Survival of Horror — Resident Evil 7: biohazard
Sometimes, you need to look in the mirror and rethink everything. If you’ve strayed too far, you have to reevaluate yourself. Only you can know if you’re on the right path for your life or not. However, if you’re a video game IP, not to worry: there are plenty of suits in an office that can make that decision for you, for better or worse!
Capcom was busy in this very same predicament following Resident Evil 6’s lukewarm reception. Despite having long legs that carried it, there was more to it than that. A mainline Resident Evil title getting an average of 6 or 7 isn’t really acceptable for a series that, up to that point, had a low point of about 80/100 on Metacritic. More than that, though, Capcom felt that Resident Evil 6 contributed to a lack of trust in the company, something they desperately wanted to earn back from its fans.
Thus, back in early 2014, Capcom went back to the drawing board. They needed something that was nearly the antithesis to Resident Evil 6; rather than a bombastic cinematic action game, they needed something truly scary to reel their fans back in. After all, it was slow-paced survival horror that had originally brought fans to the series back in the beginning, so it seemed smart to attempt that again. That said, it wouldn’t be enough to just do the same thing exactly. Capcom needed to keep things fresh so that it didn’t feel like a rehash to older players, while making something that could attract newer gamers as well.
If this sounds a lot like the sort of discussion that led to Resident Evil 4’s hard break from series lore, then you’d be right. The company needed another soft reboot that would allow the slate to be wiped clean for the most part. This way, they could focus on whatever story they wanted and allow old and new players to jump into something dark and terrifying all the same.
It would be a while before we would officially see the fruits of Capcom’s labor, though. In 2015, Capcom started to demo a first-person VR horror experience called Kitchen. It was a short experience that Capcom wanted to use to show off the power of Playstation VR, then called Project Morpheus. It seemed cool, but ultimately it flew a bit under the radar. VR wasn’t a big thing yet, but little did our foolish brains know that Capcom was hiding in plain sight with this one.
I still remember the day Resident Evil 7 was officially announced. E3 2016, Sony’s press conference. A nondescript trailer depicted someone in first person waking up and walking around a photorealistic, dilapidated old house after talking to someone on a phone warning him to get out immediately. After wandering through the trashed home, eventually the person finds a videotape next to a TV and VCR. Then, the actual trailer starts.
So far, I was laughing to myself. “Another VR horror walking simulator.” I had said out loud, my boyfriend playing a game beside me and not even paying attention. The trailer showed a bunch of what looked like found-footage and strange imagery, ending with a dark and slow rendition of the folk song “Aunt Rhody”. It ended with a man’s leg stepping forward into the headlight of a car as he stared toward the old house, with a bright orange VII flashing on screen. I was so confused, but as the rest of the scene faded to black, the VII was revealed to be nested into a very familiar logo: RESIDENT EVIL. When he heard me go “Uh, whaaaaaat?”, my boyfriend looked over to my computer monitor and his eyes widened. “Huh.”
It was such a stunning moment for us as long-time fans of the series. It looked… different from what we’d come to expect from Resident Evil over the past decade or so. Needless to say, I was utterly and completely enthralled from that moment on. Even better, Resident Evil 7: biohazard was only 7 months away, releasing in January. On top of that, they even had a demo ready for PlayStation Plus owners available that day. I could hardly believe all this happening at once!
Thus, the demo kicked off several mysteries. It was in the same house that the trailer took place in, a small chunk of a small house. Your objective upon waking up is to escape, but it always seemed to end with the player getting slugged in the face unconscious by a mysterious old man that was “welcoming him to the family”. It eventually turned out that the demo was updated a couple times throughout the time from its initial release until the release of the game itself. More and more of the demo was uncovered, and eventually it was possible to escape the house. The main reason to finish the demo was to unlock a Dirty Coin item, which would apparently be used in some way in the main game.
However, the first few months after the demo came out were a bit tumultuous. There was an axe that the player could pick up but do nothing with, and there were options in the menu about gun aiming, but the lack of weaponry or enemies quickly led to a bit of a war between people calling it “an Outlast clone” and people pointing out that you clearly get a weapon in-game and a gun in the main game, as pointed out in the options. Thankfully, most of that subsided with the demo updates adding a pistol with very limited ammo alongside more of the house to explore, as well as the actual release of the game.
Resident Evil 7 had one final ace up its sleeve: PlayStation VR support. The entire game, start to finish, was playable in VR. I didn’t have a VR headset at the time, so I didn’t mess with it, but since then I dabbled with it a little bit. What little I did was terrifying, but this time around I chose to play the entire game in VR and see if it changed my perception of the game. Or rather, I would have, if an unfortunate family emergency hadn’t kept me away from home for several weeks. Thus, I’ll be replaying this on my trusty laptop (and desktop when I get home)!
For critics, however, Resident Evil 7 was extremely well-received. Currently, it sits at a cozy 86/100 on OpenCritic, and it’s on the Capcom Platinum Titles page at 8.3m copies sold. This makes it the best-selling single SKU of the entire Resident Evil series, proving that they absolutely did something right. Whereas Resident Evil 6 had sales but middling reception, 7 ended up with both high praise and high sales. When I played it, I was in love with the mysterious new Louisiana setting and interesting story. Now, nearly four years later, it’s time to take another look and see what all the hype is about.
