Survivor is such incredible dogshit. It's mystifying that a game so haphazardly designed, incompetently written and laughably executed was made by professionals who are paid to create videogames to sell to people. From the major design oversights to the over-excited tie-ins to the main series' storyline and poorly integrated assets from previous games, I've never played a piece of licensed Sony Computer Entertainment software that felt so much like a fangame made by a 12 year-old. It's a marvel.

For the uninitiated, Resident Evil: Survivor is the Resident Evil lightgun game. Apart from in America, where they were nervous about games where you held a toy gun, and the G-Con support was patched out. It's not designed like a lightgun game, though - It's designed like the laziest Resident Evil game ever made. You play in first-person perspective, walking from rectangular room to rectangular room. You walk forward by pulling the G-Con's trigger while aiming off-screen, and turn by using the gun's A and B buttons. More intricate actions can be performed with awkward double-clicks, but the timing's too tricky to be reliable, so the developers have balanced out the difficulty by making every enemy encounter incredibly easy. If a zombie is in front of you, shoot away until he's dead - he's not really going anywhere. Avoiding enemies is considered an advanced play technique in Survivor, akin to those used by speedrunners. And if he does hurt you, you can easily recover thanks to the copious amount of healing items you'll be carrying - There's no limits to your inventory. No management. No planning. Just pick everything up and carry it until you need it. Pistol ammo is infinite, and the game's over in about an hour anyway.

Lip service is paid to Resident Evil's exploration and puzzles. You enter a new area and there's one locked door and one unlocked one. Go through the unlocked door and you'll find a key for the other one, floating right in front of your face. This is a hardline structural rule to Survivor's map structure that the game very rarely deviates from.

Character models are pulled straight from Resident Evil 2 - Quite an attractive game, given the limitations its artists were working with, and the atmosphere they were evoking. That was a game with a floating camera and pre-rendered backgrounds, though. The character models were never intended to take up three quarters of your television screen, as you determined which giant polygon face to aim at. The animation hasn't been altered either, making Resident Evil Survivor the stiffest-looking lightgun game since Hogan's Alley, where the enemies were supposed to be cardboard cutouts.

The storyline is schlock beyond schlock. I won't dare ruin the thrilling mystery of our amnesiac protagonist's identity for you, but he's without a doubt, the dumbest, most naive hero I've seen in fiction. A joy. I love him. The script is out of this world. The Resident Evil series has frequently utilised low-rate English-speaking actors and models who were within walking distance of Capcom HQ for its cast, but this time, the weird imbalance of English, American, Australian and bilingual European cultural influences seems to have been injected into the script too. I don't know how else to logically dissect lines like “They all had sleepy eyes. One of the girls even slavered.”

Survivor has so many marks of technical weirdness. The way when you shoot a Hunter in mid-leap they hang there like Wile E. Coyote, or the “Return” command appearing twice in your inventory list to mislead you you've scrolled through the whole thing when you're only halfway through your options, or the brightly-lit idyllic family home that sits between open sewer and barb wire fenced-off hellhole, or the implementation of crawling close-quarters enemies in a game where you can't manually look down, or the foley when you wade in thigh-high water sounding like someone pushing a mushy cabbage into a matchbox. It's a fascinating spectacle.

Survivor abandons the need for Ink Ribbons and Typewriters by just making the game very short. There's no mid-game saving. You get to do that when you complete it, as you'll doubtless want to see the alternate routes in New Game+. There's a couple times in the campaign where three doors are presented before you. Choose one, and you'll determine the theme that the next three rooms will take before the paths converge once more. Do you pick the arcade or the hospital? Which wallpaper would you prefer? It's cute that they attempted something.

In spite of all this, I remain very fond of Resident Evil: Survivor. This isn't just a bad Resident Evil game. It's not a miserable experience to play. It isn't Dead Aim. Survivor's most positive attribute is lack of ambition. It's short, simple, and disinterested in challenging the player. The most negative emotion it can evoke is boredom, and that's not much of an issue when it so rapidly takes such dramatic left-turns into sheer lunacy. It's not bereft of positive qualities, either. The texture work is genuinely pretty good, and makes me think they must have had some staff from the main studio work on the game. Before the internet was what it is today, Survivor served as a breezy, accessible way to see a bunch of Resi monsters. I never have a bad time with it. Ironic enjoyment has been deemed an unfashionable concept since the term “hipster” was first coined, but there's nothing insincere about how much pleasure this game brings me, or how hard I push it upon classic Resident Evil fans. I couldn't ever give this incontrovertible icon of badness anything above a 1/5 though. It'd be like giving the blunt force trauma a positive review because it made you talk funny.