Thinking back on it, this is one of very few games I can even still remember that I started playing when I was younger but just gave up on because it was too hard. It was probably some ten or so years ago that I tried playing the American Director’s Cut version of RE1, but I ended up giving up after being completely stonewalled by the first boss. Now admittedly, this game is a slightly easier version (it has auto-aim, enemies are a bit weaker, and you get 1 more ribbon per pile of ink ribbons), but I was definitely happy with how I was finally able to best a game that had stumped younger me (even it’s not exactly an all-time favorite). I wanted to play at least one spoopy game this October, and I ended up being able to beat this one in the one day I figured it’d take me. I even managed to play through the whole thing with the weird ASCII RE1 PS1 controller I got that inspired me to give this game another try in the first place x3. It took me about 10 or so hours (in-game time being just a hair under 8 hours) to beat the Japanese version of the game on real hardware, and I got the best ending with Jill.
Biohazard 1 is a well known story by now to pretty much anyone reading this review. After mysterious monster attacks in the rural American town of Raccoon City, the STARS special forces team is sent to investigate. After Bravo team mysteriously disappears, your unit is sent in after them, and they flee inside the mysterious Spencer Mansion to escape the monstrous dogs that attack them after their initial helicopter landing. It’s up to Jill (or Chris, if you decide to play his harder route), to explore the mansion and survive all of the monsters and zombies out to get them! It’s a cute story that’s aged pretty well. The English voice acting still has that campy fun, and it’s a delightful homage to old American horror B-movies. It’s hardly high art, of course, but it’s a fun story with twists and turns that accomplishes more or less exactly what it sets out to do.
Mechanically, it’s the dawn of survival horror as we know it so well today. Lots of pre-rendered environments for your character to run around in with their tank controls, clunky combat, inventory management, and puzzle solving. While the better auto-aim in this version definitely made the clunky combat a lot easier to bare (and the relative abundance of ammo and health making Jill’s route at least not too difficult overall if you play smartly), the inventory management absolutely did my head in XP. SO much walking back and forth between storage boxes and safe rooms, even with the enemies in the way taken care of, the loading screens between rooms (charming door opening effects or no) take up SUCH a significant amount of the playtime in RE1. It’s a remarkably good effort for a game effectively founding the genre it’s in, particularly in little way like the game telling you that you’ve opened every door a key can open (and giving you the opportunity to throw it away right then), but the at this point iconic inventory management system of this game is definitely as much of an obstacle as it ever was to playing it these days.
As far as its presentation goes, this game still looks quite nice for such an early (March ’96) PS1 game. The pre-rendered backgrounds look very nice, the character models are very expressive and well designed, and the monsters are really cool too. My only real complaint is that I wish interactable items were a bit better highlighted, as it’s a tad too easy to not realize the puzzle you’ve been stuck on for ages was all down to you not realizing you didn’t interact with a shelf in QUITE the right way to actually access what’s inside it. The sound design is also nice, with the music setting a really nice tone for the action at hand, whether that action is more spoopyful or action-y.
Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. There is absolutely still fun to be had with these old PS1 survival horror games, but being a genre so in its infancy, there’s still a lot of crap to deal with just as a result of where gaming was at the time. If you’re ready to meet the game where it’s at and deal with its clunkyness, this is still a relatively easy experience still worth playing, but if you’re not ready for that, it’s probably better looking elsewhere for your horror games. While I didn’t dislike my time with Biohazard 1, I didn’t exactly love it either, and it’s not something I have a ton of willingness to run out and grab other entries in. I liked it okay for what it is, and you very well might do as well~.
Biohazard 1 is a well known story by now to pretty much anyone reading this review. After mysterious monster attacks in the rural American town of Raccoon City, the STARS special forces team is sent to investigate. After Bravo team mysteriously disappears, your unit is sent in after them, and they flee inside the mysterious Spencer Mansion to escape the monstrous dogs that attack them after their initial helicopter landing. It’s up to Jill (or Chris, if you decide to play his harder route), to explore the mansion and survive all of the monsters and zombies out to get them! It’s a cute story that’s aged pretty well. The English voice acting still has that campy fun, and it’s a delightful homage to old American horror B-movies. It’s hardly high art, of course, but it’s a fun story with twists and turns that accomplishes more or less exactly what it sets out to do.
Mechanically, it’s the dawn of survival horror as we know it so well today. Lots of pre-rendered environments for your character to run around in with their tank controls, clunky combat, inventory management, and puzzle solving. While the better auto-aim in this version definitely made the clunky combat a lot easier to bare (and the relative abundance of ammo and health making Jill’s route at least not too difficult overall if you play smartly), the inventory management absolutely did my head in XP. SO much walking back and forth between storage boxes and safe rooms, even with the enemies in the way taken care of, the loading screens between rooms (charming door opening effects or no) take up SUCH a significant amount of the playtime in RE1. It’s a remarkably good effort for a game effectively founding the genre it’s in, particularly in little way like the game telling you that you’ve opened every door a key can open (and giving you the opportunity to throw it away right then), but the at this point iconic inventory management system of this game is definitely as much of an obstacle as it ever was to playing it these days.
As far as its presentation goes, this game still looks quite nice for such an early (March ’96) PS1 game. The pre-rendered backgrounds look very nice, the character models are very expressive and well designed, and the monsters are really cool too. My only real complaint is that I wish interactable items were a bit better highlighted, as it’s a tad too easy to not realize the puzzle you’ve been stuck on for ages was all down to you not realizing you didn’t interact with a shelf in QUITE the right way to actually access what’s inside it. The sound design is also nice, with the music setting a really nice tone for the action at hand, whether that action is more spoopyful or action-y.
Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. There is absolutely still fun to be had with these old PS1 survival horror games, but being a genre so in its infancy, there’s still a lot of crap to deal with just as a result of where gaming was at the time. If you’re ready to meet the game where it’s at and deal with its clunkyness, this is still a relatively easy experience still worth playing, but if you’re not ready for that, it’s probably better looking elsewhere for your horror games. While I didn’t dislike my time with Biohazard 1, I didn’t exactly love it either, and it’s not something I have a ton of willingness to run out and grab other entries in. I liked it okay for what it is, and you very well might do as well~.