Resident Evil 7: biohazard — January 24th, 2017 (PS4, X1, PC, PSVR)
Version used for review: PC version, 2017
Warning: This review will spoil the entirety of Resident Evil 7!
Story
“Holy god, this is some horror movie bullshit!”
It would appear that Resident Evil 7 has some secrets to hide right from the start. We begin with a woman in a damp, dark room, looking over her video message to her husband, Ethan. She’s on a ship, excited to finally be coming back after a long-term babysitting job. We know it’s an old file because afterward, we see the woman recording a new message and she looks totally disheveled. She warns Ethan that she lied to him and that he needs to stay away from her at all costs.
We then see Ethan himself, driving along the road toward Dulvey, Louisiana. Apparently, his wife Mia recently sent him a note telling him that she was trapped there. Without thinking, Ethan immediately springs to action, heading there himself to save the woman he thought he lost three years ago. Upon finding the address, he finds little more than an old estate deep in the woods of the Louisiana bayou. Instead of being smart and immediately calling every officer within a 100 mile radius, Ethan ventures into the woods around the house, trying to find a way around the locked gate.
Here, he eventually drops down and finds the entrance to the very same guest house from the Beginning Hour demo! Once again, against my better instincts as a human being, I can’t stop Ethan from continuing into what is most certainly a trap. The moment he enters, the door slams shut and seems to be barred off from the outside. From here, a little investigation around the house leads him to a dark, dirty basement area where he eventually finds… Mia! His wife!
Waking her up, Ethan tells her that she’s been gone for three years, which seems to confuse her, before she starts to lead him through the basement in a panic, asking if anyone saw him. After all, “Daddy’s coming”. The practically inconsolable Mia swears that she doesn’t remember anything, or sending a letter, or being trapped for a full three years. It’s not long before Ethan and Mia are separated by something, or someone, dragging Mia off into the darkness of the guest house. Upon further exploration, Ethan finds Mia, but she’s something… different.
Super powerful and super angry, she tosses him around like a ragdoll, and it takes every ounce of strength not to be gutted by the knife in her hand. Instead, it goes through his hand. It only gets worse after Ethan finds an axe and apparently kills Mia with a swing to the jugular. A mysterious woman calls a phone in the guest house and tells Ethan to get out. Unfortunately, Mia is now missing.
It’s not long before she shows up with a screwdriver into Ethan’s hand though, and she pins him to the wall before picking up a chainsaw and enacting one of the most grotesque moments in recent memory of the Resident Evil franchise. The creators clearly wanted you to feel different from the last few games, and Resident Evil 7 is utterly visceral in its attempts to draw you in. Ethan attempts to escape and confronts Mia again, this time finding a handgun and busting a cap in her ass. As he finishes her off, a strange man spins him around and slugs him in the face, knocking him out cold with his boot when he hits the floor.
It’s only now that Resident Evil 7 truly begins.
The first time I went through this was totally shocking, and even now I’m blown away by the intense first section of the game. It’s a brutal introduction that effectively tells new players that Capcom isn’t messing around, and it tells veteran players that Capcom has taken the kid gloves from Resident Evil 5 and 6 and dismembered the hands wearing them with a chainsaw. They mean business with Resident Evil 7.
Things don’t get much better for Ethan, who wakes up bound to a chair at a dinner table, surrounded by an odd-looking family and a table full of the most putrid, disgusting guts you’ve ever imagined. The wretched family is none other than the Baker family, and you’re now a captive in their estate. After the son antagonizes you, the patriarch of the family carves his arm off with a knife and acts like nothing else happened. Once he tries to force-feed you some of the awful intestines and you spit it out, all hell breaks loose. Jack, the father, threatens to shove a knife in Ethan’s mouth, while mother Marguerite flips her lip and screeches at you while leaving the room. You’re saved… by a doorbell.
They leave Ethan with the decrepit old grandmother, silent in her wheelchair as you break free from your bindings. You may notice that Ethan has his missing hand stapled to the rest of him, with a strange watch around his wrist. Looks like someone is looking out for you. After some exploration, you eventually encounter Jack again in the garage, where he makes quick work of a local police officer using a very powerful shovel thrust. One boss fight later, and the psychotic Jack blows his own brains out using your handgun.
Once again in shock, I processed what I was experiencing. Everything felt so wrong compared to a normal Resident Evil game, but not in a bad way. It’s a chaotic start to the game, deliberately crafted to send you into disarray, and it does so magnificently. Ethan escapes further into the house, only to be called again by the woman, identifying herself as Zoe. She’s trying to help you and Mia escape. Ethan explores the house and fights Jack Baker a second time, his head wound fully healed. This time, the fight involves more chainsaws, and ends with a disgusting, gory display as Jack’s upper half explodes into gore and viscera, leaving only his legs to flop over and spill out more blood.
Escaping the house, Ethan finds a trailer in the back courtyard, where he’s informed by Zoe via phone that they need a serum to rid her and Mia of infection. Ethan is sent looking through the old house in the back of the estate for one of the ingredients, an ominously-named “D-Series Arm”. This puts him in contention with the matriarch of the house, Marguerite. Her infection seems different, and she has the ability to create and control insects. After a very disturbing and gross boss fight, Marguerite is wiped out and Ethan can continue his search for the serum ingredient.
