Evil Tonight

I have a soft spot for the games nobody puts on a list. DYA Games is exactly two brothers out of Spain, and Evil Tonight is their love letter to classic survival horror rendered in top-down 2D with pixel art so detailed it genuinely stopped me mid-corridor. The game drops you into the San Paolo De Rosa Academy for the Performing Arts, a shuttered school in Florence haunted by a vengeful spirit named Violetta Carbone. Your guide through this mess is Silvia Bellini, an exorcist who opens a portal into the haunted version of the building and accidentally drags four children in alongside her. The setup is pulpy and the dialogue leans goofy in places - Silvia is written with that anime-flavored overconfidence that does not always land - but the premise gets you moving fast and the atmosphere does the heavy lifting from there. The bones of the gameplay are unmistakably Resident Evil. You start with a knife and a handgun, pick up a crossbow and a handful of other tools as you progress, and you manage those resources against enemies that do not telegraph generosity. Silvia has to enter a combat stance before firing, which locks her movement to four cardinal directions and strips her of free-aim - a deliberate old-school friction that makes every shot feel weighty. The stamina bar attached to the knife means you cannot spam your way through bats and slimes forever; kiting, dodging, and knowing when to run are real skills here. Boss fights stand out as a highlight, each one folding a small puzzle into the combat so that brute-forcing your way through is not a reliable option. The dynamic lighting - a small halo of visibility around Silvia that fades into darkness and flickers with lightning - does more atmospheric work than most horror games manage with a full jump-scare budget. The puzzles pull from classic point-and-click logic: symbol-locked doors, combination containers, clues scattered across rooms you will need to actually remember. Crucially, several puzzle solutions are semi-randomized per playthrough, so a walkthrough will not fully bail you out. The absence of an in-game map is the sharpest friction point in the whole experience - the academy is compact enough that most players internalize its layout by the midpoint, but the back-half of the game includes at least one puzzle that sent players on a thirty-minute hunt wondering if they had missed something. Keep a notepad. It is advice the game itself essentially gives you, and it is honest advice. The difficulty curve steepens in the final third in a way that has divided players pretty cleanly. Ammo and health items thin out right before you need them most, and runs can end in resource dead-ends if you spent bullets freely early on. A 'Balanced' mode exists alongside harder and easier options, and the post-launch patches addressed some of the rougher edges - but even on Balanced, the last boss can catch you dry if you were not counting bullets. This is a feature for some players and a wall for others. The runtime lands somewhere between three and five hours depending on how much wandering the map-lessness costs you, and the game is designed to know where its ending is. It does not pad. It does not overstay. What DYA Games built here - two people, one soundtrack full of creeping piano and atmospheric dread, pixel art backdrops that feel handpainted, a 90s anime aesthetic for the character portraits - is the kind of project that deserves far more attention than it typically gets. Steam reviews sit at Very Positive and the community warmth for a sequel to Silvia's story is real and consistent. For anyone who grew up with Sweet Home or the original Resident Evil and wonders what that formula looks like refracted through modern indie craft and a two-person budget, this is a quiet, precise answer.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

Be the first to comment on Evil Tonight.