Never really been a fan of the first Resident Evil game. I appreciate both this and REmake and I believe are good games, but whenever I play I find it's too obtuse and never really enjoy my time with it. At first I thought it was the camera but after playing and enjoying RE2 and other older games with fixed-cameras it is just this game in particular. I played this with infinite ammo and health just to see what the experience would be like and see how far I could get, played for an hour but the thought of so much back-tracking and figuring out this game's puzzles just isn't something I want to do again.

Resident Evil (1996) é um jogo do gênero ''Survivor Horror'' lançado nos anos 90 com duas campanhas parecidas, porém cada uma tem suas peculiaridades. Você pode controlar Jill Valentine ou Chris Redfield, Jill é o modo ''fácil'' e Chris o ''difícil'', enquanto Jill tem 6 slots em seu inventário, uma beretta e faca, Chris tem apenas 4 slots e sua fiel faca militar. No decorrer do jogo, jogando com Jill, você tem a ajuda de Barry Burton, e Chris passa a maior parte de sua campanha sozinho. Os gráficos são bons para a época, a atmosfera faz sua parte e a gameplay é ok, a atuação dos personagens são engraçadas, mas divertidas ao mesmo tempo, recomendo bastante o game.

Thinking back on it, this is one of very few games I can even still remember that I started playing when I was younger but just gave up on because it was too hard. It was probably some ten or so years ago that I tried playing the American Director’s Cut version of RE1, but I ended up giving up after being completely stonewalled by the first boss. Now admittedly, this game is a slightly easier version (it has auto-aim, enemies are a bit weaker, and you get 1 more ribbon per pile of ink ribbons), but I was definitely happy with how I was finally able to best a game that had stumped younger me (even it’s not exactly an all-time favorite). I wanted to play at least one spoopy game this October, and I ended up being able to beat this one in the one day I figured it’d take me. I even managed to play through the whole thing with the weird ASCII RE1 PS1 controller I got that inspired me to give this game another try in the first place x3. It took me about 10 or so hours (in-game time being just a hair under 8 hours) to beat the Japanese version of the game on real hardware, and I got the best ending with Jill.

Biohazard 1 is a well known story by now to pretty much anyone reading this review. After mysterious monster attacks in the rural American town of Raccoon City, the STARS special forces team is sent to investigate. After Bravo team mysteriously disappears, your unit is sent in after them, and they flee inside the mysterious Spencer Mansion to escape the monstrous dogs that attack them after their initial helicopter landing. It’s up to Jill (or Chris, if you decide to play his harder route), to explore the mansion and survive all of the monsters and zombies out to get them! It’s a cute story that’s aged pretty well. The English voice acting still has that campy fun, and it’s a delightful homage to old American horror B-movies. It’s hardly high art, of course, but it’s a fun story with twists and turns that accomplishes more or less exactly what it sets out to do.

Mechanically, it’s the dawn of survival horror as we know it so well today. Lots of pre-rendered environments for your character to run around in with their tank controls, clunky combat, inventory management, and puzzle solving. While the better auto-aim in this version definitely made the clunky combat a lot easier to bare (and the relative abundance of ammo and health making Jill’s route at least not too difficult overall if you play smartly), the inventory management absolutely did my head in XP. SO much walking back and forth between storage boxes and safe rooms, even with the enemies in the way taken care of, the loading screens between rooms (charming door opening effects or no) take up SUCH a significant amount of the playtime in RE1. It’s a remarkably good effort for a game effectively founding the genre it’s in, particularly in little way like the game telling you that you’ve opened every door a key can open (and giving you the opportunity to throw it away right then), but the at this point iconic inventory management system of this game is definitely as much of an obstacle as it ever was to playing it these days.

As far as its presentation goes, this game still looks quite nice for such an early (March ’96) PS1 game. The pre-rendered backgrounds look very nice, the character models are very expressive and well designed, and the monsters are really cool too. My only real complaint is that I wish interactable items were a bit better highlighted, as it’s a tad too easy to not realize the puzzle you’ve been stuck on for ages was all down to you not realizing you didn’t interact with a shelf in QUITE the right way to actually access what’s inside it. The sound design is also nice, with the music setting a really nice tone for the action at hand, whether that action is more spoopyful or action-y.

Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. There is absolutely still fun to be had with these old PS1 survival horror games, but being a genre so in its infancy, there’s still a lot of crap to deal with just as a result of where gaming was at the time. If you’re ready to meet the game where it’s at and deal with its clunkyness, this is still a relatively easy experience still worth playing, but if you’re not ready for that, it’s probably better looking elsewhere for your horror games. While I didn’t dislike my time with Biohazard 1, I didn’t exactly love it either, and it’s not something I have a ton of willingness to run out and grab other entries in. I liked it okay for what it is, and you very well might do as well~.

Many years ago, I had a lot of mixed feelings on the classic Resident Evil titles, and a lot of them revolved around their limited inventory system. Growing up with Silent Hill first, where there was no need to worry about stuff like that for most of their games, the inconveniences of Resident Evil were a hard pill for me to swallow. Coupled with the door opening animations, that - while iconic - take up obnoxious amounts of time while trying to get around the mansion faster, the franchise came off as this antiquated little thing that was only there for the people who grew up with it. I thought it was far too late for me to be getting into this series.

And then Resident Evil 7 came out, along with Resident Evil 2 Remake shortly after. Which is a topic for another day, but within one fell swoop (or two fell swoops), these games turned me into a huge fan of the franchise, and retroactively got me to beat as many of the other games as possible. Except the classic trilogy. Once again, I would try them, but not really be able to commit to their design, so I would just save state through it all. But I could feel it. Even with the aged PS1 original, I could feel this alluring challenge calling out to me. Especially after playing RE2 Remake, I decided that perhaps if I truly dedicated myself to RE1's challenge, I would be able to appreciate it more than ever before.

And so, I set out a goal: To play the original RE1 with the goal of getting good enough to unlock the Infinite Rocket Launcher. Save states were mostly disabled, at most only used near the designated save points as a way to quickly return to them without having to sit through the game over screen. This handicap also meant that if I was doing miserably, or came into something unprepared, I had a load state button I could use to quickly get back to the nearest Safe Room and re-organize my strategy for what's coming up next.

I have to stress just how nice it was to be able to do that in this game, as Resident Evil 1 does a really poor job conveying what's actually useful to carry in your limited inventory for the road ahead. Weapons are one thing, but sometimes you'll get a puzzle item which the game will either decide you'll need to use 5 minutes from now, or 2 hours. And all the while you're carrying it, a sense of decision paralysis washes over you, "Should I store this puzzle item in a Safe Room for now? But what if I'm about to use it? But if I keep it now, that's one less inventory space..." The crank is a fun example of this, an item you use once, are absolutely confident you'll no longer need it, only for the game to tell you 2 hours later "Haha, gotcha, you actually needed that crank for this spot as well!" Limited ammunition is scary in survival horror. Having to wrestle with limited inventory for puzzle items on the other hand, is just a frustrating time waster, and one that I'm glad I managed to somewhat circumvent.

One more complaint I have about RE1, and it's something that most new players are likely to fall into, is its deliberately misleading difficulty select. Intreestingly, the Japanese version of the game ensures to mark both Chris and Jill as "Hard Mode" and "Easy Mode", respectively. Meanwhile, the western releases took that bit of text out and places Chris as the default choice, ensuring most players will pick him for their first playthrough. I do not recommend doing that. The difference between Jill's 8 inventory slots and Chris's mere 6 is staggering, and alongside giving him more items to carry than Jill needs to, makes him a way bigger pain in the ass to play. Don't let the game fool you, Jill is the Normal Mode. Chris is what you play when you've familiarized yourself enough with the game to desire a more advanced challenge.

In spite of these gripes I had with RE1, I'm pleased to say that after my first playthrough fully concluded, I grew to enjoy the game a lot more. In fact, I kinda went crazy for it, and replayed it 12 more times in the span of two weeks. Totaling 13 playthroughs in total, I've done 8 runs of the original PS1 release (4 runs for both characters to get all of their endings), 2 runs of the Director's Cut, 1 run of the Dualshock Edition, and 2 runs of the PC version. About halfway through these runs, save states were completely abandoned altogether, and I grew comfortable enough to play the game as fully intended.

