“All the world will be your enemy, Prince with a Thousand Enemies, and whenever they catch you, they will kill you. But first they must catch you, digger, listener, runner, prince with the swift warning. Be cunning and full of tricks and your people shall never be destroyed.”
--Watership Down

Rain World one of those games where the line of "I like it because I think it's fun" and "I like it because I respect the work that went into it" is blurred.
Every enemy has observable behavior patterns, be it hunting, pack tactics, fear of environmental hazards, or symbiosis with other creatures. Looking at the behind the scenes it's impressive how it all fits together with the AI having separate ways of tracking through sight or vision. It truly feels like I am escaping a wild animal and not an enemy with a "pursue entity: [Player]" protocol.
And understanding that is what helps mitigate the frustrations when the simulation works against you. Three camouflaged lizards camping by the one path forward isn't the devs crafting a challenging encounter, that's just where their AI is telling them to gather because they're being chased out of their usual hunting grounds by a migrating tribe of Scavenger Monkeys.
Still, this can be used to your advantage, because the lizards are territorial and don't like sharing space with one another. Coax one to assault another and they may just leave enough of an opening for you to slip past.
90% of the time it works and feels like you're overcoming the odds of a world programmed against you by fighting back with your knowledge of it.

The other 10% of the time is when the simulation breaks down. You start to see the artifice in the design and things transcend from "Tolerable inconvenience" to "Bullshit Setback."
Because Rain World still needs to be a game with a goal and path forward, and this at times is incongruous with it's measured little world.
Much of the actual frustrations I had came at the fault of the rain mechanic. You're on a timer (with inconsistent length) at the start of each day to fill your belly and find shelter, and sometimes the path to shelter just isn't the path that food has spawned on, and vice-versa.
This wouldn't be so much a problem without the karma system preventing your passage to new areas. Survive a day with a full belly, your karma goes up a level, die and it goes down. At the entrance to new areas you'll be denied access if your karma isn't above a certain level. Get rejected and you now have to remain in the area you just got through, back tracking until you find reasonable hunting grounds and survive enough cycles to get your karma level requisite.

Grinding. It's grinding. And the grinding is never fun because of the aforementioned chaos and unfairness of the simulated ecosystem. Getting through an area by the skin of your teeth feels terrific, being told to go back and do it five more times is deflating.

And it's clear the devs became aware of this deficiency, because endgame areas simply start to include farmable food and shelters right outside the karma checkpoints. Were it not tied to the game's themes and story of cycles and rebirth, I'd question if the game even needs the karma system.

The true frustrations lie in a few gimmick areas causing deaths (and thus depleted karma) far outside the control or understanding of new players. A completely pitch black network of tunnels that causes eye strain, a complex of sentient cancer and zero gravity, and fields of carnivorous grass that can only be traversed on the back of a squishy deer that can sometimes just not spawn near you (this is oddly the worst one).

But as I walk away from Rain World, I can't stay mad at it. It's too fascinating a creation. A labor of passion and experimentation.

I will, inevitably, grit my teeth and dive back in again.

Resident Evil Village shows that the formula for RE7 can beat the sophmore slump and even surpass it's predacessor.
While RE7 offers a tighter, clausterphobic story, Village delivers a sort of carnival of horror. It's a deluge of ideas ranging from fetuses that vore you to mechanical monstrosities. It's so difficult to predict where this game is taking you and that keeps it's story fresh at a length that caused earlier games to become stale.
Every environment is a joy to explore because you're always rewarded with secret areas brimming with loot and lore. Highly reactive and violent enemies keep every shootout exciting and rarely is there a frustrating encounter.
Ethan Winters may be a cardboard protagonist, but he loves his daughter goddamnit and woe be to any monster that gets in his way. It's this throughline that makes Village one of the strongest narratives in the franchise and I was genuinley touched by its emotional climax.
Where the franchise will go from here I genuinely cannot say, but I think they ended on a high note.