It’s in this old house that Ethan walks through a disgusting room filled with mold very similar to the grotesque Molded monsters he was seeing in the main house. Immediately afterward, he finds a hidden room with a decayed body of a young girl, and he realizes this is the D-Series. He pulls the arm out and from here on out, Ethan starts to see a young girl now and then running around the house.
He escapes back to the trailer with the arm after Zoe calls him and tells him to meet back with her there. Instead, he gets a phone call from the deranged son, Lucas. He’s kidnapped Zoe and wants to play games with Ethan, forcing him to run errands around the main house before entering a farmhouse of horrors. Jigsaw would be proud of Lucas, with bomb traps and spike traps and fire traps galore. Ethan navigates his sick game and eventually turns the tables on him, escaping the sadistic funhouse and finding the components for the serum.
Eventually he finds Zoe and Mia both, and once freed Zoe crafts two doses of the serum. Immediately, though, a gigantic mutated blob with Jack’s messed-up face smashes into the room and Ethan is thrown into a battle arena with the giant monster. After mostly destroying him, Ethan is about to be crushed to death when Zoe tells him to use the serum on him. In doing so, Jack finally seems to be destroyed, calcifying and falling apart. Unfortunately, this leaves Ethan with a single dose to cure either Zoe or Mia.
Here’s where Resident Evil 7 kind of wastes your time, to be honest. It gives you a choice of either saving Mia or Zoe. This single choice determines which ending you get, and it feels so forced. I almost feel like an executive demanded multiple endings in a game that did not need such a choice, but here we are. Choosing Zoe will continue the game with her coming with you on a small boat on the dock you’re standing on. However, she immediately dies and in the end Mia will die too. It’s garbage, so unless you really want the achievement, don’t do it.
Instead, cure Mia. You’ll notice a large ship in the distance as you ride through the bayou before something attacks you from beneath the water and you black out. When you reawaken, you realize that you’re playing as Mia for this section of the game, near the giant ship you saw. As she explores, she starts to remember who she is, and who the little girl is that she and Ethan have been seeing. Once her memories come back, Mia remembers everything: She’s a trained agent, who was transporting a young girl named Eveline on a cargo ship. Eveline is a test-tube baby that’s a host for Mold, a substance that can mutate monsters and enslave them as Eveline’s thralls. The first successful model, she’s named the E-Series 001. These thralls she creates are the Molded enemies you’ve seen throughout the entire game, including the Baker family that took her and Mia in after escaping the cargo ship following a disastrous shipwreck. Eveline, a very lonely girl, just wanted a family instead of a lab worker prodding her with needles. She got it one way or another.
Obviously, Mia never told Ethan about her real line of work. She eventually finds Ethan in the ship, half-covered in Mold on the wall. She frees him, and gets him out of the room, locking herself in with Eveline and telling Ethan to save himself. Distraught, he complies, heading out into the next area. It’s a salt mine, and after seeing some helicopters in the sky and a radio transmission from someone talking about investigating the Baker Estate, Ethan descends.
He learns that there’s a small lab in the salt mines, and though confused, he finds the equipment needed to make an E-Series Necrotoxin, which should kill Eveline and stop the Mold monsters. Eventually escaping the mines, Ethan realizes he’s in the guest house from the start of the game. He finds Eveline and injects her with the toxin, dropping his hallucinations and revealing that Eveline was the old woman in the wheelchair all along. It turns out that without regular injections to keep her cells in check, she aged extremely rapidly. The toxin finishes her off… or so we think.
Instead, Eveline melts into mold and flies into a rage, eventually becoming a giant monster that towers above you. As you fall to the ground from the second floor of the house, a small box lands beside you and a gun slides out. A voice from the strange watch on your wrist tells you to use it, and with several well-placed shots, the gigantic Eveline monster calcifies just like Jack Baker did and crumbles to pieces. The nightmare is over.
One of the soldiers removes his helmet and offers to help Ethan up, revealing himself to be none other than Chris Redfield. For some reason he’s working with… Blue Umbrella?! What’s Blue Umbrella? Why would Chris work for them? What’s going on? All these questions are left hanging for a little bit as Ethan escapes in the helicopter, where he finds Mia being treated for another Mold infection as the leave the nightmare behind. Chris stays behind, noting that they’ve not caught Lucas Baker and brought him in yet. We’ll have to see what happens later on in Not a Hero!
That’s where the main game leaves off. Sudden major connections to the main plot right at the end, to be answered in Chris’s mini campaign. It’s honestly effective, as the entirety of Resident Evil 7 has little to nothing to do with the main plot. As I said before, it mirrors Resident Evil 4 in that regard, allowing new players to jump in without the need for reading up on lore. For vets, there are plenty of little details scattered throughout the game that connect to other games. For instance, remember Clive R. O’Brian? The former BSAA director who retired to write a mystery novel when he should’ve been jailed? Well, you can find his book amongst the Baker collection.
There are pictures of the Arklay Mountains, a news article by Resident Evil Outbreak’s Alyssa Ashcroft, the revelation that all the weird puzzles in the house were crafted by George Trevor’s construction company, all sorts of cool stuff like that for Resident Evil nerds like myself. It tenuously connects itself to the larger canon before the ending drops a bomb on us that Chris is working with the supposed enemy of the series. It left me immediately salivating for more. I had to know! We’ll talk about that in the extras, though. Now you have to be left hanging the same way I did so many years ago!