What the hell happened to cause that many runs? Familiarity happened. As you may remember, my initial goal when I started playing was to unlock the Infinite Rocket Launcher. To unlock this weapon, you are required to beat the game under 3 hours. Keeping in mind that this is the ultimate reward of Resident Evil 1, it becomes clear what the game aims to be on secondary playthroughs: A speedrunner's challenge. For your first playthrough, you don't know what's happening, you don't know what items go where, you don't know if there's gonna be an enemy or a boss around this next corner... now that you've beat it and the "fear" of the whole thing is gone, the game effectively turns into a Time Attack, where all your knowledge is used to efficiently optimize the hell out of everything. By my 2nd run, I've shaved off over 2 hours of playtime, and that's when I knew I was in love. What was once a game that required at least 2-3 sessions, I could now cozily knock out under 2 hours. Then I could show off my skills to my friends, and inevitably fuck up along the way!

So, the appeal of the gameplay turned out to show itself during secondary runs. But is there anything to appreciate during the 1st run? Well, I suppose that all depends on your enjoyment of irony. The entire aesthetic of the mansion is comprised of dated, surrealistic 90's CG graphics, at times it looks like my old grandma's house. It's not really scary as the "horror" in survival horror would suggest, nor is it atmospherically realistic, but it is atmospheric nonetheless. Atmospheric in the sense of it whisking you away into a world that doesn't quite feel like yours, but is enchanting to explore, overcome, and discover its secrets. Much like a point 'n click adventure, the more puzzles you solve, the more things click together. One mystery solved after another, with the satisfaction of knowing each one brings you closer to your end goal, until eventually you've wrapped up all of them with a neat ribbon.

Bonus points go to the feel of the weapons. The knife's a worthless piece of trash, and the handgun is deliberately weak. But that only serves to make weapons like the shotgun and grenade launcher feel so much more amazing by comparison. Getting in those shotgun headshots to instantly take out a zombie, or loading up a grenade launcher with acid rounds and taking out a boss in seconds feels so good, man. By the time you get to the final boss, the game loads you up with enough powerful weaponry to go all out, to end things on an explosive note. Does that lend itself to horror well? Not particularly, but it is by all means deliberate. The 1st half starts you off as a vulnerable mess, but by the end, it wants you to feel like you've grown into something much more experienced and powerful. It's the zombies who should be running away from you now. It's not scary, but it feels really good.

I adore this voice acting. Yes, it's awful, laughable, the writing for it is downright nonsensical at parts. They have fucked it up beyond all understanding, and it is exactly what makes it so enjoyable. Every line is stuck in my head, and kept me looking forward to whatever stupid thing the next cutscene will do. This sort of B-movie camp would become synomous with the Resident Evil brand for many games to come. And even though the voice acting would go on to improve, I think that each of the game's writers understood well, that Resident Evil's uniqueness comes from the very fact that it's not just a straightforward horror experience, but a balance of heavy tension, and cheesy levity.

Oh yeah, so, because of the fact that I've played so many versions of RE1, the big question is, which one would I recommend? So, there are some gaps in my experience, I haven't touched the Sega Saturn or the DS ports for example. But, if I were to recommend one to a newcomer... I'm a little torn between the original PS1 release, and the PC port. Once you apply a fanmade patch to the PC port, it is by far the best way to play. FMV's are present in all their uncensored gory glory, you have a button to spin around 180 degrees for quick turning, you can save without needing Ink Ribbons, and best of all: You can skip the door loading animations! However, I've noted its audio quality (specifically the voices) as being lower than the PS1 release, and at times, the voices were drowned out by the music. Unless there's a way to adjust this, I would recommend playing the original PS1 version despite its lesser QoL, and then switch over to PC once you've got to gripes with things.

As for the other versions, the PS1 was also home to "Director's Cut" and the "Director's Cut Dualshock Edition" versions of RE1. The regular Director's Cut adds some small new features, alongside the biggest addition of an "Arrange Mode", which rearranges enemies, items, and adds new camera angles. I'd recommend it for subsequent runs of the game, but not as your first experience. I would ESPECIALLY not recommend that you make the "Dualshock Edition" your first playthrough. Everybody clowns on its replaced soundtrack, in particular the Basement theme, and the rest of the music is about as dissonant. It has little to offer beyond that. So, really, just stick to the original PS1 release if you want to play it absolutely safe.

