The only thing I really knew about this game going in was that it’s considered an excellent return to form for the Resident Evil series. As someone who loves the classic RE games I was of course very excited to play this one and had pretty high expectations. This is definitely a good and at times truly excellent game that unfortunately fails to live up to the survival horror standards set by classic resident evil. The atmosphere, writing, and environmental design is top notch throughout the entirety of RE7, but it’s ultimately let down by hollow survival mechanics and level design that starts off great but quickly declines in quality.
Let’s start with what this game does well. This is a beautifully designed game from a visual standpoint. I love the mostly grounded approach taken in regard to the environments, which makes the Baker property feel like a real place. The spookiness of the environments is also nicely restrained and mostly shies away from over the top creepiness. We’re not immediately confronted with pagan shrines made of human bones or piles of headless dolls the second we walk into the house. When we do see things like this, it’s generally in areas that are hard to access, making it feel like we’ve stumbled upon a dark secret in the bowels of the Baker estate. The trappings of a pleasant domestic life can still be seen throughout the entirety of the house just now with the obvious sickness and decay brought about by the mold. This sort of realism adds to the creepiness of the environments and plays in nicely with the tragedy of the Bakers being a normal and kind-hearted family unit before being infected.
Writing in this game is also excellent. The overarching plot is fairly standard for a Resident Evil game but is delivered very effectively. The game sets up the mystery surrounding Mia’s disappearance and what exactly is happening at the Baker house very early on and then slowly reveals details about this as the game progresses. This all works really well in RE7 and keeps the player invested up until the very end of the game. Dialogue is also fantastic and while playing into various horror cliches is genuinely creepy as opposed to campy and funny, which fits the serious tone of the game well. This game also subtly invokes themes of abuse and intergenerational trauma with the relationships between the infected Baker family, which is a level of subtextual depth I didn’t expect from a Resident Evil game. I’ll let players discover this subtext for themselves, but it pops up all over the place - even with something as simple as the infection being labeled the Mold. Actual mold is an insidious and hidden toxin that eats away at homes and is sometimes invoked as a symbol for a hidden sickness eating away at the heart of a family unit in various pieces of media. The Virgin Suicides is an example that comes to mind where the physical rotting away of a house is symbolically used in this way. People who have a more academic understanding of abusive family dynamics could probably give some truly creative and insightful readings of this game.
On to the bad, which mostly concerns the level design and gameplay systems in RE7. Level design starts out great in the first two areas of the game - the guest house and the truly excellent main house and then slowly degrades in quality from there. The main house is very open, which allows for varied route selection and plenty of options when it comes to evading Jack Baker or the Molded. It’s also a blast to explore with different rooms being visually distinct and memorable. There’s also a tremendous feeling of tension due to the constant stalking of Jack Baker, who poses a legitimate threat to players due to Ethan being rather weak and ill-equipped at this point. Gameplay and balancing actually works really well in this level, but this unfortunately isn’t the case for the rest of the game.
As the game progresses level design becomes increasingly linear and visually repetitive. The Old House is pretty open and exploring it is propped up by the tension involved in avoiding the powerful Magueritte, but the rooms are visually very bland. The testing facility is entirely linear and only kept entertaining by the challenge of looking out for traps. This all comes to a head with the dreadful mine level, which is essentially a linear enemy gauntlet where the player is showered with resources and highly encouraged to fight every enemy. The music ramps up at this point but you’ll probably end up strolling through the level and easily blowing Molded to bits with your shotgun.
