Resident Evil 7: Biohazard

There's a scene a few kills into The Texas Chainsaw Massacre where Leatherface has a tantrum by the window, visibly super anxious about these kids who keep coming into his house and won't just get in their van and drive off. He's not repentant or anything like that, but his stress is enough to show a crack in the surface of evil. Up until that point he appears as the grim reaper, quickly and with a sense of horrifying finality removing the kids from the realm of the living, like a full stop. Later still we come to learn that when he's not the embodiment of death, Leatherface plays the role of a caring mother sweating to keep her family together even if just for the duration a dinner she's lovingly prepared. Hooper's films are built with a stoned elasticity that means that as many complementary and conflicting things can be true or untrue about them as the viewer is willing to work for, and the appearances of the Sawyer family are no exception. Depictions of abuse within a family-unit for whom violence is so commonplace that it's as ritualised as a family dinner are the essence of that film as they are of Resident Evil 7.

We are made to witness moments of connection between family members, not so that we can excuse their behaviour, but so we can see that they belong to a unit in which they are functionally heinous. We come to understand them within the context of their world, whether this means pitying or just hating them more deeply than we would an abstraction. The family unit is taken for granted as a context for normalcy in the majority of narrative works that do not make family an explicit concern, but this is frequently upset in horror films. Something like The Witch looks at the oppressive nature of the nuclear family, but its break is gained too easily: the family in it is an abstraction, entirely without heart. Hooper's works and Resident Evil 7 on the other hand understand that to dissolve the glue is not a clean process. Regardless of whether there is genuine love binding any of the Bakers or Sawyers, violence will be present under love's guise.

An abuser is a master manipulator that works their way into the abused's body and soul. The abuser will convince the abused that they are everywhere, that they need them, that there is no escape. Hooper's works subject us to the idea of a potentially boundless horror, but also give us the bloodied tools to break out and expose it as pathetic, finite. For its first act, Resident Evil 7 explores the emotional ramifications and ambiguities of Hooper's best to excellent ends. It is a game that traps us, tortures us, makes us feel weak, but also demands that we fight our way out of it. The game has been celebrated by many as a return to form, and it narratively and mechanically emphasises itself as a return home for the developer as well. The original Resident Evil was most frightening for its clunkiness, for the way that instead of breaking immersion, frustrations encountered outside the gameworld made their way into the player's identification with the happenings on screen. Curiously, this new one is strictly in first person, emphasising that our return home must be viewed in terms of a new game body. We are trapped in our game body, and we are trapped in both a literal home, and the game body itself. To return home is to be trapped there.

There is much to be said about Resident Evil 7 as a first person game that works against conventional instincts. Where we might expect to transform into a digital body that can act and react with a speed and fluidity that easily transcends our own (particularly as parkour-ish flailing arms show no sign of disappearing from AAA games any time soon), Resident Evil 7 imprisons the player in a slow-moving body that is less a superhuman avatar than a kind of awkward cage. Immersion, it was at some stage decided, occurs as the player becomes a centrally privileged torrent of power rushing through an environment-as-playground, but Resident Evil 7 makes the case that a more chilling form occurs when the environment answers back: the world of the game encloses on our digital body, and our digital body encloses on us. Where in a typical action game the world arranges itself around the player, rendering itself for, but pretending not to see her (effectively performing as indifferent but also submissive), Resident Evil 7 makes us believe that there are all eyes on the player at all times. What is key, what is home, is this claustrophobic sense of mechanical friction between what we are and what we want to be.

That the player is encouraged to roam around and collect VHS tapes throughout the game makes explicit Nakanishi's appreciation of found footage horror movies, where a similar negotiation of power occurs. In found footage, the viewer is no longer detached from the world of the film, passively receiving images they can trust, but rather becomes 'grounded' in it, vulnerable because to see is to be seen, to take part in it. No concrete truth, no safety. At its most effective Resident Evil 7 exploits the rift between belief and knowledge, withholding information and providing ambiguous sounds and light effects such that the viewer fills in the blanks themselves. Its entire currency is unrealised, individually felt fears. It is in these paranoid minutes that we become participants in generating our own sense of terror, believing ourselves to be in hell where our new father Jack is controlling everything. Resident Evil 7 knows that whatever we imagine to be behind the curtain, whatever we believe caused the crashing sound upstairs, is far more frightening than anything the game could ever depict, because we are home where Jack sees everything. Some gamers will balk at the comparison, but the developers of Resident Evil 7 clearly learned a lot from Gone Home.

Not that it in any way flirts with becoming an outright art game- it is of at least two minds where suggestion and realisation are concerned, and Nakanishi ultimately betrays the conceit for a mounting silliness more Sam Raimi than Blair Witch. The Bakers are an invasive, shrill presence across the screen, and wherever they appear the game switches its shallow-focus subjectivity for a filmic kineticism that is critically withheld from us and the ability of our game body. The developers' decision to not gift Ethan with the movement capacities of his tormentors brings about moments of frustration that can break the spell of the game, particularly during boss fights, but it gives small fights the slow, lumbering inevitability of a George Romero film. This echoing of someone else's cinematic dread through mechanical unresponsiveness is a bold move, but one that is reflexively necessary. Friction, entrapment, terror, home.