The plot of Resident Evil 7 isn’t too abnormal. It’s a “save the wife” plot, but it’s crafted in such a way as to make you feel weak and powerless against foes as terrifying as the Baker family… at least at the start. The opening is amazing and I can’t help but love it each time. The way Capcom flipped the script from Resident Evil 6 and made you feel less like a total badass who was invulnerable to a weakling who gets his arm chopped off was brilliant, and it showed that Capcom had learned a lesson and was excited to put it to practice. The little details interspersed throughout the game helping settle the world in the Resident Evil universe are nice, but the story nonetheless stands on its own. It’s a great, effective story of saving someone in danger, told in a bloody, gory way that I just love.
Graphics
“Do I have your attention, boy? You are about to see somethin’ wonderful.”
Did you know that Resident Evil 7 is gory? I don’t know if I mentioned it enough, but my god it’s a bloody game. It harkens back to Resident Evil 4’s shocking imagery, which was disturbing for 2005. Similarly, this is grotesque even by 2017’s standards, with limbs coming off and intestines almost being forced down your throat. Oh, speaking of forcing stuff down throats…
Yeah! That! What the hell, man?! Don’t get me wrong, I’m so happy that Resident Evil went back to being nasty, but what sicko at Capcom comes up with this stuff? They have a serial killer in their midst, I swear… Anyway, back to the point, Resident Evil 7 is more than just a gorefest. There’s a ton going on with the game’s graphics, most notably the engine on which it runs. History lesson time!
Back in the halcyon days of 2013, Capcom’s fighting game guru Yoshinori Ono presented a gorgeous new engine designed specifically for the next generation of hardware upon the console’s announcement. This was Panta Rhei, and the game using it looked stunning. This dungeon crawler, Deep Down, was so good-looking that I don’t think anyone who saw it at the time thought it was in-game graphics. There was just no way. This was the engine that was going to replace MT Framework, but that sounded a little strange to me even back then. The point of MT Framework was twofold: that games would be highly polished, and that the engine would be easily scalable, from handhelds up to high-spec PCs. Meanwhile, they said that this engine was built from the ground up for next-gen consoles and only next-gen consoles. Something about that didn’t jive with me.
Clearly, something didn’t jive with Capcom either, because it’s now 2020 and neither Deep Down nor Panta Rhei have ever seen the light of day. You read that right: not just a game, but an entire engine became vaporware. Tens of millions of dollars flushed down the toilet, just like that. I don’t know the story behind what happened here, but I would be fascinated to find out. In possibly related news, Yoshinori Ono recently left Capcom a few months ago after it came out that he was a terrible project manager…
Regardless, we soon saw the birth of a new engine. While our first exposure to RE Engine would be Kitchen, it wasn’t until Resident Evil 7 proper that RE Engine would get its first full-sized game. RE Engine is supposedly far more scalable than Panta Rhei ever was. I think it’s safe to say at this point that RE Engine is the de facto engine for Capcom going forward. You may think it stands for Resident Evil Engine, but don’t be silly! No, Capcom says it actually stands for the much more reasonable REach for the Moon Engine. Because the logo is a hand… reaching for the moon. I’m sure this has nothing at all to do with Capcom realizing that only using the engine for Resident Evil games was a bad idea once they started experimenting with it more and discovering it could help them immensely with other projects. Guys, just own it! Call it the Resident Evil Engine. Don’t reach so hard for an alternate answer.
RE Engine currently feels like the second coming of MT Framework. Capcom discovered a way to cut down on production time while simultaneously creating an ever-expanding library of assets to use and reuse as they needed. This new method of asset creation, called photogrammetry, also has the added bonus of making things look photorealistic. Instead of hand-crafting each asset digitally, instead many assets are made in real life, then scanned into the game with super high-quality cameras that capture every detail of it to ensure a high-quality asset. This ranges to everything from a couple bullets all the way up to all the character models. This process cuts down dramatically on production time, apparently.
I can’t say for sure what’s going on under the hood, but whatever it is, suffice to say Capcom’s programmers are wizards once again. Not only does RE Engine create gorgeous high-fidelity graphics, but the engine itself is so well-optimized that it targets those graphics at 60fps. Bold, you may say, and you’d be right. I don’t mean that Resident Evil 7 runs at 60fps flawlessly on a PC or an Xbox One X; rather, the results are the same all the way down the board, down to and including the base PS4. Since it’s the first major VR-compatible AAA title, Capcom had to follow Sony’s strict guidelines to ensure the game never drops a frame, lest players get motion sickness.
Thus, Resident Evil 7 was polished so finely that it hits a rock-solid 60fps even on such an old console. According to Digital Foundry’s Dave Bierton, the only platform that struggles to maintain a solid 60fps is the original Xbox One. It’s not surprising, given the visuals on display for such a low-spec console, but just about any other way you play the game, you’re going to experience amazing performance. RE Engine had one hell of a good first outing and looking at where we are now, it’s good to know that we can expect similar output in terms of visuals and framerate. However, we’ll get to that in the coming months.
That really covers the majority of what I have to say here for the graphics, in all honesty. Resident Evil 7 is a tour de force for an engine’s first outing, with Capcom still learning the ropes and having to make certain concessions in order to adhere to VR guidelines. Despite that, or in fact because of it, the game hits high performance targets even on the old PS4. It also highlights beautiful textures all around, with highly detailed character models and an almost giddy obsession with grossing the player out. Hey, did I mention that Resident Evil 7 is gory?