This is more of an adaptation of Resident Evil 3 than a straight remake. Whereas REmake 2 followed the floorplan of the original game with near slavish devotion, this one is altered right from the get go, following the beats of RE3, but with different environments and progression of events.
Now, I like these differences, but I don't know if I prefer them to the original. Where's the giant worm, or the Raccoon City parks? Where's the room with all the dead tyrants and soldiers?
The combat, imo, is improved from REmake 2. Here's the dodge move I was asking for, along with ample space to avoid zombies if you so choose. The game compensates this by having there be a ton of zombies, and zombie variants. The game really captures what set RE3 apart from the prior 2 entries. It's a game about the rush of the pursuit and the dire feeling of needing to escape a city gone to hell.
The issue is, in this iteration, the pursuer, the titular Nemisis...feels like a non-entity. He only shows up for scripted chase scenes and boss fights that are quite short. Very abruptly he sheds his iconic design for something more bestial, and much like the other changes I like it, but I don't know that I love it. By the end I didn't feel I had that personal relationship of spite that I did at the end of the original.
The game is pretty as hell and I wish there was more time spent exploring the streets, but at the same time no one area feels it overstays it's welcome.

This game does a lot of things right. A lot. 85% of the time the systems work pretty flawlessly for an atmospheric survival experience. That remaining 15% are circumstances where random enemies take all your ammo to even stagger, zombies chain grabbing you becausee the animation takes so long, or Mr. X camping out in the hallway you need to go down. In these moments, I personally don't feel like I'm being forced into on-the-fly decision making, I feel like I'm seeing the numbers in the matrix and I'm waiting for the game to get back to that other 85%
I don't know. It's hard to articulate. I don't mind that it's hard, but it doesn't feel as satisfying to roll with the punches like in previous games. Every setback feels lethal in a way where I'm thinking about the time lost having to roll back to a worthwhile save.
There's also the disappointment at how much is copy/pasted between the two campaigns. It's hard to believe the the original RE2 did a better job at making the A and B playthroughs feel like different games, with actual compelling decisions.
I want to like it, but I simply wasn't having fun compared to RE4, or 7, or REmake 1

RE7 was the only Resident Evil I have played before doing this massive series playthrough. I got it around launch because it was marketed as being very standalone. So this review is a retrospective with the added benefit of knowing it's context in the greater series.
It's almost a cliche to say that RE7 brings things back to basics for the franchise, but it does. This is a very small horror story, one smaller than the first game, and it's about survival and escape before any concept of international intrigue and bioterrorism. The game feels wildly fresh just by doing the shit that made Resident Evil famous, a true shocker for all involved.
It wears the influences of hillbilly horror on its sleeve with homages and sometimes direct callouts to Texas Chainsaw, Evil Dead, and Hills Have Eyes. The Baker family is a shot of personality into what was becoming a fairly sterile franchise. They ride the line beautifully between true horror and camp enjoyment. Yes, you don't want to be locked in a room with any of them, but you can't help but want to watch what they do next.
The game is the scariest it's been since REmake, maybe scarier. Even on this 2nd playthrough the sequences where I know I'm safe still have me unnerved because the sound design makes it clear that you are never alone on the Baker property.
Many say that the game falls apart in the last act, once you've dispatched the Bakers and turn to the true villain (who's twist reveal is the best in the series). Last time I played I agreed with that, but this time it didn't bug me as much. If the game is too long, it's only by an hour or so. The experience goes by super quick if you're not scouring the environment for every possible advantage.
My complaints are minimal. I think it could have used more enemy variety, the blood splatter on the screen showing your level of damage is obnoxious, and I think a lot of the gore and goo effects already look dated.
I love Ethan Winters so much.