Another notable game to make the player feel helplessly trapped in first person perspective was Bioshock, which similarly demanded getting to know an environment in shallow focus. That game was economical in the sense that it reused environments by backtracking us into tedium, but the level design here is more sophisticated. Resident Evil 7 is economical in that it might take the gamer body the same amount of time to get to the end of a hallway as it would Franklin in Grand Theft Auto to run the way through multiple houses. Every bit of peeling wallpaper feels like it matters enough to take note of, every section of the floor not carpeted feels like the difference between life and death: Jack hearing and not hearing our footsteps. Resident Evil 7 is designed to make the backtracking process feel radial, as though we are returning to the centre of something having learned more about ourselves, and about that which threatens us. We may be pathetic, we may throw the controller down in fear when something scrapes at the window as we walk past, but now we know that the noise upstairs was just creaky floorboards. They're not always watching us, they're looking for us, and that's a big difference.

Resident Evil 7 is most scary when we feel most mortal, and we feel most mortal when we're weighing up how a conflict will go, before we fail and our game body dies. There is invariably a use by date cooked into the game and its terror (it has to scale in difficulty, meaning more deaths through problem solving), but this occurs after the game's early climax: as the player for the first time leaves the house. We charge out, screaming, and we turn to the house that trapped us and tortured us, and we look for the eyes of evil and we can't find them. We see the house and it's just a house. We believed it was infinite, but now we can say 'I see you too.' The game trapped us in Jack's house, but now the stage set has collapsed, and we can see it was a tree banging against the side of the house, and the wind howling through the boards. We've traced the tracks to the cause, the real cause, and it's more and less than the man who told us he was in control of everything.

Later on the shadow of Jack lingers over us, the reminder of the power that he once had over us, but also of the family that perversely worked for him. The greatest gag in Resident Evil 7 is not the ultraviolence, but the fact that as a part of the Baker family we must close doors behind us to stop evil coming our way. Whether we like it or not, we will play by the family rules. Its most disarming moment is when the tenacious patriarch begins screaming 'You killed my beautiful wife!,' which, yeah, we did. It's mournful as it is bizarre, and also completely heartbreaking- the only time that its baroque catharsis works to echo its hesitant, freaked out steps toward freedom.

Unfortunately these distinct modes are otherwise never reconciled in the game, and in truth jumping back and forth between horrorshow grotesquerie and psychological fear eventually leaves us numb to both. When we come to meet Marguerite, our mother, the loudness of the game is amplified such that we're in a rush to defeat her, and as our inventory fills up we are left with two conclusions: either we're too well stocked, or we're going to have to play trial and error with our equipment. Either way it leads to action rather than caution, the antithesis of the first act. By the time we find Lucas, Nakanishi has toyed with so many horror formats that he figures he might as well throw in post-Saw torture porn too. At this point the game enforces trial and error, as we are well and truly too well stocked in arms and health to feel in any way threatened.

Resident Evil 7's need to contextualise itself within the franchise makes for a strangely anticlimactic final act, explaining the events we've witnessed within the larger picture of a catastrophic event. On the one hand this is frustrating because it doesn't matter, but on the other it works as a tragic eulogy for the Baker family, removed from the visibility of world events but nevertheless impacted by them. In The Texas Chainsaw Massacre we understand how violence and family are inextricably bound, about how movements toward Big Agriculture have left rural families without their livelihood. Similarly the Event of Resident Evil 7 occurs outside of our experience of the Baker home but it leads to starkly visualised ills: the mould could be a blind rage over their way of life crumbling, it could be substance (Jack's implied alcoholism), it could be the cycle of generational violence suffered and inflicted by everyone in the family line. Like Hooper's works it is contradictory, complementary, and elastic: it took the director twelve years to release a sequel that made it clear that the Sawyers are everything mentioned before but also greed and evil itself, whereas Resident Evil 7 moves in the opposite direction, arguing for the family as victims. Eveline's own quest for family holds its deal of pathos, but the picture is more complicated, more human, when family itself is the subject of its scrutiny: Marguerite's southern hospitality loaded with the anger of going unappreciated, Jack's performative father figure saying grace and beating the shit out of his son at the dinner table.

Now this is tricky. I don't actually like the original resident evil games, I'm just not smart enough to get behind the camera angles, which never scared me that much, since zombies just don't do it unless you make them a. fast or b. weird. But this, this I really really fuck with. Backtracking, thinking about resources, struggling to survive, being tactical, its a really good mix.

Story gets a bit too whimsical and over-the-top, but nothing's really changed. The atmosphere is top notch, the writing is really fun, the enemies are scary and the areas are consistently great. Margueritte and her bug house are especially horrifying, and her bossfight was a big sticking point for me for a while, that I could just not get through.