Gameplay mechanics and balance in RE7 is also deeply flawed. Due to the game’s top notch presentation and horror atmosphere as well it’s excellently designed early levels this isn’t noticeable at first but becomes increasingly obvious as the player progresses. On the surface the gameplay in RE7 is largely a modern adaptation of classic Resident Evil gameplay consisting of puzzles, exploration, route selection, item management, and combat. All of this, however, is undone by the balance in RE7, which is all wrong for a survival horror game. On normal difficulty resources in this game are more plentiful than almost any other Resident Evil game. I didn’t try too hard to conserve resources in RE7, and I was never hurting for ammo or healing items. Even the action oriented RE games have stricter item balancing than this. By the time I got to the Old House my item box had accumulated more supplies than I could ever need, and the tension needed for a survival horror game evaporated immediately as a result. This issue is compounded by RE7 not scaling the difficulty of encounters with the strength of the player. There are quite literally four enemy types in this game and none of them are remotely threatening once you get the shotgun and flamethrower, which happens relatively early on in the game. The lack of enemy variety is (to my surprise) a very intentional design choice on the part of the developers, who didn’t want a menagerie of different monsters to draw attention away from the Baker family. I understand the reasoning behind this, but I think this was the wrong decision. The Baker family, who really are threatening from a gameplay perspective, stop pursuing the player by the halfway point and therefore can’t be used to increase late game difficulty. Once they’re out of the picture, you’re left with three very similar enemy types to carry the rest of the game, and they unfortunately fail to do so. The save system in this game also serves to lessen the tension once you realize how it works. In the vein of classic Resident Evil there are safe rooms with item boxes and save points, which now have unlimited uses. When I first started playing I thought this would be like classic RE where saving and needing to potentially backtrack past enemies to save would be a strategic and tension building mechanic due to the risk of losing progress if you die. Instead, RE7 uses a very generous checkpoint system. This eliminates the purpose of the save point as anything other than a quality of life feature for players who want to go back and play a specific section again or go for a different ending. This lack of tension and difficultly is compounded by increasingly bland level design, which makes the last half of this game a kind to a slog to get through.
Playing RE7 felt like walking through a really high budget haunted house. The atmosphere and theming is great and initially creates genuine tension and some really scary moments. However the longer you stay there, the less affect this atmosphere has, and you begin to realize that there’s little more aside from it on display. Maybe you touch a prop and can feel that it’s actually made of rubber or instead of cowering from an actor you stare them down and are reminded of the reality that they can’t actually touch you. You’re no longer immersed in the experience and now walking through the haunted house becomes nothing more than a scenic tour through a very well themed environment. Similarly, the longer I played RE7 the less effect it’s truly stellar atmosphere and writing had on me, and I quickly realized that the game didn’t have much else to offer past the first few levels.
This is overall an enjoyable game and one I would certainly recommend for people who are curious to try out. There are things about this game that are truly fantastic. I just wish the gameplay on offer was as strong as the writing and atmosphere.
postscript: having now played every mainline RE game and remake, I’ve come to the conclusion that this is definitely the most disappointing for me. I can’t exaggerate just how fantastic the early levels of this game are in basically every way. If the entire game kept up this pace this would be in contention for the best RE game IMO. Just a shame that’s not the game we got because the potential was definitely there.
Let’s start with what this game does well. This is a beautifully designed game from a visual standpoint. I love the mostly grounded approach taken in regard to the environments, which makes the Baker property feel like a real place. The spookiness of the environments is also nicely restrained and mostly shies away from over the top creepiness. We’re not immediately confronted with pagan shrines made of human bones or piles of headless dolls the second we walk into the house. When we do see things like this, it’s generally in areas that are hard to access, making it feel like we’ve stumbled upon a dark secret in the bowels of the Baker estate. The trappings of a pleasant domestic life can still be seen throughout the entirety of the house just now with the obvious sickness and decay brought about by the mold. This sort of realism adds to the creepiness of the environments and plays in nicely with the tragedy of the Bakers being a normal and kind-hearted family unit before being infected.
Writing in this game is also excellent. The overarching plot is fairly standard for a Resident Evil game but is delivered very effectively. The game sets up the mystery surrounding Mia’s disappearance and what exactly is happening at the Baker house very early on and then slowly reveals details about this as the game progresses. This all works really well in RE7 and keeps the player invested up until the very end of the game. Dialogue is also fantastic and while playing into various horror cliches is genuinely creepy as opposed to campy and funny, which fits the serious tone of the game well. This game also subtly invokes themes of abuse and intergenerational trauma with the relationships between the infected Baker family, which is a level of subtextual depth I didn’t expect from a Resident Evil game. I’ll let players discover this subtext for themselves, but it pops up all over the place - even with something as simple as the infection being labeled the Mold. Actual mold is an insidious and hidden toxin that eats away at homes and is sometimes invoked as a symbol for a hidden sickness eating away at the heart of a family unit in various pieces of media. The Virgin Suicides is an example that comes to mind where the physical rotting away of a house is symbolically used in this way. People who have a more academic understanding of abusive family dynamics could probably give some truly creative and insightful readings of this game.
