Resident Evil 6 is the theater of goop.
Here be the sludge that stirs across the surface! Imagine not being able to tell the difference between tar and honey ?
"What's good for you is good for me."
This is not a rehabilitation letter. Six will be buried if necessary, never to be talked of again now that we've got another virus on our hand. New alphabet ; one Wesker for a Birkin. Turncoat Redfields, fake Adas but more importantly, hot people. People on topic, at the cutting edge of any given threat. Videogame protagonists for videogame times, with three fingers on the trigger while a glance back affords us a little breather. It's still our franchise, right sir ? Biohazard moves forward because Resident Evil never can.
Two things have been sitting at the back of my mind while playing this mess : On the one hand you have the release of Resident Evil 4's HD Project 1.0 version - a work of restoration so thorough that Jacob Geller already dedicated a whole video to it - and on the other you've got swirling reports of CAPCOM's very own attempt to resurrect the golden child once again by (among other things) drawing inspiration from the infamous 2003 castle demo. I'm excited. Curious! A little chained to the peerless promise of next-gen frights ; man with hook is the verb, an absurdly new one to wield in this here place and house. It's like we're circumventing the whole Village just to go back to the source material. Modernity is overrated anyway and I want my cookie moody instead of soaked in the era of greys and beiges - but what greys and beiges! See the thing about Resident Evil 4 is that I don't want to play it again. It's cliché to call something modern, especially within the context of a specular videogame canon, but Four is the Shit and everyone knows it. It's just that blatant. Now what we do with that notion is at our own discretion but the fact is this rift no one has been able to close ever since. Of course I'd wanna be back there, spoil the ancestors. Resident Evil is not "special". But we like it enough to have turned the monster into a cultural touchstone. I see the stone and it's oozing sludge. I touch it and the wet grips me. Let us all recess in this pandemic together. I have never been more invested in discovering the refreshed polygon count of a dog in my whole life.
Sometimes this craze - this hopelessness, really - pushes me to reevaluate things in a pseudo-scholarly gesture of boredom. My brain is inherently wired to go down rabbit-holes, draw cosmic lines of meaning between points of interests that don't even intersect at the most obscure of angles ; and sometimes the line leads me to take patience with a title and meet it on its own terms completely. Embrace the fire and awkwardly march towards my own doom. Welcome to Racoon City 6.
There's an ugliness at play that is key (I think) to share some sort of commonality with a game like Resident Evil 6. I don't mean basking in a rotten decor or giggling at the prospect of seeing the burning car rolling-on down the hill. This I don't care about - bad is important and insightful but ultimately I'm a sucker for beauty and grace. When I use the term "ugly" to describe Resident Evil 6 I mean it not in the aesthetic sense but as an "aesthetical marker", better yet an "aesthetical touchstone" of the material. Because the words that kept popping back in my head as I fucked around this globe of bioweapons were Michael Benjamin Bay. The glory of Bay's entire body of work has always lied in how ugly his film were. They're cynical, nihilistic, nothing-of-a-project ideas envisioned as pornographical and commercial in nature. Bay is a storyteller - a damn fine one at that - but he is also a fundamental nonbeliever. Because of the formless ideological void that shapes his stories some of his most potent visual ideas often don't mesh well with each other and end up resonating more strongly across separate films (this is why his disregard for bodily sanctity has never been more vibrant than in Transformers or how the upcoming dream that is Ambulance looks to be one of his most syncretic works yet). In the eyes of Bay, our earthly decor has long been an anti-matter for humans where only his gaze deems objects and shapes worthy of examination. And of course to him, serpentine camera motions and explosions are the only lifeforms worth maintaining in the end. An America for the people, without the people.
"No Hope Left" is the tagline of Resident Evil 6 through and through. Everything about it is guided by this thematic zeitgeist, pushing our heroes to go through the motions of a game that can't stop, won't stop. Ever. Six's economy is watered-down, uninterested in subtle mood swings. It's relentless. Always on a "have some more attitude" and unwilling to part with that drive for the sake of play conventions. Hence it's impossible to view it as a singular suite or some supersized block of ideas because to do so would require some type of body-beacon to illuminate the reason of its existence. A humane garble that would cut through the horde ; or put it another way, what Ed Smith once referred to as "the headshot". Resident Evil 6 is profoundly, explicitly anti-headshot, not just from a gameplay standpoint but also from an ideological perspective. This world is a hydra-state that solely follows the flow of bullets from one country to the next. Any attempt to make a narrative out of this conflict fails once you realize the game exists in this persistent state of in-medias res, the kind where every second is spent in disbelief of what the developers decided to throw at you. I play Resident Evil 6 and ask myself "How ?"
