Sebastian survived The Evil Within, but he survived at a loss. His ears rang as he left Beacon, suggesting a continued wireless connection to STEM. The outro camera lifted away from the hospital steps and scaled Beacon's edifice. The game closed as the watchtower's light washed the camera, an event that the game connected with a loss of self and coherent identity.

To defend himself from Ruvik, he made an unacknowledged alliance with another presence in STEM: the player. Sebastian and the player met through a virtual environment. To him, it was STEM. To the player, it was the game The Evil Within. Sebastian shared his mind and behavior with the player in every way that he rejected Ruvik's influence.

Sebastian's survival was contingent on the player's trial-and-error, as his encounters with the stalker enemies illustrated. The player devised strategies using knowledge that an in-game character cannot access — many permutations of failure. The Evil Within did not, like Dark Souls, incorporate death and rebirth into its storytelling. When Sebastian died, the game ended, so his character had no knowledge of their one-hit-kill attacks. The player, however, understood how to respond to the stalkers by failing and retrying. Through means invisible to Sebastian, we gifted him survival through strategies of avoidance and escape.

To be clear, The Evil Within did not recognize the player as an actor in its fiction. The game did not break the fourth wall, so it, on its own, did not suggest a special player/character relationship. However, as we will explore, The Evil Within 2 assumes the pre-existence of such a relationship. It aligns Sebastian's memories of STEM with the player's memories of The Evil Within, the game. The elision revises what we know. It reveals that a connection had been made, despite neither Sebastian's nor the player's awareness.

And that connection, forged from the need to survive with a low profile, magnified behaviors that weighed Sebastian down before The Evil Within — avoiding emotional pain through workaholism and drinking. Ruvik attacked with his illness, and Sebastian survived when we amplified his. As Sebastian left a piece of himself in STEM, so we left a piece of ourselves in Sebastian.

The Evil Within's gameplay strategies made his self-harming coping skills immediate and physical rather than gradual, lifestyle behaviors. His physical avoidance in STEM fortified his bad habits in the real world, evident in his decline between games. Once-optimal strategies of avoidance now distanced him from grief and allowed him to deny his trauma. Sebastian applied The Evil Within's winning strategy to the one force he cannot escape: himself.