The most important treasure gained in any retrospective is one of perspective. You get the grasp of how many different ways an IP can be twisted to fit certain molds. Resident Evil has seen spin-offs that are light gun games, Gameboy Color Zelda-style adventures, early experiments in online cooperative play, and now this: an attempt to fit the brand in to an e-sports shooter shaped hole.
Another important aspect of perspective is it allows you to truly see where just how low a franchise’s quality can get. Resident Evil Survivor is bad, but at least the voice acting and plot are hilarious. Operation Raccoon City is bad, but at least I see people that defend it and make fan art of its characters. Resident Evil 5 is bad, but at least Chris Redfield punches a boulder.
Umbrella Corps is bad without qualification. There is no reason to play this unless you’re me. The online component is dead which means you’re left with a bevy of single-player missions. There is no curiosity to be sated by seeking out this forgotten title.
The premise of this game is that, in the wake of RE5, other pharmaceutical companies are sending their own mercenaries into hotzones to collect data on T-virus, las plaga, and ourobouros. The multiplayer matches have the zombies as more of an environmental hazard, as they won’t harass you unless provoked or the enemy team sabotages your zombie stealth gadget. It is blatantly wanting to be a tactical shooter like Rainbow 6, with the level of movement and maps that encourage finding hidey-holes. If it had more than a year’s development time maybe it could have had a niche market like Valve’s Evolve.
The single-player mode drops you into these multiplayer maps and just has you fight the zombies while doing the same objectives from the multiplayer mode. There is a thin thread of narrative of you playing a character who is a clone/son/successor to Hunk being put through combat trials to test new zombie killing weapons. It is vaguely implied that the company you work for is being run by a returned Wesker. Or maybe it's a clone of Wesker. It may also be Krauser, or Saddler, or Spencer. It doesn’t matter, I learned too late that this game is no longer canon.
I won’t mince words. This game sucks. This game really sucks. This game sucks big, floppy, venereal diseased dicks bathed in the river of excrement from the eighth Circle of Hell. I rarely wish true ill on anyone, but I hope that each member of this game’s development team watches at least a single loved one melt before their eyes. Who the fuck decided that you can only take 3 hits before dying in maps that spawn five dogs that can swarm you in seconds? Who THE FUCK decided that wasn’t enough and each map also needed a super zombie that can one shot you with ridiculous hitboxes and requires multiple clips to kill? Why do enemies keep spawning behind me with no tells? Why do I have to keep doing missions with just one clip of ammo?
Countless times I was so near to victory, when suddenly I was ganked by a zombie that went 0 to 60 after spotting me across the map. Countless times I was in a good spot when a crow swooped from the heavens and pecked out half my health bar. I got so mad that I bit into my thumb and drew blood. No game has drawn the iron price from me. I one-hundred percented this game, even the optional objectives, so that it would hold no future power over me.
Much like how Resident Evil 1 Remake was one of the best games I’ve played, Umbrella Corps is one of the worst. It would not improve on an experience of me holding a controller and staring at a blank screen for six hours.

Revelations 2 feels like the franchise floundering to recapture the fans alienated by the post RE5 games.
"Look, we brought back Claire. We borrowed motifs from Code Veronica and Zero. We brought in a new Wesker. We made it scary again. We even brought back Barry Goddamn Burton and reference all his memey dialogue from RE1."
The issue is the game is just kinda dull?
I'll admit this is a scarier than previous fair, but it's gross-out horror more often than not. All the scare sequences just make me think of when the weird kid in class would spit on his hand, then try to chase you down to touch you with it.
It's biggest innovation is some interesting puzzle combat. Barry arrives to his campaign armed to the teeth, so he doesn't need to worry too much about scrounging for resources, so the game compensates with trickier enemies. His most common foe is a new take on Regenerators that only go down when a particular weakspot is shot, but Barry can't see where that weakspot it. His partner, a little psychic girl named Natalia, can. So those combat encounters involve swapping to Natalia to assess the situation, then back to Barry to unleash the lead. It may sound tedious, but it works really well in execution, especially once they start mixing in these invisible insectoids that slowly chase you down.
Claire's campaign doesn't have any of these nifty encounters and is pretty straight-forward copy of RE4 mechanics. The issue with Claire's campaign is her partner is Moira Burton. Moira is a teenager written by a 50 year old sailor trying to be hip. The shit that comes out of her mouth would make the writers of Riverdale envious. Not a single combat encounter goes by without Moira screaming how the monsters can get fucked, shit-on, or bent.
She is. The Female Steve Burnside.
I never see RE Fans talk about this one and I can see why. It's not bad, just enduringly meh.