That is not the mark of mediocrity, that's just a dog chewing at its own leg and liking it.
But anyway, a world without people, without zombies, really, without monsters even - or without time to properly explore their effects on a consistent metagame. The lifeforms that CAPCOM deems worthy of exploration here are harder to identify than in any other title in the series. Leon's campaign, for example, does a decent job of setting up this framework of bravado - slipping and sliding and kicking interwoven by bouts of excellent QTE work - I'd hoped would be further expanded later only to be thrown off the deep end by Chris and the boys. Only Resident Evil 6 would be so foolish (so brave) as to orchestrate close-quarters rocket battles...I hate this campaign, because it's the one that gets the closest to this idea of "bad" I referred to earlier. Nothing can be gained from its furious exchanges, every encounter deserving of a crass and finicky dissection no one would walk away from with their sanity intact. Like drigo said to me one evening "It's impossible to tell whether or not they thought about [any given idea] for longer than 5 min." This is the theme of Resident Evil 6 more than anything else, and it occasionally leads to beautiful meanderings into what I call this theater of goop.
Goop is mush. It's fluid, indistinct but mostly is the state of games with an ambivalent bond to genre. Attachment to genre is the reason of Six's whole identity crisis because its understanding of the word is so gleefully malleable, as if 600 employees at CAPCOM deduced that ambiance only consisted of shadows on the wall and Nemesis could just be airdropped into warzones unscathed (as if this "space" had nothing to do with “those” bodies). Genre is when an object with this many ambitions is so aggressively "of the market" by way of gesturing to western audiences while imagining that it could be anything other than profoundly "Resident Evil". There's no easy answer here ; Six doesn't lend itself to any kind of catharsis, even ten years later, passionately playing it does not assuage the shortcomings of its mechanics/level-design in the face of king shit like Resident Evil 4 even as its highest highs invoke a sense of return to Spain - not by way of knife-play this time but through a kick-and-slide metagame that, if it could, would reject any notion of the necessity of firearms to fight bioterrorism - while its many artistic inconsistencies prevent me from loving it from afar. This theater has no sense of place tying the frame to some shared space with the player ; no stage upon which to string ourselves along or spectatorship at hand to reassure us, there's just the linear play, the consistency of our need for business in the face of explosions that run mud-caked in radioactive blacks and yellows. Resident Evil 6 can't be denied.
Leave exhausted or don't come at all.
In the absence of resolution, I'll make up my own lie.
I think I have an idea of what this game is and it all comes from a very specific point in Jake and Sherry's campaign I like to call the four doors of the Ustanak.
The four doors of the Ustanak are a set of precisely 4 (four!) metallic military-grade doors you need to open with your partner one after the other at the end of a chase with our resident Nemesis. Throughout Six doors are a huge component of the environment, whether bashed-through with a partner or careful half-opened in anticipation of the next threat. But this set is special. You go through each one of these thresholds - themselves divided in a two-part ritual, first unlocking the valve and then opening and closing the door behind us - only to find yourself in the presence of another one of Chekhov's gun - here taking the form of a huge drill-tractor which we promptly hijack in order to retaliate. What ensues is one of my favorite moments of the game as Jake and Sherry proceed to ram the Ustanak through each of the doors in reverse order all the way to mountain rock. Beyond the absolute insanity of making us go through four successive instances of Quick-time-event handywork as if drunk on its contraptions I think this sequence holds the key to understanding just how much the game wishes to be noticed and engaged with at the most basic level of play, repeating patterns to better nuke them out in front of our eyes. It’s not so much the individual chain of motions composing it that endeared me but rather their absurd repetition, the belief that this was what the game required at this point in time and space. Contrary to Bay this ugliness at work is exactly what draws the game away from cynicism and into unknown territories ; whereas he makes engines of fatigue that serve the disintegration of everything human in his frame, Resident Evil 6 is pushed forward by this notion that aesthetic destruction will make a live beast out of moments of desperation.
Leon and its companions are not actors of their own lives - and neither are we there - but Six offers the distant possibility that maybe, just maybe, if one keeps on kicking and sliding in this world where every door is screaming and death-drive feels indistinguishable from survival we could be heard someday, somehow.
Helluva manifesto this.
Here be the sludge that stirs across the surface! Imagine not being able to tell the difference between tar and honey ?
"What's good for you is good for me."
This is not a rehabilitation letter. Six will be buried if necessary, never to be talked of again now that we've got another virus on our hand. New alphabet ; one Wesker for a Birkin. Turncoat Redfields, fake Adas but more importantly, hot people. People on topic, at the cutting edge of any given threat. Videogame protagonists for videogame times, with three fingers on the trigger while a glance back affords us a little breather. It's still our franchise, right sir ? Biohazard moves forward because Resident Evil never can.
