Alright, fuck. I was wrong. Sometimes you do get it perfect on your first try.
Of course, this is pretty far removed from the original release of Resident Evil; it’s a remaster of a remake of Resident Evil with plenty of bits shuffled around and new mechanics stretched overtop. Still, though, these new trappings are just a couple extra layers of flesh. This is Resident Evil deep in the marrow of its bones. Slow, shuffling zombies taking up just too much space in cramped corridors, creaky floors, doors that fall apart, giant man-eating plants and a very silly conspiracy centered around the most obviously evil man alive that nobody suspects until he reveals himself at the end; this is what you ought to be thinking of when someone says the phrase “survival horror” around you.
It’s been an open secret for quite a while (even if Shinji Mikami refused to acknowledge it for decades) that this game is more-or-less a Japanese take on 1992’s Alone in the Dark; same creepy mansion, same spooky monsters, same arcane puzzles, same unconventional camera angles that obscure the action to throw the player off. It’s all present here, just as it was about four years before the original Resident Evil dropped; what sets (and continues to set) Resident Evil apart, however, is entirely in how it constructs an atmosphere. Unlike how Alone in the Dark had Edward Carnby slapping the shit out of every zombie he came across like that one Sonic video, Resident Evil plays the whole thing much more reservedly. This game is tense, and deep, and fucking scary. I sat awake late in bed one night after playing, trying to come up with a safe route through the mansion, and getting progressively more and more panicked when I realized just how few options I actually had. This was after I had stopped playing for the night. Resident Evil sticks to your insides. It goes down hard and it refuses to digest easily. You will play on its terms, and it will kill you anyway.
I wasn’t especially hot on the game by the time I’d finished Jill Mansion 1. I was constantly getting lost, constantly getting bogged down by too many inventory items, constantly failing to figure out what I even needed to do to make any progress. I kept drawing unfavorable comparisons to my beloved Silent Hill: why can’t I carry all this ammo at once? Why can’t I have unlimited slots for key items? Why can’t the map give me some information as to what the rooms actually are instead of just giving me unlabelled floor plans? I knew it was all intentional, but there was something about the execution that felt sloppy. I understood it, but I didn’t really get it, if that makes any sense.
The minute I gained access to the courtyard, though, I felt something click. Maybe it was just getting a moment outside on the most linear path imaginable that gave me a much-needed break to clear my head. I cleaned out the area, blitzed through the puzzles, broke Lisa Trevor’s ankles like she was Wesley Johnson screening Harden, and walked right back into the mansion like I owned the place. The hunters spawned in, giving me more than enough incentive to start spending all of the ammo I’d been hoarding, and I realized just how much easier I could have made the early game on myself once I killed every single one of them and still had buckets of grenades and shotgun shells to spare. Don’t let the speedrunning, invisible-enemies, knife-only people trick you; you’ve gotta play this game carefully, but you really don’t need to be that careful.
The big trick of it all was that I’d fallen entirely for the brutal design of the mansion and allowed my nerves to muck up my decision-making. Every zombie I’d encountered took so many bullets to go down, and other zombies would stumble in from the other rooms, and some of them would even get back up stronger than ever if I forgot to burn the bodies. I put my pistol away and sprinted through the rooms and just prayed I wouldn’t get grabbed around a corner. That was all a part of the trick, though; it’s actually shockingly easy and reliable to kill just about every zombie in the game so long as you’re careful about how you budget your resources. It’s the layout of the mansion on your first go that fucks you up; all of the obfuscatory angles and hallways that lead to locked doors and dead ends that loop around on themselves with a zombie blocking the only way back. The architect must have been an axe murderer. It’s an evil fucking residence, hence the title. When you finally have your Kevin McCallister “I’m not afraid anymore!” moment, you realize that the zombies can only hurt you if you let them. The second half of the Kevin McCallister moment where he runs and screams and hides under the covers comes when a hunter pounces on you from behind and you remember that you are, in fact, still incredibly afraid.
I beat the game with newfound confidence, immediately booted it back up as Chris, and breezed through the first part of the mansion in a fraction of the time it had originally taken me. I cleared out all of the rooms, stuffed my pockets with items, burned every corpse I left, and found myself with more green herbs sitting in my item box within the first hour than I could ever possibly use before credits rolled. The design wasn't sloppy, I was just playing it wrong. I wasn't engaging with enough of the game's systems; I had all of these tools that were provided to me, and I cowered against Resident Evil's glare. What I should have done was square my shoulders and fight back, and never once did that click for me on my first trip through the mansion. Going back through it as Chris proved that idea: all I needed to do was not be so afraid.
Horror as a genre has something of an inherent problem to it, where that sense of fear is often wholly dependent on surprise. This isn't to imply that it's all reliant on jump scares, but a scary movie is always going to be the same every time you go through it. You can be shit-your-pants terrified on your first watch, but pop the same film in again and you'll start anticipating the moments that got you the last time around. This is a big part of the reason why a lot of people like to "beat" horror media; they laugh, they rewatch, they dissect it and break it down, because horror is a lot less scary once we understand it. Rather than passively accept this, though, the Resident Evil team leans into it. You stumble through the game once, groping at the walls and frantically checking every doorknob in the hopes that you accidentally discover progression. You boot it up for the second time, and you turn into Arnold Schwarzenegger. You know where the zombies are, you know where the items are, you know how many you can afford to kill in a given moment, you know how to juke around zombies and make them grab air instead of you. People lament the loss of this type of survival horror game and how something like Resident Evil 4 completely actionized the franchise, but that wasn't a move that came out of nowhere.
It starts here. It's genius.
Chris in this looks kind of like a very sad monkey with a bad haircut and I laugh a little whenever he gets a dramatic close-up.