I don't really have a problem with the hollow choice of ending, doesn't really bother me since there is one logical choice and that's Mia. Zoe is a shitstain the whole game who withholds crucial information from the player for no good reason, and Ethan has no good reason to take anything she says as real, whereas Mia did lie, but at least she realises that and does try and make some amends for it.

Boat section is probably a bit weaker than the other ones, not a big fan of wandering around desperately trying to figure out where to go, especially when there is nothing happening. The ending after that is a little weak, as is the section in the mines where it doesn't really feel like you are progressing. It all gets a bit Resident Evil 5, moving from level to level to level, which is a shame, because the main house is so awesome.

Another irksome point is the optional tapes you find throughout the game. Anyone ever get the sense that the Banned Footage DLCs were meant to be in the main game at some point? Like, cut content that got fully realised and stuck on at the end. I don't know about you but I think each one of those tapes pretty nicely latches onto the game (Nightmare as the first tape, 21 in Lucas' section, Bedroom in Margueritte's and Daughters in some of the more surreal Eveline sections later). The ones we get I always skip on repeat playthroughs because they never amount to much.

Gunplay, exploration, the bits of the Resident Evil Formula that transferred over to this, the tone, that save room theme. Its all really good, and I'm sure that fans of the series will be disappointed, but for an entry title to the series and a soft-reboot, this is really fantastic.

Inspirado por hits dos anos 2010 como Amnesia: The Dark Descent e Outlast, Resident Evil 7 foca no terror como nunca antes na franquia. Pelo menos dois terços desse jogo tem um nível de tensão similar aos dos momentos mais aterrorizantes dos outros jogos - o primeiro Crimson Head em Resident Evil Remake, ou a aparição do Regenerador no 4.

Mas não só de terror vive o homem, e Resident Evil 7, em seus melhores momentos, é uma deliciosa experiência aos moldes da série, com um level design impecável em todo o “complexo” Baker e uma história intrigante que se revela aos poucos, com o auxílio de arquivos e dicas no cenário.

É uma pena, no entanto, que o terço final não acompanha a qualidade, como é o caso de quase todo jogo da série. A Mina de Sal, por exemplo, é basicamente um grande corredor linear até um boss no mínimo decepcionante. Aqui, pelo menos, a queda de qualidade é menos brusca que nas últimas horas de Resi 4 ou 5, por exemplo.

Uma coisa menor que me incomodou: o jogo podia ter avisado no momento anterior à fuga da casa. Fiquei bolado de não pegar todos os itens.

I was very excited to play this game. REmake4 was the first experience Ive had with resident evil game and i fucking loved it, and was looking forward to what a first person RE game with actual horror elements would be like. I had heard from multiple people that this game was one of the scariest horror games out there, so as someone who cant even handle Five nights at Freddy's sometimes, I was kind of expecting to be terrified or at least spooked for the majority of my play-through.

Instead, I got a game that's maybe scary for about a 1/3 of it, and most of the game feels like a mediocre puzzle game mixed with some first person shooter elements that would be more than passable if the game was scary while doing so. And it sometimes is, but after the boss-fight with the hillbilly wife and the part where you sneak into the kid's room to get the D-series arm, (which are both legitimately terrifying) the game loses any sort of horror. Instead feeling (and looking) like an indie game that has enough good moments to become viral but enough bad moments to have me scratching my head asking "why its so popular?"

One of the key factors to immerse me in any sort of game is a believably structured world with believable logic and events. I can get pretty nit-picky with it, but I think it's fair to say its especially important in horror games. because how can I be scared by something that is so clearly not believable? If I'm constantly reminded it's just a game? And this is where RE 7 falls apart, because so many little cracks break any immersion I have.

The relationship between The protagonist Ethan and his wife, Mia, is extremely bland for two characters who should be in love, and are going through something incredibly dramatic. And their initial reunion is so underwhelming you'd think they'd have been apart for just 3 hours, not 3 years. Or the fact that most monsters and enemies will just... stop following you if you past the specific area the game doesn't get them go. Ruining any sort of terror if I just run the other way. The hillbilly family is incredibly memorable, but the flashbacks in the form of videotapes is another area where the game just falls flat. Half the time it makes no sense why a character would still be videoing their experience, especially the ones with Mia, where she's either having a near death experience or trying to stop a supernatural, incredibly dangerous person, and there's no reason for her to even have a camera on in the first place. It may be considered a nitpick to some but moment's like these genuinely ruin any sort of horror for me. I feel for a game like this to feel scary I can't have all those things be circling around in my head while I try to fully immerse myself in the experience.