Operation Raccoon City is not a good game. It's riddled with bugs and reeks of a rushed development cycle. It's a sort of bizarre side-story to the events of RE2 & 3 where we're led to believe Leon and Jill were having frequent encounters with bands of armed Umbrella and US special agents.
It's a class-based 4 player game and as such probably falls into the vein of "fun with friends." Playing with AI means to play alone because the AI is braindead and on more than one occasion I caught them unloading their ammo into the adjacent wall.
To be honest, the game rides at about the C-tier for most of the missions because they're fairly inoffensive. It's fun to shoot hordes of zombies with automatic weapons and these are some gooey, destructible, zombies. It's the same enjoyment I'd get out of a Dynasty Warriors game. But the moment the game pits you against human foes with automatic weapons the game drops to the garbage tier.
Counter to your companions, the enemy AI is capable of placing a bullet between the buttcheeks of a flea at 50 meters.
A level will be going fine and then demand you progress down a hallway with no cover where 7 guys at the other end are doing alternating hails of bullets. Your health melts the moment you expose yourself in these sections and the game would only be a third as long if not for these roadblocks. It doesn't feel quality assured in any way. Dropping the difficulty did nothing to alleviate these sections and I wound up playing most of my time as the class with unlimited grenades, or the class that could turn invisible and run by all the dudes with guns
THAT ALL SAID, Operation Raccoon City panders very hard to RE3 fans especially, which I appreciate. You do whacky shit like orchestrate a conflict between Mr. X and Nemesis, operate the railgun from the end of 3, and potentially gun down Leon Kennedy and Claire Redfield. It's fanservice on fanservice and I feel quite serviced.
The environments are pretty moody and would be good in a better designed game. The sewer level has a great gimmick of there being low light so you have to chuck flares, which only illuminate how surrounded by zombies you are.
The game is bad, but it doesn't feel ill-conceived.
I spent most of the play time alternating between intrigue and ambivalence as even the frustrating parts slowly wore away into just something to expect. Maybe it's stockholm syndrome, but I'm not disappointed I played it

Resident Evil Revelations is a better RE5 than RE5. Heck, it may be a better RE4 as well since it feels more like a sequel to the original trilogy. The story here is the same global conspiracy of the last couple RE games and movies, but here they actually establish all the players at the start and invest you in said conspiracy. The story isn't perfect, there's multiple fakeouts involving identical cruise ships and a C-Plot involving two characters named Jackass and Grinder, but there's also a good moody atmosphere and A+ creature design. You actually get to see Jill and Chris work as partners and the new cast gets some likeable shine on them. It turns out the first head of the BSAA was Columbo.
Combat is a run and gun shooter where you're scouring the environment for weapon upgrades more than you are ammo or heals. This is an RE game with no inventory management or save pressure and it works quite well. There's no sacrificing the tense atmosphere or combat pressure even though it's easier to shotgun a beast in the gizzard.
Honestly wish I had played this back on the 3DS where it initially released. I find it hard to imagine such a game running on that. Runtime was under 6 hours, but it still feels dense and satisfying.

Resident Evil 5 is antithetical to anything that I enjoyed about Resident Evil. It is not a survival horror, but a struggle horror where disparate game design ideas and tone clash impotently until the game turns into a soup of particle worms. Chris Redfield punching a big magma boulder is the standout moment of this game strictly because it is the one moment of comedy in an otherwise joyless and pough-faced slog.
If I had to play this without a friend it would somehow be even lower because the prospect of having to do some of these sections with a 2009 AI partner sounds nightmarish

