At an early point during my hour-long demo of The Evil Within 2

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My time with the Evil Within 2 showed that while improvements have been made to the formula, it fundamentally remains the same. Sebastian is still a sort of stiff, bewildered protagonist, the monsters are still pulled from the golden era of Japanese horror, and the world is as grimy and oppressive as some of the darker moments of Jacob’s Ladder, a source of inspiration for original Evil Within director Shinji Mikami. But of course, that combination of quirks made the original game so much fun in the first place.

The demo itself took place in chapter 2, so much of it was tutorial-focused, which gave me a good grasp of Tango Gameworks’ ambitions for the sequel. After blindly running from the mutant-hydra, I found myself alone in a farmhouse. Like its predecessor, The Evil Within 2 looks to pull the rug out from under your feet at a moment’s notice, playing with sudden shifts in geography and atmosphere.

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As Sebastian made his way out into a forest bracketed road, he got an incoming transmission on his ‘communicator’ from Julie Kidman, his colleague from the previous game who he now shares an uneasy alliance with. Throughout The Evil Within 2 Kidman serves as your guide, though she’s not a resource on tap - every call appears to be context sensitive.

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The immediate goal, it seems, was to find MOBIUS soldiers within Union, a small twisted town in STEM punctuated with an all American sign that reads “Welcome to Union, We’re Glad You’re Here!” Making my way through the Twin Peaks-Silent Hill-Resident Evil 7-esque back-water town - the twisted-Americana trope runs ripe in The Evil Within 2 - required me to kill multiple zombie-like enemies. It’s familiar stuff, but the act of killing has been streamlined, and it appears you no longer have to set fire to every enemy corpse for fear of re-animation.The Evil Within 2 has been streamlined elsewhere. Sebastian can upgrade his weaponry (in my case, just a handgun) and craft medical syringes using parts he collects through the world on workbenches, while Green Gel is now only used to upgrade Sebastian’s abilities in Tatiana’s Clair de Lune-tinged world. I was delighted to be reunited with the sardonic nurse, such a highlight in the original game, and the black cat from The Evil Within’s first DLC, The Assignment.Of course, the reason Sebastian has returned to the world of STEM is to rescue his daughter, and this is where your communicator has a more practical function. I spent the latter half of my demo logging onto ‘resonance’ points - in this case, a child’s cry. When locked on, the communicator will show the direction and relative distance to the resonance point. As I made my way to the ghostly cry using what is, essentially, a tracking device from Alien, the earth split in two, much of the road falling down into an abyss. After killing an evil priest and a couple of his buddies, I stumbled upon the ghostly shadow of Sebastian’s daughter. The world shifted once more, and I began to walk through her memory. My hour was up.This was definitely The Evil Within. I can’t wait to be plummeted into its hellscape once more.

Lucy O'Brien is Games and Entertainment Editor at IGN’s Sydney office. Follow her on Twitter.