The few moments this game really did cause me to feel genuine terror, are the exceptions. When the hillbilly wife becomes some sort of half spider abomination, and you are trapped in that small house, and you always know she's around the corner, is when the game succeeds, because you CAN'T run away, and that combined with the fact that you have to stop and craft your healing items while still being pursued really adds to that thrill. Stopping to craft a healing item and managing to use it seconds before she gets you, not being able to take a second and breathe, that's when I felt the most terror playing. Shortly after, you are sent in the house, the "detention room" to get a D-series arm (whatever that means?) and the haunting atmosphere and effects also prove to make this truly scary, because you don't know what's going to turn the corner nor can you run, but the tension and build up eventually dissipates and you never really hit that ever again. Because shortly after this the game sends you through a short backtracking trip and, by this point the game has run out of tricks.

But hey, maybe it's not all that scary but is supposed to be fun to play, but honestly looking through those lens the game is even worse. Most of the puzzles are very unfun and are usually dependent on you hovering over a button prompt (that can be missed, sending you on a half hour search wondering what to do) or just have you look around for the one thing you need. The gunplay isn't anything special, which again would be fine if there was actual substance in the puzzles and horror, because it would work more than fine in the context of survival horror. But like I've said the survival horror elements reach their peak like, 3 hours into the game. By the end it turns into a third-rate action game. Where you are shooting a big monster, dodging its vomit, and shooting again. It feels like once you get the two keycards to get into the son's house, any survival horror element is just... gone.

After the admittedly good boss fight between you and the dad, the game takes a complete tonal shift, and while the lore revealed about eveline is very well done, it loses the magic of the crazed hillbilly mansion setting. And once you are in the mines, it straight up is just a bad action game with a very very scripted bossfight that drops the ball completely.

the Family is honestly where RE7 shows the most personality, and watching them talk to Eveline before it's revealed who she actually is and that they're actually talking to someone in their head is brilliant. Like during the videotape that their son gives you. It appears as if he's talking to someone off screen, but the whole game's narrative and little moments like that are given way more depth when you find out the truth. I loved moments like this, along with the genuinely crazy antics of the family and especially the first scene.

Eveline's story is a unique one, and I did truly enjoy those moments, I loved the hillbilly family, the concept of a horror game taking place entirely in a house by some crazed people, all of that really works well. I just wish the game committed to being a horror game that really made you feel helpless.

(written jan 31, 2017)

Capcom has been oddly mysterious about Resident Evil 7 since its reveal and teaser demo. Both barely showcased combat or enemies to the point where I feel the short YouTube clips of item boxes and monster types were uploaded as an apology, but Capcom has more than proved themselves worthy of returning the series to glory.

Resident Evil 7 takes place in a Southern Louisiana plantation mansion owned by the Baker family. After his girlfriend Mia messages him three years after her disappearance, Ethan Winters travels to the Baker household, only to be captured and tortured by the family, and is determined to escape the mansion alive.

If the Baker mansion sounds familiar, I don’t blame you: the way the mansion is designed is almost identical to the Spencer mansion from the first Resident Evil. There’s moments of realizing where a new item needs to be place that make backtracking exciting; keys that coincide with their respective doors, the entire manor riddled with shortcuts; the atmosphere of the Baker mansion was so on point that I got excited every time a door was locked.

Of course, a proper Resident Evil needs to balance the creepy with the corny, and the Baker family perfectly fits the bill. Resident Evil 7 doesn’t stop at cheesy, overplayed voice acting, but goes psychotic in its goofiness. Jack Baker, the father of the family, has great one-liners that lets the players slip some giggles in-between their screams.

Jack and Marguerite Baker are some of the most offputting boss fights in the game, mutating into monstrosities, J-horror designs that throw the player off in a Western atmosphere. On another note, the game features impressive, nearly 1:1 bullet tracking, where holes show up almost exactly where the player aims, adding a sense of futility when first approaching the family.

Combat is where Resident Evil 7’s potential truly shines. Slowly reloading a shotgun, managing the tetris-shaped inventory, and being genuinely concerned about how much ammo is in the weapon versus where more could be found is what exhilarates the player with panic; but fear not, as save rooms feature background music that fuses anxiety with serenity, (dare I say) doing a better job at evoking that very feeling than the first Resident Evil.

Resident Evil 7 is taking all the good bits of the original games and letting them organically evolve into the modern generation. Everything from the fact that it’s set in 2017 proves that Capcom knows what they’re trying to do with this game.

It’s not just a shameless REmake homage, either; part of the modernization process was cranking the violence and gross-out factor to an 11. The “molded” enemies spewing thick bile, the Bakers insane self-mutilation to prove how invincible they are, all that good stuff strikes a chord with audiences, whether it be in the key of laughter or pure disgust.

This exaggeration of “biohorror” through grossness rather than scale feels like Capcom is understanding their mistakes. While Resident Evil 5 and 6 were trying to appease modern audiences by forcing a Hollywood sense of scale, 7 feels much more organic; don’t just go with whatever’s trending, but understand what it is that people want and blend that with what people liked.

