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.
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.