On to the bad, which mostly concerns the level design and gameplay systems in RE7. Level design starts out great in the first two areas of the game - the guest house and the truly excellent main house and then slowly degrades in quality from there. The main house is very open, which allows for varied route selection and plenty of options when it comes to evading Jack Baker or the Molded. It’s also a blast to explore with different rooms being visually distinct and memorable. There’s also a tremendous feeling of tension due to the constant stalking of Jack Baker, who poses a legitimate threat to players due to Ethan being rather weak and ill-equipped at this point. Gameplay and balancing actually works really well in this level, but this unfortunately isn’t the case for the rest of the game.
As the game progresses level design becomes increasingly linear and visually repetitive. The Old House is pretty open and exploring it is propped up by the tension involved in avoiding the powerful Magueritte, but the rooms are visually very bland. The testing facility is entirely linear and only kept entertaining by the challenge of looking out for traps. This all comes to a head with the dreadful mine level, which is essentially a linear enemy gauntlet where the player is showered with resources and highly encouraged to fight every enemy. The music ramps up at this point but you’ll probably end up strolling through the level and easily blowing Molded to bits with your shotgun.
Gameplay mechanics and balance in RE7 is also deeply flawed. Due to the game’s top notch presentation and horror atmosphere as well it’s excellently designed early levels this isn’t noticeable at first but becomes increasingly obvious as the player progresses. On the surface the gameplay in RE7 is largely a modern adaptation of classic Resident Evil gameplay consisting of puzzles, exploration, route selection, item management, and combat. All of this, however, is undone by the balance in RE7, which is all wrong for a survival horror game. On normal difficulty resources in this game are more plentiful than almost any other Resident Evil game. I didn’t try too hard to conserve resources in RE7, and I was never hurting for ammo or healing items. Even the action oriented RE games have stricter item balancing than this. By the time I got to the Old House my item box had accumulated more supplies than I could ever need, and the tension needed for a survival horror game evaporated immediately as a result. This issue is compounded by RE7 not scaling the difficulty of encounters with the strength of the player. There are quite literally four enemy types in this game and none of them are remotely threatening once you get the shotgun and flamethrower, which happens relatively early on in the game. The lack of enemy variety is (to my surprise) a very intentional design choice on the part of the developers, who didn’t want a menagerie of different monsters to draw attention away from the Baker family. I understand the reasoning behind this, but I think this was the wrong decision. The Baker family, who really are threatening from a gameplay perspective, stop pursuing the player by the halfway point and therefore can’t be used to increase late game difficulty. Once they’re out of the picture, you’re left with three very similar enemy types to carry the rest of the game, and they unfortunately fail to do so. The save system in this game also serves to lessen the tension once you realize how it works. In the vein of classic Resident Evil there are safe rooms with item boxes and save points, which now have unlimited uses. When I first started playing I thought this would be like classic RE where saving and needing to potentially backtrack past enemies to save would be a strategic and tension building mechanic due to the risk of losing progress if you die. Instead, RE7 uses a very generous checkpoint system. This eliminates the purpose of the save point as anything other than a quality of life feature for players who want to go back and play a specific section again or go for a different ending. This lack of tension and difficultly is compounded by increasingly bland level design, which makes the last half of this game a kind to a slog to get through.
Playing RE7 felt like walking through a really high budget haunted house. The atmosphere and theming is great and initially creates genuine tension and some really scary moments. However the longer you stay there, the less affect this atmosphere has, and you begin to realize that there’s little more aside from it on display. Maybe you touch a prop and can feel that it’s actually made of rubber or instead of cowering from an actor you stare them down and are reminded of the reality that they can’t actually touch you. You’re no longer immersed in the experience and now walking through the haunted house becomes nothing more than a scenic tour through a very well themed environment. Similarly, the longer I played RE7 the less effect it’s truly stellar atmosphere and writing had on me, and I quickly realized that the game didn’t have much else to offer past the first few levels.
This is overall an enjoyable game and one I would certainly recommend for people who are curious to try out. There are things about this game that are truly fantastic. I just wish the gameplay on offer was as strong as the writing and atmosphere.
postscript: having now played every mainline RE game and remake, I’ve come to the conclusion that this is definitely the most disappointing for me. I can’t exaggerate just how fantastic the early levels of this game are in basically every way. If the entire game kept up this pace this would be in contention for the best RE game IMO. Just a shame that’s not the game we got because the potential was definitely there.