Two things have been sitting at the back of my mind while playing this mess : On the one hand you have the release of Resident Evil 4's HD Project 1.0 version - a work of restoration so thorough that Jacob Geller already dedicated a whole video to it - and on the other you've got swirling reports of CAPCOM's very own attempt to resurrect the golden child once again by (among other things) drawing inspiration from the infamous 2003 castle demo. I'm excited. Curious! A little chained to the peerless promise of next-gen frights ; man with hook is the verb, an absurdly new one to wield in this here place and house. It's like we're circumventing the whole Village just to go back to the source material. Modernity is overrated anyway and I want my cookie moody instead of soaked in the era of greys and beiges - but what greys and beiges! See the thing about Resident Evil 4 is that I don't want to play it again. It's cliché to call something modern, especially within the context of a specular videogame canon, but Four is the Shit and everyone knows it. It's just that blatant. Now what we do with that notion is at our own discretion but the fact is this rift no one has been able to close ever since. Of course I'd wanna be back there, spoil the ancestors. Resident Evil is not "special". But we like it enough to have turned the monster into a cultural touchstone. I see the stone and it's oozing sludge. I touch it and the wet grips me. Let us all recess in this pandemic together. I have never been more invested in discovering the refreshed polygon count of a dog in my whole life.
Sometimes this craze - this hopelessness, really - pushes me to reevaluate things in a pseudo-scholarly gesture of boredom. My brain is inherently wired to go down rabbit-holes, draw cosmic lines of meaning between points of interests that don't even intersect at the most obscure of angles ; and sometimes the line leads me to take patience with a title and meet it on its own terms completely. Embrace the fire and awkwardly march towards my own doom. Welcome to Racoon City 6.
There's an ugliness at play that is key (I think) to share some sort of commonality with a game like Resident Evil 6. I don't mean basking in a rotten decor or giggling at the prospect of seeing the burning car rolling-on down the hill. This I don't care about - bad is important and insightful but ultimately I'm a sucker for beauty and grace. When I use the term "ugly" to describe Resident Evil 6 I mean it not in the aesthetic sense but as an "aesthetical marker", better yet an "aesthetical touchstone" of the material. Because the words that kept popping back in my head as I fucked around this globe of bioweapons were Michael Benjamin Bay. The glory of Bay's entire body of work has always lied in how ugly his film were. They're cynical, nihilistic, nothing-of-a-project ideas envisioned as pornographical and commercial in nature. Bay is a storyteller - a damn fine one at that - but he is also a fundamental nonbeliever. Because of the formless ideological void that shapes his stories some of his most potent visual ideas often don't mesh well with each other and end up resonating more strongly across separate films (this is why his disregard for bodily sanctity has never been more vibrant than in Transformers or how the upcoming dream that is Ambulance looks to be one of his most syncretic works yet). In the eyes of Bay, our earthly decor has long been an anti-matter for humans where only his gaze deems objects and shapes worthy of examination. And of course to him, serpentine camera motions and explosions are the only lifeforms worth maintaining in the end. An America for the people, without the people.
"No Hope Left" is the tagline of Resident Evil 6 through and through. Everything about it is guided by this thematic zeitgeist, pushing our heroes to go through the motions of a game that can't stop, won't stop. Ever. Six's economy is watered-down, uninterested in subtle mood swings. It's relentless. Always on a "have some more attitude" and unwilling to part with that drive for the sake of play conventions. Hence it's impossible to view it as a singular suite or some supersized block of ideas because to do so would require some type of body-beacon to illuminate the reason of its existence. A humane garble that would cut through the horde ; or put it another way, what Ed Smith once referred to as "the headshot". Resident Evil 6 is profoundly, explicitly anti-headshot, not just from a gameplay standpoint but also from an ideological perspective. This world is a hydra-state that solely follows the flow of bullets from one country to the next. Any attempt to make a narrative out of this conflict fails once you realize the game exists in this persistent state of in-medias res, the kind where every second is spent in disbelief of what the developers decided to throw at you. I play Resident Evil 6 and ask myself "How ?"
That is not the mark of mediocrity, that's just a dog chewing at its own leg and liking it.
But anyway, a world without people, without zombies, really, without monsters even - or without time to properly explore their effects on a consistent metagame. The lifeforms that CAPCOM deems worthy of exploration here are harder to identify than in any other title in the series. Leon's campaign, for example, does a decent job of setting up this framework of bravado - slipping and sliding and kicking interwoven by bouts of excellent QTE work - I'd hoped would be further expanded later only to be thrown off the deep end by Chris and the boys. Only Resident Evil 6 would be so foolish (so brave) as to orchestrate close-quarters rocket battles...I hate this campaign, because it's the one that gets the closest to this idea of "bad" I referred to earlier. Nothing can be gained from its furious exchanges, every encounter deserving of a crass and finicky dissection no one would walk away from with their sanity intact. Like drigo said to me one evening "It's impossible to tell whether or not they thought about [any given idea] for longer than 5 min." This is the theme of Resident Evil 6 more than anything else, and it occasionally leads to beautiful meanderings into what I call this theater of goop.