Sound
“I don’t understand you at all. This is a gift.”
As good as things have been so far, we have to have something to nitpick at here. Don’t worry, it’s not all bad! In fact, let’s do the compliment sandwich. Here, I’ll start: Resident Evil 7 has really good voice acting! As you might expect, it’s a whole new cast of characters and as such, Capcom employed a whole new cast of VAs as well. There’s plenty to love here, and much like the previous couple games, it’s the villains who really take the cake.
The Baker family is comprised of some insane members, and their VAs clearly relish in their maniac personalities. It’s hard to tell a favorite, because they all stand out so much in their own way. Jack Brand plays patriarch Jack Baker and he lets loose in practically every scene. When he’s not hootin’ and hollerin’ about how he’s gonna murder you with giggling glee, he’s probably busy muttering quietly with his anger seeping through his gritted teeth.
Not to be outdone, Sara Coates plays the sweet wife Marguerite. Unlike Jack, Marguerite is rarely quiet. Your first encounter with her, she seems nice! Which would be great if she weren’t trying to feed you infected intestines. Instead, you can tell by Sara’s excellent performance that the matriarch is a 0-to-100 type of personality. The very nanosecond you refuse her “cooking”, she goes absolutely apeshit and storms off in an expletive-addled huff. From then on, most encounters with her are either her spewing hate or screaming it in your face, and it is awesome.
Finally, the son of the family rounds out the villainous Baker family, with Jesse Pimentel lending his voice to the psychotic Lucas. This good ol’ Southern boy loves nothing more than trapping people and enjoying their suffering in his little Saw-inspired funhouse. In case you think the Mold made him like this, think again; you learn that he’s killed as early as elementary school, and that’s why his craziness comes through in his performance differently than either of his parents. He’s a lot more calm most of the time, more cool and calculated than Jack or Marguerite, and it’s all the more unsettling to know that he’s just as much a monster as anything in Resident Evil 7 despite not being influenced by the Mold.
While the villains steal the show yet again, I have to wonder why people in the industry keep insisting upon protagonists in games often being quieter or more reserved in order to make them feel more like a stand-in for the player. I rarely enjoy this trope, and Resident Evil 7 weirdly half-steps it. Ethan Winters, voiced by Todd Soley, does have a defined personality and it’s honestly entertaining when it bleeds through in some of his lines. Unfortunately, most of the time his reactions to events are incredibly muted or outright missing in an attempt to let the player fill in those reactions instead. It’s jarring to see a man get his hand shredded off with a chainsaw, and the worst we get is a mangled cry of pain. Two minutes later and Ethan has all but forgotten about his missing limb. This isn’t Todd’s fault so much as the writing team’s, but it’s annoying all the same.
Thankfully, that’s the worst of it when it comes to the voice acting. When it comes to music, things have seen a very similar shake-up as the rest of the game. Instead of the usual melodies and creeping tunes, Resident Evil 7 is surprisingly quiet a lot of the time. That doesn’t mean there isn’t music, nor does it mean there’s mostly silence. Rather, music is reserved for pivotal moments and the silence in-between those moments is expertly filled with atmospheric sounds to creep the player out.
The sound design is top-notch, and it feels like the developers wanted to accentuate their work by keeping music for specific encounters and moments. Instead, as you go through the game you’ll hear the quiet creaking of old wood in the house, or some unnerving metal clanking in the depths of the wrecked ship. It’s highly effective at settling you into the mood of the game, far more so than the writers’ half-hearted attempt at “engrossing” the player with a half-personality Ethan.
When there is music, however, it’s similarly creepy and atmospheric. The few melodies throughout Resident Evil 7 follow this same ethos: be unnerving and strange. “Go Tell Aunt Rhody” is a folk classic that dates all the way back to a 1700s violin piece by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and has been covered hundreds of times. Here, it’s been retooled into a dark and sinister intro song that’s modified heavily to better fit the themes of the game. It’s slower than most other renditions, hanging on each phrase longer to let the words linger. It’s great!
Getting the soothing, yet uneasy feeling of a safe room right is key to survival horror. It’s a room where you know you cannot be harmed so you can decompress for a moment, but danger is only a door away. “Saferoom” instills this feeling beautifully, in my opinion. Beyond that, it fits the setting perfectly in my mind. In the backwater bayou of Louisiana, in a run-down shack with holes in the wall, basically a room on stilts above the swamp, I heard this twangy, sorrowful tune and it sent shivers down my spine. Rarely does a song so excellently pair with both the mood and the setting like this one does, and it’s why it’s one of my favorite save room themes in the series.
“So Close Yet So Far” is an example of when the music kicks in to add tension, as sometimes keeping the silence can be effective, while other times breaking it works better. This dread-inducing piece makes heavy use of many rhythmic sounds to simulate the sound of a clock or countdown, with intense percussion and interspersed repeating bass sounds from piano keys pushing the player forward with a spring in their step, reminding them that they need to move or die. I always preface these music categories by mentioning that I know precisely diddly and squat about how to convey my musical feelings, so I hope any of that made sense. But I like what I’m hearing!