While it does overshoot modernization in some aspects, what with the game reminding the player of objectives, heals having a quick button and a general over-usage of the F-word, Capcom has hit the nail on the head. Resident Evil 7 has gone back to it’s roots using new soil.

The Resident Evil series was in desperate need of a swift kick in the ass. The original three survival-horror games ran their course and made Resident Evil less effective, but the three action-horror games that followed eventually turned the franchise into a joke. The gaming landmark that was Resident Evil 4’s impact was sullied by two derivative successors who aped every aspect of Resident Evil 4 except for its sense of self-awareness. The tongue-in-cheek joke that Resident Evil 4 represented in the scope of the franchise had tumbled on itself, becoming that same joke in time. What was Capcom to do about their washed-up horror staple with many iconic titles under its belt? Was it time to hang up the Resident Evil IP and move on to greener pastures? They attempted this before which gave birth to the also successful Devil May Cry series, so perhaps this was the right course of action. Like in the case of developing Resident Evil 4, someone at Capcom put their foot down and gave the series another chance. Resident Evil is that franchise at Capcom that refuses to die like an old man who comes back after a series of strokes. Unlike that metaphorical old man, Resident Evil can be rebuilt to seem fresh again. What the developers generated with this strong persistence of faith for the franchise was Resident Evil 7: Biohazard (because Resident Evil is known as Biohazard in its native Japan, the title is inverted to Biohazard 7: Resident Evil there which is cute), the biggest example of retreading the franchise has ever done. Capcom saw it better to demolish the building they erected instead of making a new addition to it, scraping up pieces of the wreckage to form something new. Resident Evil 7 makes such a grand departure from the familiarities of the series that one might not be able to recognize it as a Resident Evil game. If the changes made in Resident Evil 4 were enough to upset and alienate the Resident Evil purists, then the stark deviation in RE7 is enough to make those purists wretch. While the changes Resident Evil 7 makes are more than obvious, it still retains the essence of a Resident Evil game in many ways.

To efficiently stray away from one’s foundation, it helps to take aspects from other sources of inspiration. Resident Evil 7 is anything but uninspired, taking influence from a plethora of horror media. The premise of Resident Evil 7 for example borrows from its fellow, renowned horror series Silent Hill, retaining that mutual swapping of ideas I’ve noticed between both franchises. Our protagonist Ethan Winters gets a peculiar video message from his wife Mia, who has been missing for over three years. Instead of heeding her wishes to forget about her for his own good, he drives out to her last known location to look for her. Sound familiar? Rather than Ethan traveling to the misty ghost town of Silent Hill, he ventures out to a series of houses on the most remote parts of the Louisiana bayou. The sun radiates on Ethan through the hanging branches of the cypress trees, but don’t be led astray by the sunny setting. The dilapidated house Ethan finds himself in does not absorb any of the light outside making for an eerie search for Mia. To his surprise, Ethan finds Mia just hanging out in the dingiest-looking basement seemingly unscathed. Mia however is not as unassuming as she initially seems as she reveals a newfound feral side of her akin to something of a meth head. She screams and gnarls her teeth at Ethan like a rabid dog and eviscerates Ethan’s hand with a chainsaw. Ethan tentatively shoots her to subdue her, seemingly disposing of his reason for being here in the first place. Ethan then gets knocked unconscious by a middle-aged man who is as malevolent as Mia and wakes up sitting at a dinner table held by restraints with the man and his family of cackling psychopaths under dim, horrific lighting.

Resident Evil 7’s other horror influences should seem readily apparent by anyone who is a fan of the genre. Its southern location, daylight setting, and dinner table sequence should remind horror fans of the iconic proto-slasher film The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. The big difference here is that Capcom chose to set RE7 one state over from Texas to its more humid, swampier neighbor Louisiana. This is possible because Louisiana is associated with a more spooky, macabre culture, or perhaps setting the game in Texas would prove to be TOO obvious. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre influence is obvious enough here to the point where it seems like it’s in tribute to the film. To their credit, the dingy, deteriorated country houses of backwoods Louisiana are a far cry from the comparatively foppish gothic mansions that make up the previous Resident Evil games. Even the third-world villages of RE4 look like a resort compared to the Baker properties. I don’t think this point of inspiration was just noticing that The Texas Chainsaw Massacre has a different tone and aesthetic from the zombie-outbreak influenced Resident Evil games to redefine the series. It’s not as simple as that. The developers understood that the effectiveness of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre was in its gritty minimalism and quasi-realism. Many people say that The Texas Chainsaw Massacre looks like something of an old videotape they’d show in school due to its dirt-cheap budget. The film transcended the inevitable B-movie, grindhouse schlock it would’ve easily warranted by using its minimal budget to create a nightmare with tension so palpable that it could burst. People wondered for years if what they were seeing was documented footage of real psychopaths murdering teenagers and stirred up a lot of controversies. By 2017, people weren’t as gullible, but that doesn’t stop Resident Evil 7 from being effectively creepy with the same sense of gritty minimalism. The previous Resident Evil games had spooky moments, but Resident Evil 7 is one of the scariest games I’ve ever played.

