This review contains spoilers
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 returns 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 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 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 to anyone 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 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 saw was documented footage of real psychopaths murdering teenagers, which 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 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 house's walls. Eerie lighting is present throughout, which is quite effective at making every location even more creepy. The caveat is that sometimes the lighting is too dim, and it can be challenging to see. 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 being too much of a detriment on a triple-A budget in HD eighth-generation 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 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, 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 work wonders at making Resident Evil 7 an effective horror experience. The first-person perspective shift 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 comes 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 lurks in the dark, acting like a sixth sense that signifies endangerment. When the fears 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 includes 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. He 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 protagonist's shoes, 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 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 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 be able 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 players 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 forced players 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 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 these weapons is scarce. This is made even more so than in the first three games because the enemies do not drop supplies like the fans expect them to. The player has to strategize when to use their resources more wisely than in 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 strengthen their properties, 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 them, 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 more urgent than ever.
Another aspect of RE7 that reminds me of the older titles is the area's layout. 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 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. Still, 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 is supposed to deviate from it.
Roaming the halls of these ramshackle buildings is the main reason to be scared of them: the enemies. The common enemies seen around the premise are “molded”: dark, stringy beasts with razor-sharp teeth and a ravenous nature. Imagine the regenerators from RE4, but with a more amorphous body 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 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 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 family's daughter, assists Ethan by giving him pointers through a series of antiquated longline phones throughout the property. She has Ethan scrounge up ingredients for a serum that she believes will cure her, her family, and Mia of their supernatural ailments. Using this serum becomes a catalyst for the controversial last third of the game. After using 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 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 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 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 game's finale. 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. 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 story's events 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 Resident Evil purists were dissuaded by many of the new elements presented here to reinvent the franchise. However, if they still decry Resident Evil 7 as an “improper” entry, they obviously haven’t taken the time to play it.
Play this game in VR if you dare.
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Attribution: https://erockreviews.blogspot.com
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 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 to anyone 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 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 saw was documented footage of real psychopaths murdering teenagers, which 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 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 house's walls. Eerie lighting is present throughout, which is quite effective at making every location even more creepy. The caveat is that sometimes the lighting is too dim, and it can be challenging to see. 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 being too much of a detriment on a triple-A budget in HD eighth-generation 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 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, 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 work wonders at making Resident Evil 7 an effective horror experience. The first-person perspective shift 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 comes 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 lurks in the dark, acting like a sixth sense that signifies endangerment. When the fears 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 includes 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. He 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 protagonist's shoes, 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 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 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 be able 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 players 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 forced players 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 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 these weapons is scarce. This is made even more so than in the first three games because the enemies do not drop supplies like the fans expect them to. The player has to strategize when to use their resources more wisely than in 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 strengthen their properties, 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 them, 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 more urgent than ever.
Another aspect of RE7 that reminds me of the older titles is the area's layout. 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 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. Still, 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 is supposed to deviate from it.
Roaming the halls of these ramshackle buildings is the main reason to be scared of them: the enemies. The common enemies seen around the premise are “molded”: dark, stringy beasts with razor-sharp teeth and a ravenous nature. Imagine the regenerators from RE4, but with a more amorphous body 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 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 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 family's daughter, assists Ethan by giving him pointers through a series of antiquated longline phones throughout the property. She has Ethan scrounge up ingredients for a serum that she believes will cure her, her family, and Mia of their supernatural ailments. Using this serum becomes a catalyst for the controversial last third of the game. After using 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 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 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 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 game's finale. 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. 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 story's events 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 Resident Evil purists were dissuaded by many of the new elements presented here to reinvent the franchise. However, if they still decry Resident Evil 7 as an “improper” entry, they obviously haven’t taken the time to play it.
Play this game in VR if you dare.
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Attribution: https://erockreviews.blogspot.com