While not everything is perfect, I think Resident Evil 7 overall does a great job in creating its own unique sound identity in the series. With atmospheric ambience taking up a majority of the soundtrack, it still maintains its effectiveness in spooking the player in a new way. The voice acting is mostly fantastic, with the writers essentially holding Ethan back from being as beloved as the Bakers in a vain attempt to make a player self-insert while also having his own distinct personality. Seriously, though, the Baker family as a whole is the real shining star of this game.
Gameplay
“You see, Ethan, not everybody wants to turn back the clock.”
I’ve been tip-toeing around it for this entire review, so I may as well just get it out there: Resident Evil 7 is a first-person game. You may have surmised this from the Kitchen VR demo, but Capcom decided to make the full game in this way as well. This was a bit of cause for contention when the game was first revealed, and a large part of why the demo was being called an Outlast clone.
As I said before, though, the demo’s updates and the game’s release dispelled those unfounded claims thoroughly. The idea behind the new camera system was twofold: the first-person perspective would provide a modern method of constricting the player’s view a la fixed camera angles to heighten the horror, and it would provide for easier VR support. As an added bonus, it was a big shift away from over-the-shoulder in a way that caught the attention of new players and veterans alike, punctuating the point of a major shift away from action Resident Evil titles. Personally, I think it’s brilliant and elegant in its execution.
Resident Evil 7 doesn’t have the off-the-wall action controls of its last major predecessors. There are no flashy melee moves, no QTEs, no diving or rolling. It’s just you, your equipped weapon, and the dangers of the Baker estate. Thankfully, as this is a Resident Evil title to the core, your arsenal becomes more and more crazy as time goes on. You’ll get access to pistols, shotguns, a magnum, a grenade launcher, a flamethrower and eventually, an SMG and even remote bombs. The SMG isn’t very good, though, so I don’t recommend it. But that should put to rest any doubts of Resident Evil 7 being a clone of a game with no combat mechanics.
In terms of structure, Resident Evil 7 is often compared to “returning to the series roots”, with the most obvious connections being made to the original game due to its keys-in-a-house method of exploration. However, the general path one takes is more akin to Resident Evil 2, in my opinion. The first part of the original Resident Evil is freeform, allowing you to tackle objectives in mostly any order you wish. Its sequel, however, is much more linear in its progression, and this is what Resident Evil 7 uses for its inspiration. There are secrets hidden throughout of course, but the main progression is pretty much A to B.
That said, it’s great for keeping the pace up. Resident Evil 7 is a roller coaster ride that wants to shock the hell out of you, and it knows when to speed up and slow down. The level design of the house is great; it’s just smartly-designed enough to make vets happy and give them more than just linear hallways to run through like the last several games, but simpler than previous classics so as not to scare off new players. It’s a lovely middle ground, but I hope we get more complex level design in the next game!
What’s even better about this smooth gameplay is the lack of loading screens. When you first start the game there’s a loading screen, but otherwise Resident Evil 7 limits its loading screens to retries after deaths unless you’re really fast in certain areas. RE Engine not only looks amazing and performs amazing, but it also allows Capcom to pull some tricks with asset streaming to keep the game as seamless as possible. It’s honestly amazing what they’ve accomplished with their debut title for a new engine. If there’s anything that helps draw the player into the world, it’s the fact that they don’t hardly ever look at a loading screen as you move from area to area.
Speaking of, there are actually a surprising number of locations throughout your time in the game, and most of them follow this more linear progression. There are three houses on the Baker estate, a wrecked ship, and a salt mine in addition to the guest house you start the game in. Most people dislike the last third or so of the game. I agree that the salt mines are quite literally those railroaded hallways from previous games, but I have a feeling the budget was running thin by that point. That said, I do like the ship a lot more than others seem to. However, the pacing is busted in this section by making you play through an interactive memory, only to then have to navigate the same space with minor differences directly afterward. It’s the one time I feel that the pace really stumbles. It’s basically a long interactive unskippable cutscene.
It actually brings me to my one major gripe with Resident Evil 7. Believe it or not, this game has unskippable cutscenes. Every single cutscene is unskippable. I’ve no doubt that this was to hide load times, but it’s really kind of unacceptable as of 2017. It’s not that I don’t want to experience the story again or anything, but sometimes I just want to play. It’s good that most of the cutscenes are entertaining, but I loathe having to watch them every single time. Please, never do this to me again Capcom. This isn’t the 90s anymore. Sometimes we just want to fight monsters, which this game makes very fun.
One area where Resident Evil 7 pulls some cool moves is the openness of encounters. Even in your very first encounter with Jack chasing you around, there are several optional scenes that can play out. I was stealthy enough the first time I ever played the game that I never triggered one of them. On my second playthrough, I was feeling more confident, so I was more bold in that section. Imagine my surprise, then, when a perfectly normal wall was suddenly blasted open in front of me by Jack’s shovel as he opened up a shortcut in the house. It was a jumpscare on the level of the original game’s dog-in-the-window for me, simply because it only occurs depending on how you play the game.
Another fantastic example of this is not long after, in the first boss fight against Jack in the garage. As I fought in the arena, I nabbed the car keys from a toolbox and jumped into my car, which Jack had apparently stolen. I proceeded to ram him over and over until he tore the roof off my car and ran it into some beams, incapacitating himself in the process. When I was later discussing this cool boss fight with my friend, he was confused. See, in his game, he had gotten in the car but Jack dragged him out. Instead, Jack was driving around in the car and Ethan had to shoot him until he spun out into the metal beams. It all depends on your positioning while getting into the car, apparently. That’s the beauty of Resident Evil 7 though: while the progression may be linear, there are often multiple ways things can play out.