One might ask: how can a triple-A, eighth-generation game have any gritty and minimalistic qualities? Did the developers compromise the budget to make it look cheap and blow the rest of the money on coke? No, because Resident Evil 7 looks spectacular. The calamitous rooms of the Baker’s property are as immaculate as they are grotesque, a sublime contradiction that works wonders for the game’s aesthetic. The game also has a silky-smooth framerate to boot, a pleasing aspect that should be expected from modern triple-A games. One might be skeptical how a game that has the frills of triple-A development succeeds in being dank, grimy, and retains a scare factor associated with gritty visuals. They might fail to understand that the crisper visual fidelity makes all of the filth of the set look even filthier. The player can discern the dusty nick nacks strewn about, the bloodstains on the furniture, and the strands of the supernatural mold that covers the walls of the house. Eerie lighting is present throughout which is quite effective at making every location even more creepy. The caveat is that sometimes the lighting is a bit too dim and it can be a challenge trying to see sometimes. The player can’t even manually turn on the flashlight, most likely so the player can’t interfere with the game’s intended lighting. Unfortunately, I can’t get creeped out by the faint lighting when I keep bumping into walls on account of not being able to see. It doesn’t help that the game’s damage mechanic involves the screen getting smudged with blood splatter. It’s like driving at night without being able to clear off the windshield. The game would’ve only gotten away without it being too much of a detriment on a triple-A budget in the HD eighth-generation of gaming.

Assisting the clear, albeit disgusting visuals of Resident Evil 7 are some new presentation mechanics never before seen in the franchise. These new mechanics are definitely influenced by games like Outlast, Soma, and other indie horror games that rose in popularity in the time between RE7 and RE6. RE7 even occasionally borrows the videotape perspective from Outlast, but there are more substantial aspects of influence here. This new crop of popular horror titles deviated far from the cheesy, action-oriented horror romps that Resident Evil became known for after RE4. Their gameplay was minimal, there was a bevy of jump scares, and all of this was experienced through the eyes of the protagonist in a first-person view. These games signaled a changing of the guard with horror games, and it was a much-needed change of pace. Resident Evil 7 followed suit and borrowed all of these elements, but it wasn’t to acclimate to trends or to provide jump scare material for Pewdiepie or Markiplier. Incorporating these minimal elements is a sign of self-reflection from the developers, realizing that the excessive nature of RE6 was its downfall. Resident Evil 7’s minimal tendencies are a reworking of the series just as much as the indie horror titles were a reworking of the horror genre itself.

The more minimal mechanics prove to work wonders at making Resident Evil 7 an effective horror experience. The first-person shift of perspective was a polarizing aspect for many Resident Evil veterans, but the game benefits greatly from it. Navigating through the tenebrous halls of the Baker property is much more tense and unnerving when the player has a restricted view of what could jump out at them at any time. This perspective also lets the player get a better look at the well-rendered details of the putrid setpieces, well supported by the HD graphics. The scare factor involved with this restricted perspective makes the player have to rely on the element of sound to survive. Music is absent through most of RE7 with door creaks, footsteps, and the sound of Ethan breathing setting a soundscape of creepy tension. This is until the player will come across something dangerous that a heart-pounding score will dynamically make an appearance. The music track will start way before the player knows exactly what is lurking in the dark, kind of acting like a sixth sense that signifies endangerment. When the fears do become clear to the player, the first-person perspective makes them all the more terrifying. The game plays with jump scares and uses the first-person perspective to make them jarring and uncomfortable. Most of the time they involve a member of the Baker family popping in on Ethan with their gnarly faces in full view. To keep them from seeming gimmicky and cheap like the effects of a 1950’s 3D movie, the game always prolongs the fright of the jump scare by making whatever jumps at the player a threat that the player must deal with accordingly. This happens on numerous occasions with several things, but the game’s pacing keeps all of these encounters effective.

Another page Resident Evil rips from the book Silent Hill is including a normal, everyman as a protagonist. Instead of the hunky, boulder-punching, window-diving, super soldiers that make up S.T.A.R.S, Ethan Winters is just some schmuck like Harry Mason and James Sunderland before him. He’s a bit of a blank slate and isn’t as ironically entertaining as, say, the overconfident one-man boy band soldier that is Leon S. Kennedy, but at least he isn’t as comically aloof as the protagonists of Silent Hill tend to be. His voice actor gives his character enough emotion, mostly with expletives given the situation, but not enough to where he ascends his faceless role (literally) as an everyman protagonist. It’s so the everyman player of the game can put themselves in the shoes of the protagonist, and I’d sure be breathing heavily and dropping f-bombs at what Ethan is up against. This is only to a certain extent because Ethan endures a bit too much physical abuse for a normal guy to withstand. Mia and the Baker family make Ethan their patsy. They sever his limbs, stab him with sharp objects, tear his flesh with their teeth and fingernails, and other means of maiming our poor, defenseless protagonist. I don’t think I have to say that Ethan only resists all of this pain due to video game magic, but all of the horrifying cuts and bruises he gets through his journey are still effective. His role as a protagonist fixes Resident Evil’s awkward fallacy of expecting the game to still be scary while playing as a roided out super-soldier. The player may not have the ability to endure the pain Ethan goes through, but his less-than-capable stature makes the horrors that happen to him all the more gruesome. This finally elicits a visceral reaction from the player that no previous game has ever caused.

