is dead, so they leave him behind. When he comes out of his stupor, everybody is gone and he's back in reality. He stumbles his way through the empty hospital just in time for the cops to bust in to save the day- except there's no day to save anymore. Right at the end, Sebastian spots Leslie walking away proud and confidently... but it's not Leslie, it's Ruvik, having successfully escaped STEM. Sebastian gets a sequel bait-induced headache, and Leslie vanishes, either by real-world teleportation or just plain turning the corner.
So that's it for the plot of The Evil Within. It's a bit of a mess, and the ways it is confusing are not always intentional, but it's servicable and deep enough for a good horror game. There are a couple of loose ends, but they're almost all tied to the final seconds of the ending: Does Sebastian's sudden headache signify anything about STEM? Did Ruvik/Leslie really teleport? Has Kidman really also been imprinted by Ruvik's consciousness? I'm not sure, and to be honest I don't think we'll ever get an answer. I'd like very much for there to be a sequel to The Evil Within, but I just don't think it's in the cards.
By the way, don't worry about the Executioner DLC, it's not canon. It's cool, but it has its own spin-off story kind of thing going on so I didn't cover its events here.
So I hope this has helped you understand the story a bit more clearly. I feel the need to reiterate that I really really like this game, story included, and I think it deserves more attention than it got. It has its successes and it has its failures, but overall I'd call it a very solid experience and an interesting look into what the human mind would do if it was allowed to run wild. Thank you very much for watching, and I'll see you in the next one.