I’m sad I didn’t get to play this in VR this time around for the review, but from the hour or so that I played before, I can tell you that even having played it previously, it’s a whole new ball game. Being in the world is terrifying, even if you know what’s coming. I think if Jack had busted through that wall with VR being my first playthrough, I wouldn’t be here today to tell you about it. Navigating the space, actually being in the Baker house, is utterly terrifying and I recommend anyone who has a Playstation VR headset to play it immediately. Just be warned that it’ll scare the pants off you.
I think that Capcom really nailed it out of the park with dialing back the gameplay mechanics of Resident Evil 7 enough to make an effective horror game. Between the mechanics, the claustrophobic first-person perspective, the excellent boss fights and VR support, they made a game that’s exceedingly fun to play. Just remember to set time aside every time you play to make a snack or something, because the unskippable cutscenes can really drag on.
Extras/Replay Value
“But only if you participate in a little activity I put together, just for yooooou~”
Upon finishing Resident Evil 7, there’s all kinds of unlockables. Between small statues you can break, files to read, and other challenges, you’ll be doing a few runs to unlock everything. There’s sadly no Infinite Rocket Launcher this time around, so we have to get that shame out of the way. Instead, we get cool weapons like the Albert-01R, which is a supercharged handgun, as well as a circular saw to carve up anything that gets in your way. Beating the game in under four hours gets you that saw and also X-Ray Glasses, which are a permanent form of the Psychostimulant item, which highlights all items around you so you know where to find everything. You can also unlock two defense items, which power up your block. Having both in your inventory will make your block invincible, so you don’t take any damage when using it.
Now, beating the game on Normal also unlocks Madhouse difficulty. This mode is tough as nails, even for a veteran like myself. It gets easier as you get further into it, but the opening is tough. In addition to changing up how you progress through the Baker house a bit (a welcome change), it also cuts down heavily on autosaves and makes you mainly rely on saving. Unlike Easy and Normal, however, you have to save using limited Cassette Tapes, just like Ink Ribbons. Granted, you get enough tapes that you should never run out of saves just like any other game with limited saving, but seeing an old mechanic like that brought back was a welcome addition. Beating this tough-as-nails mode where enemies do a lot more damage to you will net you the coveted infinite ammo for all weapons. However, we’re just getting started on extras.
Remember all those lingering questions at the end of the campaign? Why is Chris working with Umbrella, how is Umbrella back, etc.? Following the credits at the end of Resident Evil 7, there’s a splash screen for free DLC starring Chris, called Not a Hero. There were some hiccups in development, with the splash screen promising a release in Spring of 2017, yet we saw neither hide nor hair of it until December alongside the Gold Edition of the game which contained other smaller DLC for the game as well as a second epilogue DLC, End of Zoe. Be that as it may, Not a Hero was still made available for free as promised to all Resident Evil 7 owners.
Not a Hero starts right after Ethan is airlifted with Mia to safety, while Chris and some of his team stays behind in pursuit of Lucas Baker. They follow his trail to the mines, where there’s a door that was inaccessible in the campaign. This leads down to the main lab area where Lucas was doing his own experiments while contacting another secret organization. It’s also another little funhouse from hell that the psychotic Baker child has constructed. Lucas is basically what a real adult Kevin McAllister would look like.
After running around this underground hellhole, Chris eventually finds Lucas and has to put him down after he mutates into a ghastly beast. It’s revealed throughout the DLC that the reason Umbrella has returned is that they wanted to atone for their sins all those years ago. Thus, they rebranded into a PMC, but weren’t allowed to have their own soldiers, per understandably strict restrictions. Instead, the BSAA is overseeing their operations, which is why Chris is working with them.
Personally, I think this is the dumbest plot thread I’ve possibly ever heard of in the series, which is saying a lot. There’s no way, none whatsoever, that Umbrella would be allowed to operate in any capacity after causing the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people over the course of their operation. Anyone trying to use the Umbrella name would be essentially stock market poison, doomed to fail. Yet Resident Evil 7 seems fit to claim that we’re to believe they’re suddenly good guys now, even when anyone with a pulse can see that they’re going to turn evil again. Truly not a fan of the lore here, but the gameplay itself remains as fun as ever at least.
The second epilogue, End of Zoe, takes place after Not a Hero. We’re introduced to Joe Baker, Jack’s brother. He’s a bayou boy, living in the swamp area a little bit away from the main Baker residence, and he finds some suspicious soldiers wandering in the woods. He comes closer to see what they’re investigating, only to find his niece Zoe covered in strange, white, crystalline Mold. She’s been calcified! This is what happens when you choose Mia in the main campaign, and it’s Eveline’s punishment for Zoe helping them escape. Joe takes out the soldiers and demands they tell him how to cure Zoe, setting him on a path to save his niece.
Unlike Resident Evil 7 and Not a Hero, End of Zoe plays much different. You don’t get any guns in this DLC. Instead, Joe puts up his dukes, allowing you to beat the absolute snot out of anything that gets in your way. You have a few combos you can use, but you can also craft some rudimentary weapons. Single-use throwing spears are powerful weapons that should be used sparingly, while you can also craft knives to use. It’s loads of fun to unload some furious fists on the Molded, so enjoy! Keep in mind that there is a weapon you get toward the end that is so over-the-top awesome, and knowing that it’s canon brings me immense, childlike excitement.
