If there is one genre that video games can claim superiority over all other media, it’s horror.
The agency video games give to players enhances the sense of dread that horror stories strive to inspire in their audience. Resident Evil 7: Biohazard looks to take advantage of this autonomy, switching to a first-person perspective in an attempt to revitalize the historic series after several tiresome sequels.
The moment you step up to the gate of the Dulvey estate, menacingly staring down at you from a Louisiana swamp, it’s evident RE7 fills the player with dread.
You play as Ethan, who has traveled to a dilapidated homestead in Louisiana to investigate a message from his wife, who has been missing and assumed dead for three years. Quickly, though, you realize the inhabitants, the Bakers, are a disgusting, murderous and vaguely supernatural family — think The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.
The first hour or so of the game sets up the conflict with the Baker family and feels more like Outlast or P.T. than a traditional Resident Evil game.
This first act perfectly demonstrates how RE7 does horror so well. RE7 doesn’t overuse its scares, and none of the jumpscares feel cheap. Instead, the game focuses on the psychological side of fear, creating a real sense of dread and tension, making the player question every creak of the floorboards or shadow moving in the distance.
This works so well because the sound design is some of the best in any game I’ve ever played, and the photorealistic graphics are amazing. I’ve never played a game with such an attention to detail in making the surroundings so revolting.
For example, when you open the refrigerator to reveal unidentifiable goo from years of being left to sit in the bayou, a closer look will show that there’s hair mixed in. And the various insects look so lifelike when they are crawling around you. The settings will truly make your skin crawl.
Moving into the second part of the game, RE7 begins to resemble a traditional Resident Evil installment with inventory management, puzzle solving and having to carefully conserve your ammo for each fight.
The bosses are the Baker family members who each have their own unique fighting style and transformation. These are some of the hypest boss battles in a survival horror game, but many players feel the Bakers are too much of bullet sponges.
The character models are just as photorealistic as the rest of the graphics, though not without faults. The physics and rendering of the hair can get glitchy, the synching of facial movements to dialogue feels off at times, and the characters sometimes suffer from an uncanny valley effect.
As far as the story goes, there’s nothing special here. RE7 ties in the Baker family to the greater Resident Evil universe just enough to be able to call this a Resident Evil story. Late gameplay slows down and gets repetitive. The final boss is lackluster, and our protagonist Ethan will be forgotten as soon as you turn off the game. The ending also left me unsatisfied.
Diehard fans of the series will be disappointed if they go in thinking they are getting a true Resident Evil game. While many staples of the series still exist, having all new characters, being almost its own self-contained story and switching to first person is enough to dramatically change the feel of the game from others in the series.
However, at the same time I feel this to be the biggest strength of the game. The level design has a familiarity to the first Resident Evil game, and each member of the family who has their own “level” in the game takes inspiration from common horror tropes. The dad feels like Leatherface, the mom resembles The Fly, and the son sets up elaborate puzzles of death like in the Saw franchise. The game weaves these tropes into the existing Resident Evil framework to create something that feels fresh and familiar at the same time.
RE7 is not the instant classic many hoped it would be. It’s probably not even the best Resident Evil game. However, you have to commend Capcom for trying to turn around the series by trying something new.
The game sets the standard for how horror games should be handled in this generation. This is a big first step for how some fans want to see the series progress. The future looks bright for Resident Evil if they build upon the many successes they hit in this game.
Resident Evil 7: Biohazard, released Jan. 24, is a survival horror video game following Ethan Winters.
