what at a first glance may seem like a return to its franchise's roots, is quickly hamstrung by adopting many design sensibilities of other modern AAA games

the opening at the guest house is a deadly combination of forced walking segments and unskippable cutscenes that make you mash a button or something occasionally to keep up a guise of interactivity. these not only harm the game's replayability, but even on a first playthrough the way they play out is quite stilted and hard to take seriously. between the limp animation and the abundance of cartoonish jumpscares, the only knot in my stomach was one of second-hand embarrassment

after a texas chainsaw massacre pastiche introducing our cast of villains, the main segment of the game begins, and this is where the game momentarily hooked me; jack baker is immediately intimidating, and being thrown into an unfamiliar environment with the looming threat of him coming to get you made me move with a lot more trepidation than usual, but after playing the game a little more i realised that jack's words were merely empty threats

if jack discovers you he'll chase you down and if he catches you, he does a bit of damage after which you can easily keep running, this combined with plentiful healing items and automatic checkpoints makes just going about your business and tanking the damage an all too inviting prospect, evaporating any and all fear or tension the game initially created

this is a major problem because the game hangs its hat on this one gimmick to make things interested because it has very little to offer otherwise. classic resident evil games are set in maze like maps that need to be slowly pieced together through puzzle solving and remembering points of interest and what goes where, the game's limited inventory and resources and well placed enemies adding another layer of strategy to navigation, saving your progress also being a limited resource in itself was always often a source a source of tension and relief as a resourceful player could go long stretches without their progress being locked in

meanwhile the house in resident evil 7 is like three floors right on top of each other that are all tiny and can be fully explored almost immediately, aside from jack being a mild nuisance (as you'll sometimes need to run in circles to shake him off to progress) the navigation lacks any sort of friction; aside from the basement, there are no other enemies, puzzles that almost solve themselves, unlimited saves and once again a mountain of resources around every corner. there is exactly one locked door that's more than a couple of rooms away from the key to it, which even then isn't too taxing, it just takes a quick trip down to the main room in the basement and there's the scorpion key, practically staring you in the face

to make matters worse, once you defeat jack in the basement, not only does he (obviously) stop chasing you, but all the other enemies, regardless if they've been killed or not, just magically vanish. the basement can very easily be tackled immediately, leaving you with a completely empty house, with a load of boring rooms with stuff to press A on in them

the rest of the game unfortunately follows a similar structure, the old house segment has an interesting gimmick with lots of hives blocking you which swarm you with bugs when approached, and you have to find the parts to build a flamethrower which has quite limited ammunition, meaning you have to pick and choose which hives are the most important to get rid of and make yourself a safe path through the house

except this isn't what happens at all, this segment is so short and the map is so tiny this concept barely has a chance to get off the ground. in other words, why would i even consider burning this hive when circumventing it takes seconds, this house is like six or seven tiny rooms total, and once again if the bugs do attack you they do far too little damage to become something to worry about. the biggest challenge here is noticing that you're supposed to crawl into a tiny fireplace behind one of the two mandatory hives which i didn't even know existed because it's so fucking dark all the time

marguerite has even less prescence than her husband, beginning her chase mere minutes before her boss fight and she won't leave her house for some reason, go out near the waterhouse and she'll just stand in the doorway cackling like a dumbass, one time i shot her in the head a few times to make her leave and she glitched out and ran back and forth up against a window before teleporting on top of me to do her janky animation where she knocks you over or whatever, it's impossible to take seriously

take away these poorly executed central gimmicks and you're left with more of the same; banal, unskippable cutscenes, shitty jumpscares, and the bare minimum for what could qualify as puzzles

lucas baker is the cheeky one with his house full of tricks, except his tricks are just like a load of tripwires and boxes that explode and boring shit like that. cheating his escape room is an enjoyable and clever sequence though, and i like that because there's a tape you can watch earlier that has someone solving it normally and getting killed, there's also an in-universe reason as to how ethan would know how to cheat it

