The Evil Within 3 Secretly Announced?
An Easter egg in Hi-Fi Rush points toward a possible The Evil Within 3 on the way.
Unlike games that were announced more than a decade ago and still haven’t been released, The Evil Within 3 wasn’t officially announced yet. However, the first indicators of its existence stem from a very subtle Easter Egg hidden in 2023’s Hi-Fi Rush, a rhythm-based action game developed by Tango Gameworks—the developers of the original The Evil Within and The Evil Within 2— and published by Bethesda Softworks for both Windows and Xbox Series gaming platforms.
As reported by IGN, during a cinematic sequence that takes place in an elevator near the end of Hi-Fi Rush, there’s an elevator screen control panel, which also displays the current in-game weather forecast and other news. The other news, just like the text strips at the bottom of a televised news program, says that the sequel to a popular survival horror game franchise has been announced. Now, whether this is simply the developer’s nod toward The Evil Within franchise or an actual teaser for The Evil Within 3 remains to be seen.
Either one can be right, as there are plenty of other Easter Eggs in the game that nod towards The Evil Within, including robots who look like characters from the latter gaming series. But this is a somewhat blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment during a cinematic in which the Hi-Fi Rush protagonist is on his way to face the game’s final boss. Of course, this is far from an official confirmation of The Evil Within 3 game, but it’s actually the best possible piece of information gamers have found so far regarding the game and its speculated development.
To be honest, Tango Gameworks has developed other games, such as Hero Dice and Ghostwire Tokyo, but neither of those is an officially recognized franchise nor a survival horror game. Hi-Fi Rush most certainly isn’t a survival horror, which led the fandom to believe that the Easter Egg is actually referring to The Evil Within 3, as it’s the only plausible candidate. With that said, Ghostwire Tokyo was originally meant to become The Evil Within 3, but ended up as an entirely separate game due to severe variations made during the development cycle.
This wouldn’t be the first time developers have used Easter Eggs to announce their releases. These hidden messages, images, or features found in the game have been used in gaming since the 1970s on Atari consoles, but it was also used in software as well. A particularly interesting Easter Egg was related to the “make” command on PDP-6/PDP-10 computers, where a user would attempt to make a file named “love” by typing “make love,” upon which the program would respond with “not war?” before proceeding with executing the command.
One of the best Easter Eggs was unintentionally included in Uncharted 3, teasing the critically acclaimed The Last of Us game, though that particular Easter Egg wasn’t actually meant to make it to the game’s final cut. Taking into account everything we just said, it would be interesting to see the true story behind this apparent Easter Egg and whether or not Tango Gameworks is withholding information regarding The Evil Within 3’s development.