This isn’t to say that Ethan is rendered defenseless against these horrors. The indie horror games that influenced RE7 to make the player run from everything they encounter would’ve deviated too far from Resident Evil’s combat. Even the moodier, slower-paced first three games had the player shooting at the undead fairly often. Combat in the first three games was meant to force the player to use their limited resources. The action was a focal point of RE 4, 5, and 6 in which a larger number of foes in a short period of time was meant to overwhelm the player, and RE7 obviously does not emulate this. For a game that deviates greatly from every other entry in a long-running franchise, RE7’s approach to action ironically recalls the series' roots. Combat in RE7 is intended to be minimal as Ethan only has a handful of weapons at his disposal. The knife, handgun, shotgun, flamethrower, and grenade launcher encompass a wide range of firepower, but the ammunition for all of these weapons is scarce. This is made even more so than the first three games because the enemies do not drop supplies like the fans might expect them to. The player has to strategize when to use their resources more wisely than any other Resident Evil game. RE7 plays with the combination mechanic the series has upheld since the first game, but the different combinations are more restricted. Chem fluids are strewn about to combine with items to make their properties stronger like combining different colors of herbs in the previous games. However, the player cannot stack green herbs on top of each other for a stronger health item. All items can only be mixed with a chem fluid and some of these items like the gunpowder and fuel cannot be used as ammo on their own. It can be frustrating to find a resource just to sandbag it in one’s inventory, especially since RE7 has reinstated the cramped inventory system from the first three games. Resident Evil 7 has found a way to surpass the scarceness of the first three games, making survival a more urgent matter than ever before.

Another aspect of RE7 that reminds me of the older titles is the layout of the area. For a bunch of backwoods yokels, the Bakers own an astounding abundance of land. Their guest house in the tutorial is a microcosm of the main house, a way to illustrate the general design philosophy of each area in the game. The area that utilizes the old Resident Evil design to the fullest degree is the main house which comes right after the opening sequence. It’s the Spencer Mansion of the south: a circuitously built, labyrinthian building complete with several rooms per floor and a series of different keys to open all of them. The main house is so large that it gives the player the impression that the goal of escaping it will be the main objective for the entire game, but it’s only a fraction of it as Ethan escapes to visit the old house and the testing facility on the same property. As I’ve stated before in my review of the first Resident Evil game, I love the Metroidvania type of design each area of the game presents. The design is just as thrillingly intricate here as it was in the previous titles. What strikes me here is how alarmingly similar it is to the layout of the first RE game. The developers translate the spacious design of a gothic mansion into a more humdrum, southern household without the setting seeming awkward or contrived. They translated the grand scope of the classic haunted house by making the layout seem like modern people could live there, albeit while having it as the health department’s worst nightmare. The design aspect of the areas is impressively Resident Evil, ironic considering this game which is supposed to deviate from it.

Roaming the halls of these ramshackle buildings are the main reasons to be scared of them: the enemies. The common enemies seen around the premise are referred to as “molded”: dark, stringy beasts with razor-sharp teeth and a ravenous nature. Imagine the regenerators from RE4, but with a more amorphous body entirely composed of veiny, fungal detritus. They are reanimated forms of the captured victims of the Baker family, regenerated by the abysmal conditions of their burial spots. There are three types of molded, but they all are defeated with the same precise methods involving headshots and with numerous knife swipes. The molded are pure nightmare fuel but unfortunately, the initial scare factor involving these beasts runs thin due to their sole role as the only enemies in the game. The wasps surrounding the old house hardly count as enemies. The oversaturation of the molded results in too much familiarity to stay afraid of them, and potentially wasting ammo by killing them gets irritating.