after that's over though jack returns this time as a big blob with a silly voice that you have to defeat by shooting his fucking eyeball weak points, at it was this point that i felt myself fully checking out

the way enemies in general are handled is just terrible, mostly due to the fact that this game has literally one enemy type in it, just one (except for those bugs from earlier i guess) and it's just a pale imitation of the regenerators from resident evil 4. there are variants sure, some of them are a little bigger, some of them walk on all fours, but it's all basically the same sludgy lizard monsters the entire game, and flaccidly shooting their heads quickly gets tiresome

enemy variety is important for most games, and for horror games it's also just another tool to be scary, running into a new enemy you haven't seen before is inherently unnerving, you're not sure what they're capable of. returning to the spencer mansion in resident evil 1 and finding that the regular zombies have been replaced with these big lizard guys that run at you and rip you to shreds is terrifying, it imbues this previously conquered area with a whole new sense of life, a feeling resident evil 7 is never able to conjure up because you'll get to the end of the game and see the same enemy you've been seeing the whole game and you'll be like 'oh yeah those guys, nothing to worry about'.

the boss fights are equally terrible, they're overly long, overly scripted, and directed so badly it hurts. if i told you that there was a boss fight where two people fight with chainsaws like they're swords you might think that sounds pretty cool, but no it's just the most awkward looking janky shit you've ever seen it's just a headache if anything. also fuck that second fight with marguerite where she just leaves and hangs out somewhere off screen for what feels like minutes at a time that shit is so boring

anyway after all that is the fucking boat part which even people i've talked to who like the game seem to hate, because my god is it long and paced poorly. this is mostly due to the fact that you have to play through a boring extended flashback sequence on the boat, and then have to do a load more stuff in the same place again but now in the present where's it's like all dingy and old. i'd like to be able to be able to praise this segment as it's more of a challenge to piece together on a macro level than usual, due to its larger size and longer puzzle sequences, but it's just so dull regardless and i'm so tired of the game at this point that i just want it to be over, i suppose resident evil has never been known for its climaxes.

this area is where the game's story comes to a head, which i also find very dull. i don't think it's worth really going into too much but basically going with the 'little ghost girl who's evil because she was a biological experiment' thing they went with is so played out and presented in such a flat and uninteresting way with such nothing characters that it was hard for me to muster a single bone in my body to care about any of it. this is nothing new for resident evil but this game in particular wants so badly to be taken seriously that it's just miserable, especially when compared to something like resident evil 4 which is at least likeably cheesy.

the one bright spot of course being jack baker, who's an absolute delight any time he's on the screen, his manic energy is scary but mercifully also very funny, a perfect character for this franchise. i also think the scene near the end where jack like, contacts ethan from the afterlife or whatever while he's unconscious or whatever is quite effective. we get to see jack how he used to be before he was possessed; he's gentle, and speaks in a loving, fatherly tone, and is filled with remorse for the all the trouble he's inadvertently caused you. when he asks you to please save his family it's hard not to feel for the bakers, who were unfortunately swept up in all this.

the game unfortunately limps to the finish line though, with one more awkward stumble through the guest house as visions of your girlfriend with a chainsaw phase in and out of existence with sad music playing and it's just kind of silly, and the boss fight afterwards is more or less a bunch of cutscenes, not really worth mentioning

like i said at the start, resident evil 7 does seem like a return to the franchise's roots, a spooky house, puzzles to solve, inventory to manage, all the stuff you remember. but it's all surface level stuff, the things that made resident evil such an important staple in the survival horror genre are now severely stripped down, and you're just left with this generic, paper-thin, bottom of the barrel mush that's an absolutely mind-numbing slog to play, desperate to wrestle control away from you at every turn all for an endless barrage of cutscenes that all feel the same as each other or to hit you with a cheap jumpscare that can usually be seen coming from a mile away

what once frightened me, now bores me.

what once brought me satisfaction, now leaves me hollow.

and what should've been a glorious return to form, is anything but.