Resident Evil 7 Teaser: Beginning Hour

Resident Evil 7 Teaser: Beginning Hour

released on Jun 13, 2016
by Capcom

Resident Evil 7 Teaser: Beginning Hour

released on Jun 13, 2016
by Capcom

A standalone expansion of Resident Evil 7: Biohazard

You wake up alone on the floor of an abandoned farmhouse. Daylight is quickly fading. You must find a way out. A thrilling horror experience for the five senses. This full model change to the "Isolated View", and photorealistic graphics of RE Engine mark a new beginning for survival horror. Enter a terrifyingly new world of horror and survive.


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replayed to get the true ending and secret item and man this is such a fun weird little sidenote in the RE franchise. It's apparently not considered canon which makes sense, and I have no fucking clue how anyone figured out how to get dirty coin by themselves. The community must've been in SHAMBLES
i also think i've seen clancy javis die more times than any other fictional character

It's short but man did it have me a bit freaked.

RE7 is actually the game in the series i know the least about, other than maybe 0 or Code Veronica, so I played this to get hyped. And it worked!!

I wouldn't usually log a demo but this is so interesting on its own such an obvious attempt to mimic the idea of the PT demo with cryptic puzzles and hidden content and it's lucky for sure that this ended up being the return of good resident evil games

This is how you bring back a franchise!!
Gosh, the first time I played this one I was so dumbfounded. Resi as a franchise going first person was weird, though it's the first time they did so on a mainline game, but the change in pace is so satisfactory. I love how dumb Resi 5 is and Resi 6 just left me with such a bad taste in my mouth... so this came as a pleasant surprise.
Should I be thankful for Kojima and P.T. being a thing? Maybe.
Still, while not necessary for you to understand the plot for the main game, "Beginning Hour" gives you 3 possible endings. It is a bit janky, since mechanics that are in the mainline game are not great here, but it's still very much worth the hour-ish you will be spending.

Beginning Hour is a decent enough introduction to the world of Resident Evil 7, which features incredibly high-quality visuals but unfortunately does fall back on a lot of very cliche mid-2010s horror tropes and even a few bugs here and there. For starters, I do want to say that the atmosphere in Beginning Hour is excellent. From the moment you wake up in the dingy guest house, you're immediately on edge and while there isn't much that actually endangers you, it definitely feels like it. The visual presentation is top-notch, with highly detailed, almost photorealistic environments with great detail; even relatively unimportant rooms and environments are dense and filled with smaller details which make Beginning Hour infinitely more immersive. As awesome of an engine as it is, however, the RE Engine has always had two things that bothered me about it, being the anti-aliasing and the screen-space reflections. Both of these poor implementations are visible here, with messy, artifact-ridden reflections that almost make the game look worse with than without. The anti-aliasing, depending on the setting, either looks too blurry or isn't effective enough at cleaning edges. It doesn't ruin the otherwise excellent presentation but it certainly is distracting.

Although Beginning Hour looks great and maintains a generally spooky atmosphere, I can't say it was very scary. There are times when the game wants you to jump but it just comes off as weak when it needs to be. I'm not going to be too harsh, since this is a 30-minute demo that is fairly different from the base game, but it does feel very pedestrian in its horror, and never did it scare me. There is one enemy encounter in the basement that is fairly tense, but that tension is ruined when the enemy bugged out and froze in place twice for me.

Another thing I want to note is the series of puzzles necessary for the good ending feels a bit arbitrary and I can't imagine most players coming to the natural conclusion of how to complete those puzzles. However, I am under the impression Capcom intended Beginning Hour to be like PT in the sense that solving it was meant to be a community effort, and back in 2016 I can imagine that being quite fun.

Resident Evil 7 Teaser: Beginning Hour is a decent enough demo that I'd recommend people play before going into Resident Evil 7 proper, as it gives you some additional background to the game's world setting and introduces you to the visual style that it goes for. It's short, free, and hard to find too much fault in, but it certainly isn't scary and I can't imagine it having any real staying power.