Among all the choice, some people would also tell you to just play the RE1 Remake instead. But I don't believe that the remake outright replaces the original. The remake is a different type of experience, with a set of mechanics that makes you adapt a different mentality on how to play. By comparison, the original feels faster, simpler, more arcadey. It's its own game, and there's no need to invalidate its existence when both can co-exist and attract different types of players. In my case, I somehow actually prefer the original over the remake, due to its simplicity. As a whole, I fully recommend it for anyone who's willing to sink a little bit of time into learning how it works. If you're willing to go out of order though, RE2 original is a much more refined take on what this game's doing. Otherwise, if you can't put up with any of the jank that came with these older games, start playing from the easily accessible Resident Evil 7 and onward, then see if you can work your way into the other titles from there.

Resident Evil, lançado em 22 de março de 1996 pela Capcom, é um verdadeiro clássico do horror de sobrevivência que deixou uma marca indelével na indústria dos videogames. Com sua atmosfera tensa, enredo intrigante e jogabilidade desafiadora, o jogo estabeleceu os fundamentos do gênero e continua a ser reverenciado por fãs de horror até hoje.

Uma das maiores realizações de Resident Evil é sua capacidade de criar uma atmosfera de suspense e terror palpável. Ao explorar os corredores sombrios e claustrofóbicos da mansão assombrada, os jogadores são constantemente mantidos à beira do assento, nunca sabendo o que os espera na próxima esquina. Os sustos bem cronometrados e os encontros com inimigos grotescos contribuem para uma experiência intensamente imersiva e inquietante.

Além disso, Resident Evil introduziu muitos elementos que se tornaram padrão no gênero de horror de sobrevivência. Desde a gestão cuidadosa de recursos limitados até a resolução de quebra-cabeças ambientais para avançar na história, o jogo desafia os jogadores a pensar estrategicamente e agir com cautela em face do perigo constante.

No entanto, Resident Evil não está isento de críticas. Podemos encontrar frustração nas mecânicas de controle rígidas e nos ângulos de câmera fixos, que podem tornar a navegação pela mansão um tanto desajeitada em momentos. Além disso, o diálogo ocasionalmente exagerado e as dublagens questionáveis podem quebrar a imersão.

Apesar dessas pequenas falhas, Resident Evil permanece como um marco no mundo dos videogames, creditado por popularizar o gênero de horror de sobrevivência e influenciar inúmeras obras posteriores. Portanto, uma nota de 8/10 parece justa, reconhecendo suas contribuições significativas para a indústria e sua capacidade duradoura de assustar e intrigar jogadores ao longo dos anos.

Honestly, despite having this listed as "played" this is actually my first time playing the original all the way through. I started on the remake and it's evidentially my all time favourite game so whenever I tried to replay this I was just like "why bother, this is just an inferior version of a game I already love?" But with an inching to replay the entire series (or at least every numbered game, remake, and CV/Revelations for good measure) I gave this a proper go, doing both Jill and Chris.

And look, I still prefer the remake by a longshot but it's also impossible not to appreciate this game for what it was, the start of it all. Everything great about Resi started here. The iconic Arkley Manor, the almost strategic survival gameplay, and the eerie atmosphere are all in tact. It's actually quite intriguing and fun to see all these well familiar elements in their most primal stages. And honestly, being so well versed with the remake it was kinda freshing to be thrown here and there with where their game deviates from the remake (well, more accurately how the remake deviates from this).

Tho, I would be lying if I said this game completely held up. The controls are as clunky as ever, the environments don't feel as fleshed out as even the original 2/3, and despite appreciating this game for what it is, it's hard to ignore there's a version of this game that does everything here 10 times better. But again, this is where it all started and you have to play this game in mind in order to fully appreciate it. I'm actually really glad I played through this one and fellow horror game fans should give this one a go too.

And yes, I didn't list the voice acting as a criticism because it truly makes the game. It's worth for Chris laughing at Wesker alone.