Goop is mush. It's fluid, indistinct but mostly is the state of games with an ambivalent bond to genre. Attachment to genre is the reason of Six's whole identity crisis because its understanding of the word is so gleefully malleable, as if 600 employees at CAPCOM deduced that ambiance only consisted of shadows on the wall and Nemesis could just be airdropped into warzones unscathed (as if this "space" had nothing to do with “those” bodies). Genre is when an object with this many ambitions is so aggressively "of the market" by way of gesturing to western audiences while imagining that it could be anything other than profoundly "Resident Evil". There's no easy answer here ; Six doesn't lend itself to any kind of catharsis, even ten years later, passionately playing it does not assuage the shortcomings of its mechanics/level-design in the face of king shit like Resident Evil 4 even as its highest highs invoke a sense of return to Spain - not by way of knife-play this time but through a kick-and-slide metagame that, if it could, would reject any notion of the necessity of firearms to fight bioterrorism - while its many artistic inconsistencies prevent me from loving it from afar. This theater has no sense of place tying the frame to some shared space with the player ; no stage upon which to string ourselves along or spectatorship at hand to reassure us, there's just the linear play, the consistency of our need for business in the face of explosions that run mud-caked in radioactive blacks and yellows. Resident Evil 6 can't be denied.
Leave exhausted or don't come at all.
In the absence of resolution, I'll make up my own lie.
I think I have an idea of what this game is and it all comes from a very specific point in Jake and Sherry's campaign I like to call the four doors of the Ustanak.
The four doors of the Ustanak are a set of precisely 4 (four!) metallic military-grade doors you need to open with your partner one after the other at the end of a chase with our resident Nemesis. Throughout Six doors are a huge component of the environment, whether bashed-through with a partner or careful half-opened in anticipation of the next threat. But this set is special. You go through each one of these thresholds - themselves divided in a two-part ritual, first unlocking the valve and then opening and closing the door behind us - only to find yourself in the presence of another one of Chekhov's gun - here taking the form of a huge drill-tractor which we promptly hijack in order to retaliate. What ensues is one of my favorite moments of the game as Jake and Sherry proceed to ram the Ustanak through each of the doors in reverse order all the way to mountain rock. Beyond the absolute insanity of making us go through four successive instances of Quick-time-event handywork as if drunk on its contraptions I think this sequence holds the key to understanding just how much the game wishes to be noticed and engaged with at the most basic level of play, repeating patterns to better nuke them out in front of our eyes. It’s not so much the individual chain of motions composing it that endeared me but rather their absurd repetition, the belief that this was what the game required at this point in time and space. Contrary to Bay this ugliness at work is exactly what draws the game away from cynicism and into unknown territories ; whereas he makes engines of fatigue that serve the disintegration of everything human in his frame, Resident Evil 6 is pushed forward by this notion that aesthetic destruction will make a live beast out of moments of desperation.
Leon and its companions are not actors of their own lives - and neither are we there - but Six offers the distant possibility that maybe, just maybe, if one keeps on kicking and sliding in this world where every door is screaming and death-drive feels indistinguishable from survival we could be heard someday, somehow.
Helluva manifesto this.
5 Comments
thinking on it also re: chris' campaign, i remember thinking at one point it'd have an edge on the other ones simply bc having an action oriented campaign suits the titles systems but it's really muted in delivery, just a lot of flavorless skirmishes interspersed with sega arcade segments. leons is the clear winner and most will point to its horror atmosphere being the root of that when instead its success lies in not only representing the direction of the series in miniature but also so sharply accenting its rollercoaster ride with genuine profanity. was surprised at jake/sherry being much slower paced than my memory let on but as your segment on the doors alluded, i like that about it. sliding down the snow is also hilarious
@kingbancho : Thanks for the kind words ;_; t'was a pleasure to play parts of this with you -and I actually didn't finish Jake and Sherry's, I just moved on to Ada so we can finish it another time!
(Also yes to all of what you just said about Chris and Leon)
(Also yes to all of what you just said about Chris and Leon)
i was playing this with my girlfriend and we broke up after finishing 3/4 campaigns lol
i...i can't blame either you
KB0
2 years ago
sad i couldn't finish up jake/sherry with ya, i ended up pretty busy and wouldn't have been able to continue til next week 😭