Fortunately, the Baker family are the real stars of the show and eclipse the wearisome presence of the molded. The harrowing dinner sequence that introduces all of them gives the player a perfect sense of their family dynamic. They are all boisterous, foul-mouthed, deranged psychopaths who instill their morbid sense of merriment on their unfortunate guests. They all act individually with their presence encompassing one of the three main areas of their property. The patriarchal head of the Baker family Jack throws Ethan around the main house like a ragdoll, calling him a sissy with a delivery that sounds like it’s straight from Deliverance. He relentlessly stalks Ethan and jumps out at him from all corners, providing the best of the jump scares in the game. Ethan avoids the creepy Marguerite in a stealth section in the old house. I won’t spoil anything, but her boss fight is one of the most monstrous and harrowing bosses I’ve ever fought across all games. Lucas “Jigsaw” Baker mans the testing area and will put Ethan through a series of savage tests and games, making up his own rules to them as he goes. The Baker family are certainly entertaining and effectively scary as characters, but I wouldn’t say that they are great “enemies” from a gaming standpoint. The illness that has beset all of the members of the Baker family has made them virtually indestructible, and Ethan can only deter them with his firepower instead of vanquishing them. That is until the game decides to suddenly make these impenetrable foes boss fights after running away from them for periods of time. Because of the seamless cutscenes, it’s hard to tell when the player is catapulted into a boss fight and should use their resources to bring them down. This confusion trapped me a couple of times and I died as a result. I felt like it was more because the game failed to provide clarity for me and less of a factor of my skill.
There is another member of the Baker family, but this one comes in peace. Zoe Baker, the daughter of the family, assists Ethan by giving him pointers through a series of antiquated longline phones throughout the property. She has Ethan scrounge up ingredients to a serum that she believes will cure her, her family, and Mia of their supernatural ailments. Using this serum becomes a catalyst to the controversial last third of the game. After having to use one of the serums to defeat Jack’s abominable final form, Ethan can only use the other serum on either Mia or Zoe. Even though the canon choice is to pick Mia for obvious reasons, I chose Zoe because I was still a little miffed about what Mia did to my hand in the guest house. Whichever person you choose, most of the events of this portion remain the same. It is revealed that the cause of the sickness infecting the Bakers is due to someone named Eveline, a girl with supernatural powers and a wide malevolent streak. If the player chooses Zoe, she still dies when Eveline attacks them while rowing a boat on the water. Ethan is captured and it’s up to Mia to rescue him. Through playing as Mia in this portion, Mia probes the wreckage of a ship and her former role on it. Mia was part of the operation that created Eveline and the tanker capsized en route to a containment unit. Mia saves Ethan from succumbing to the same fate as her, but the route I chose resulted in Ethan having to kill Mia. Ethan then takes a toxin made from Eveline’s DNA through the salt mines to kill Eveline. Ethan comes full circle to the guest house and injects Eveline with the toxin. She then reverts to a form of an elderly woman, a familiar apparition that has appeared frequently in the game. She transforms into a giant monster which Ethan takes out with a superweapon (not a trademark rocket launcher). A rescue helicopter comes with the pilot reminding everyone that this is a Resident Evil game and Ethan either comforts a wounded Mia or introspectively ponders as he leaves the site of the Baker properties.

After being treated to the wonderful pacing of the first two-thirds of the game, all of that blows out of the window during the final section. The tanker and the salt mines can’t be expected to be as scary as any of the Baker’s properties, but salt mines feel like a scrapped area from one of the action-oriented games. The linear trek with tons of molded on the trail felt like the developers were rushed and had to half-ass the finale of the game. What’s even more indicative of this is the final boss of Eveline. The mammoth-sized, hideous beast that Eveline transforms into results in an anticlimactic, borderline interactive cutscene. It’s the most unsatisfying way to cap off any game. While this last section is underwhelming in terms of gameplay, the story of Eveline and her role in this madness is still interesting. The sequence where a vision of Jack calmly giving Ethan support and claiming that his actions were not of his volition almost made me feel sympathy for him and his family, something I never expected after perilously running away from him all this time. They are just victims of circumstances under the control of an uncontrollable bioweapon in the shape of a little girl. Strangely enough, the game makes me feel sorry for Eveline too. She’s still a scared little girl with some serious abandonment issues, which is why she refers to Mia as her “mommy” and why she created the Baker family in her image. This is why she wants more guests to the Baker residence and crafts them in her image too. All of this makes Eveline a villain with layers of substance. As for Eveline being an old woman, I can’t make heads or tails of that. Ultimately, I chose the wrong girl to cure as choosing Mia is the only logical route for the story and Ethan’s motivations. It didn’t affect the events of the story too much, but I should’ve known better.

The long reflection regarding the status of the Resident Evil franchise turned out for the best. The developers slammed on the brakes and realized that if they kept making the same mistakes that resulted in repeating Resident Evil 6, they would’ve bankrupted the disputable king of horror franchises. Fortunately, there was a goldmine of inspiration at the helm of Resident Evil 7’s production to rework the series. Their influences seem to be evident: the gritty, humid aesthetic and atmosphere of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and the videotape minimalism of horror games like Outlast. While these influences seem to deviate from the established tropes of the franchise on a surface level, the game makes a point to appease seasoned players by masterfully translating elements of classic Resident Evil like the area design and progression into the game. All of this culminates into an unrelenting nightmare of an experience. Even when the last third of the game crumbles, most of the game is still substantial enough to stick in the minds of the player. I imagine a handful of the Resident Evil’s purists were dissuaded by many of the new elements presented here to reinvent the franchise but if they still decry Resident Evil 7 as an “improper” entry, they obviously haven’t taken the time to play it.