The Resident Evil franchise is one of the greatest survival horror series of all time, but recent entries have focused more on action and convoluted plot points than actual fear. Resident Evil 7 looks to take things back to pure horror routes and even adds the original Biohazard name into the title to show just how much Capcom want to remind you of good old fashioned fear. But is a name change and a new perspective enough to bring people back… or is it all too late.
I’ll be honest for this review I have some good news and some not so good news. Good news is that after multiple years of lacklustre games, Resident Evil 7 takes the game back to its roots and is the first time since Resident Evil 4 that I’ve been fully invested in one of the main series games. The bad news is that this game is single-handedly one of the most claustrophobic and panic inducing games I’ve played in recent memory!
For me the first thing that jumps out at you and really builds the tension is the change to a first person view, it makes the game feel like you’re in the shoes of protagonist Ethan Winters and makes the beginning slow pace you take as you begin to explore the rundown Louisiana compound in trepidation a horrible experience…in these first moments the game builds fear without anything happening, and to be honest it continues likes this all the way through.
It’s a game that has a mixture of puzzle solving, exploration and battles as you fight with the backwater Bakers and as you try to escape from the more generic Molded, but all the time the game builds a tension that no matter how intense or exciting the game become there’s always an element of panic in the back of your mind. Every corridor feels like someone’s standing just around the corner of it watching you and every door that needs opening feels like someone might just burst through it in an explosion of wood and guts.
“Guts” is the key word here, as even though this is a survival horror game it still boasts some of the most grotesque graphics I’ve ever seen. The Baker family look like a homage to Texas Chainsaw with filthy clothes covering semi-decomposing skin, the Molded enemy being made up of what looks like pieces of meat held together with rot and sinew and even the main house and subsequent locations being littered with pieces of meat and blood. Everything’s dilapidated and falling apart while at the same time living and horrific. The way this was achieved is with a method called Photogrammetry which uses dense photographic data to create everything from 3-D textures to characters themselves; it’s an interesting method and one that brings almost stomach-churning realism to the screen.
Game play wise survival is the top of the chain, and to be honest for me the survival horror aspect of this game is one of the best and takes me back to original game with bullets and weapons being as rare as Dodos and an inventory that can hold probably less than I can hold in real life. Everything you find you need and so each time you see something it’s a panic to try and work out whether you go back to a safe zone to place an item and risk a heart attack, or do you just drop an item and hope it’s not important. The problem is that everything’s important and in the time you take thinking about what to keep, something has snuck up on you and you’re left quivering in the corner of the room. This is a game that I hate because of the restrictions it places but at the same time it’s these same restrictions that keep you worried and scared about what to do.
Granted as you go on through the game there is some repetition and like any horror game you work out where and how the scares are going to happen, but to be honest even when I’d got to a point in the game when I could work out when a certain enemy was going to appear or if there was any real danger at all I would still panic when I opened a door and still walk round every corner crouched down and slow as possible.
Like I said before I’d lost interest after Resident evil 4 but after playing 7, I feel like this is a franchise I’ll be looking at much more in the future.
Author: Hal, Plymouth store