Finally one of these Resident Evil lightgun games is an on-rails arcade shooter. I really wish I could have played this as intended on the Wii, but I think I made do with an emulator + mouse & keyboard. What you get here is a retelling of RE Zero, RE1, and RE3, each with additional scenarios showing untold stories of those games. Wesker escaping the mansion before it explodes, Ada escaping Raccoon City before it explodes, Rebecca's actions bridging Zero and RE1. It's some nice bonus stories because the retellings are pretty paired down.
The most egregious is RE3's levels which don't actually recreate any environments from 3 and instead reuse areas wholly from the Outbreak games, and not even the levels in Outbreak that are sourced from RE3. It's a version of RE3 where the game ends at the Police Department and Nemesis only shows up at the very end and sounds like a robot. Booooo.
There's a secret bonus campaign showing Umbrella's final days as Chris and Jill assault their final fortress in Russia. It's at this point that the game throws every non-zombie enemy in fat waves at you. I am no longer scared of hunter or lickers because this game had me slay 20 each just to walk down a hallway. They even reuse the bat boss from RE0.
There's a new Umbrella executive, Colonel Vladimir, who likes to lick knives. He's allegedly Wesker's nemesis in the company and works alongside the Red Queen AI, which I've been told is a character from the movies?
It was at this point that I was glad this was the end of Umbrella because they're no longer compelling villains. They were so much more threatening when they were a cold corporation looking to make a buck with dark experiments, but so much backstory has been laid upon them, with so many insane researchers and soldiers, that they're now a weird hybrid of eugenicists, PMC, intelligence agency, cult, and leech wizards.
As a lightgun game Umbrella Chronicles is fun. Your pistol has unlimited ammo, but you can scour the surroundings for additional weapons and heals, usually by destroying furniture. All the environments are destructible and it's oddly satisfying to blow up these familiar locations. Weapons are upgradable with the points you earn from ranks and eventually you can get every weapons with unlimited ammo.
Boss fights are annoying because they're based around targeting weakpoints and the camera just won't stay still on them for you to do any meaningful damage. The Plant 42 fight is especially awful.
If there's a standout mission it's the Umbrella Chronicles take on the 4th Survivor mission from RE2. Here Hunk's bloody escape from the RPD is overlayed with radio broadcasts from the desperate and dying citizens of Raccoon City.
If I wasn't so nostalgic for lightgun shooters I'd probably be harsher on it.

I have an RE4 hot take: Ashley is not a problem, I like her presence in the game and story.
For years I've heard people bitching about the game being a long escort mission and what a pain Ashley is, and now that I've played it my feelings are "what a bunch of babies"
I think it shows how strapped people are to find things to complain about the game. It's a game where organizing inventory is fun, how does that happen??
My main issues are the story is pretty paper thin (Krauser shows up and acts like he's been present the entire game, also that I'm supposed to know who he is), and too much time is spent in the castle.
Pretty good game.

This game is so stupid. US Agent Bruce Mcgivern is called on to track down Dr. Morpheus D. Duval, who's extorting China and the US to the tune of 5 Billion dollarinos. Bruce looks and sounds like the Tiger King and his love interest is Ada Wong Fongling, a Chinese agent who, the moment she even thinks about betraying China, is targeted by an orbital satellite laser.
Morpheus turns into a super tyrant, which for some reason gives him organic high heels and a rockin set of tits. The fight between him and Bruce plays out like an MGS battle. When defeated, Morpheus explodes, killing everyone....until the post credits reveal Bruce and Fongling survived in a convenient, not established submarine.
The game-play isn't too shabby, better than the last survivor game because it's actually designed like a light gun game where you have to target weak points and stuff, but the game almost doesn't matter because I was just rushing between areas to see the next cutscene.

RE0 is fine. Just fine. Other than the train, the environments are very standard for the series. Another mansion, another lab. It would all feel so safe if not for some head-scratching design decisions.
The lack of an item box means you're constantly shuttling your stuff between areas so you have it all on hand. A lot of the new enemies (the zombie apes, the leech men) take and deal a lot of damage. The last area introduces a frog that will eat your character if the other isn't around to save them. There's an awful bat boss fight.
I don't feel the game really justifies the two characters gimmick. It's neat to have someone around, but there aren't many puzzles or even bosses that utilize the feature in an interesting way.
The story is....odd. The villain is a clone of an old man made of leeches that controls other leeches through opera (but only in the train level?) He looks, and talks, like a finally fantasy villain, and his old and young versions have wildly different accents.
That said, I like the dynamic of Billy and Rebecca and I think they carry the game just fine. I find it very implausible that Rebecca went through all this 24 hours before the events of RE1 and reverted back to helpless rookie.
Honestly, I think the premise is fine, just not as a prequel. I didn't need an answer for how the Spencer mansion got infested, and I certainly didn't expect the answer to be "A man made of leeches did it."
Ultimately I think the game is just kinda forgettable.