There are many challenges to accomplish in End of Zoe as well. Doing so will unlock all manner of extras, such as a shotgun (which seems counterintuitive, but sure!), a Spirit Blade, and a second gauntlet to go along with your first. Feeling that raw power of two charged fists is a joy that very few first-person games have replicated. Utterly magical. You can also get infinite weapons as the ultimate reward, so you can chuck spears as much as you want. Become the swamp Rambo you were always meant to be.
If you thought that wasn’t enough extra content somehow, then don’t you worry. Resident Evil 7 decided to throw everything at the wall to see what would stick. We have Jack’s 55th Birthday, which tasks Mia with feeding Jack for his birthday. You run around different stages on a timer, finding all sorts of food and drink around the house while contending with Molded enemies wearing fun party hats. You can freeze the timer and add time to it. Keep in mind that getting a high score requires you to fill up Jack with a lot of time left on the clock!
Next up, we have Ethan Must Die. This is, strangely enough, a super-hard roguelike that tasks you with killing Marguerite in the greenhouse. There’s only one stage here, but it takes you all around the Baker estate, with boxes and chests littered all around. Items in these crates, which can range from one to four-star boxes, contain random items and weapons to aid you in your attempt. Be sure to check them for ticking, however, as some of them are trap bombs. Ethan takes tons of damage from enemies in this mode, so be very careful. To date, I’ve only beaten this mode once, and it was as dramatic a finish as you could imagine: one hit from death, I ran out of ammo and was cowering in the corner when the final bullet of a turret hit and killed Marguerite as she ran at me. I couldn’t replicate that if I tried.
After this, we have Nightmare. This mini-Mercenaries traps the poor cameraman from the VHS tapes, Clancy, in the Baker basement. There are scrap generators that you have to keep running in order to collect scrap and use it for weapons, health and ammo over time. You have a limited time to make this happen, as the game will throw Jack at you every now and then to contend with. It’s an exciting little mode that unlocks more and more stuff as you try again and again, encouraging you to keep trying.
21 is the next little mini-game. It’s a twisted game of blackjack that Lucas has set up, where you have to face off against another of his victims. You go head-to-head and use skills to try and gain the upper hand against your opponent. Every time you lose, you get a finger chopped off. Lose them all, and you die. If they lose them, they die and you move onto the next opponent. As someone who loves blackjack and who can’t wait to return to the casino after this pandemic has ended, I really enjoyed my time with this one.
Bedroom is an interesting little experimental DLC. You play once again as Clancy, this time trapped and tied to a bed in the second floor of the house. Periodically, Marguerite attempts to get you to eat some food and when she leaves, you have to escape your bindings and try to find a way out. It’s a fun little escape room, where you have to put everything back to normal and hurry back to your bindings once you hear Marguerite coming. If she notices too many things off, she’ll kill you and it’s game over. It’s not something I would replay, but I had forgotten the solutions after several years so it was refreshing to give it another shot.
Finally, Daughters puts you in the shoes of Zoe. We see the Baker family before their transformation, with Mia and Eveline being carried in from the storm. Once Eveline wakes up, however, things quickly go south. Zoe sees Marguerite and Jack turn, and eventually tries to escape. There are two endings to this short DLC, one where Zoe attempts to leave via the car and is caught, and the canon ending where she makes it to her trailer in the courtyard and eventually gets infected like the rest of the family. It’s a really short DLC and not all that exciting, but at least we get to see the Baker family for a short time pre-infection so we can feel worse for the happy family life that was shredded to bits by an angry young girl.
While Resident Evil 7 was more of a classic-style game in the franchise, they made sure to go all-out with the replay value. As the first major AAA VR game, Resident Evil 7 was already fairly experimental. However, this is best exemplified in all these extra modes. Making a melee-focused DLC, one based on blackjack, an escape room DLC, a roguelike mode… it all points to an exciting time in the series’s life, one where they felt they could really go wild and see what was good and what wasn’t. I love almost all of the extras on offer here, and I recommend at least one playthrough of all of them. You’ll thank me when you get to powerbomb a swamp man.
Conclusion
“The fuck took you guys so long?”
I love Resident Evil 7. Loooove it. It’s a breakout debut for the RE Engine, a graphical and technical powerhouse. It’s more than just a gory, messed up cute face though; the gameplay is a welcome change of pace, a more classic style experience that I’m glad the series returned to. The new first-person camera help the game feel claustrophobic, and from my limited time in VR I can safely say that it’s among the most terrifying entries in the series.
Capcom set out to prove to the world that they could make a horror game again. After confidence in their ability to do so waned, it became a mission to shock everyone. Suffice to say, they succeeded in spades. Resident Evil 7 is among the franchise’s top entries in my opinion. It’s got the DNA of classic Resident Evil spliced with modern design and it meshes together beautifully.
Despite a few hiccups, namely the writers attempting to make Ethan his own character and somehow a player stand-in as well as one or two dud mini DLCs, this game stands tall. It’s a fantastic horror game that everyone should experience at least once. Now if you’ll excuse me, I want to replay Resident Evil 7 again already, so I have to go to the bathroom for the next five minutes while the intro plays out.