Of course, this is pretty far removed from the original release of Resident Evil; it’s a remaster of a remake of Resident Evil with plenty of bits shuffled around and new mechanics stretched overtop. Still, though, these new trappings are just a couple extra layers of flesh. This is Resident Evil deep in the marrow of its bones. Slow, shuffling zombies taking up just too much space in cramped corridors, creaky floors, doors that fall apart, giant man-eating plants and a very silly conspiracy centered around the most obviously evil man alive that nobody suspects until he reveals himself at the end; this is what you ought to be thinking of when someone says the phrase “survival horror” around you.
It’s been an open secret for quite a while (even if Shinji Mikami refused to acknowledge it for decades) that this game is more-or-less a Japanese take on 1992’s Alone in the Dark; same creepy mansion, same spooky monsters, same arcane puzzles, same unconventional camera angles that obscure the action to throw the player off. It’s all present here, just as it was about four years before the original Resident Evil dropped; what sets (and continues to set) Resident Evil apart, however, is entirely in how it constructs an atmosphere. Unlike how Alone in the Dark had Edward Carnby slapping the shit out of every zombie he came across like that one Sonic video, Resident Evil plays the whole thing much more reservedly. This game is tense, and deep, and fucking scary. I sat awake late in bed one night after playing, trying to come up with a safe route through the mansion, and getting progressively more and more panicked when I realized just how few options I actually had. This was after I had stopped playing for the night. Resident Evil sticks to your insides. It goes down hard and it refuses to digest easily. You will play on its terms, and it will kill you anyway.
I wasn’t especially hot on the game by the time I’d finished Jill Mansion 1. I was constantly getting lost, constantly getting bogged down by too many inventory items, constantly failing to figure out what I even needed to do to make any progress. I kept drawing unfavorable comparisons to my beloved Silent Hill: why can’t I carry all this ammo at once? Why can’t I have unlimited slots for key items? Why can’t the map give me some information as to what the rooms actually are instead of just giving me unlabelled floor plans? I knew it was all intentional, but there was something about the execution that felt sloppy. I understood it, but I didn’t really get it, if that makes any sense.
The minute I gained access to the courtyard, though, I felt something click. Maybe it was just getting a moment outside on the most linear path imaginable that gave me a much-needed break to clear my head. I cleaned out the area, blitzed through the puzzles, broke Lisa Trevor’s ankles like she was Wesley Johnson screening Harden, and walked right back into the mansion like I owned the place. The hunters spawned in, giving me more than enough incentive to start spending all of the ammo I’d been hoarding, and I realized just how much easier I could have made the early game on myself once I killed every single one of them and still had buckets of grenades and shotgun shells to spare. Don’t let the speedrunning, invisible-enemies, knife-only people trick you; you’ve gotta play this game carefully, but you really don’t need to be that careful.
The big trick of it all was that I’d fallen entirely for the brutal design of the mansion and allowed my nerves to muck up my decision-making. Every zombie I’d encountered took so many bullets to go down, and other zombies would stumble in from the other rooms, and some of them would even get back up stronger than ever if I forgot to burn the bodies. I put my pistol away and sprinted through the rooms and just prayed I wouldn’t get grabbed around a corner. That was all a part of the trick, though; it’s actually shockingly easy and reliable to kill just about every zombie in the game so long as you’re careful about how you budget your resources. It’s the layout of the mansion on your first go that fucks you up; all of the obfuscatory angles and hallways that lead to locked doors and dead ends that loop around on themselves with a zombie blocking the only way back. The architect must have been an axe murderer. It’s an evil fucking residence, hence the title. When you finally have your Kevin McCallister “I’m not afraid anymore!” moment, you realize that the zombies can only hurt you if you let them. The second half of the Kevin McCallister moment where he runs and screams and hides under the covers comes when a hunter pounces on you from behind and you remember that you are, in fact, still incredibly afraid.
I beat the game with newfound confidence, immediately booted it back up as Chris, and breezed through the first part of the mansion in a fraction of the time it had originally taken me. I cleared out all of the rooms, stuffed my pockets with items, burned every corpse I left, and found myself with more green herbs sitting in my item box within the first hour than I could ever possibly use before credits rolled. The design wasn't sloppy, I was just playing it wrong. I wasn't engaging with enough of the game's systems; I had all of these tools that were provided to me, and I cowered against Resident Evil's glare. What I should have done was square my shoulders and fight back, and never once did that click for me on my first trip through the mansion. Going back through it as Chris proved that idea: all I needed to do was not be so afraid.
Horror as a genre has something of an inherent problem to it, where that sense of fear is often wholly dependent on surprise. This isn't to imply that it's all reliant on jump scares, but a scary movie is always going to be the same every time you go through it. You can be shit-your-pants terrified on your first watch, but pop the same film in again and you'll start anticipating the moments that got you the last time around. This is a big part of the reason why a lot of people like to "beat" horror media; they laugh, they rewatch, they dissect it and break it down, because horror is a lot less scary once we understand it. Rather than passively accept this, though, the Resident Evil team leans into it. You stumble through the game once, groping at the walls and frantically checking every doorknob in the hopes that you accidentally discover progression. You boot it up for the second time, and you turn into Arnold Schwarzenegger. You know where the zombies are, you know where the items are, you know how many you can afford to kill in a given moment, you know how to juke around zombies and make them grab air instead of you. People lament the loss of this type of survival horror game and how something like Resident Evil 4 completely actionized the franchise, but that wasn't a move that came out of nowhere.
It starts here. It's genius.
Chris in this looks kind of like a very sad monkey with a bad haircut and I laugh a little whenever he gets a dramatic close-up.