What do you make of the Baker family as villains? Do they avoid just being stereotypes of dangerous rural white people?Īdi: Without giving too much away, the game heavily subverts our initial expectations of the Bakers. If anything, Resident Evil 7’s later chapters - set amid an on-the-nose stand-in for the BP oil spill - takes the series’ fascination with paramilitary conspiracies and sci-fi melodrama, and grounds it with a setting that’s almost mundane, if you take away the spiderwebs and creepy dolls. It’s sort of like a new Star Wars taking time to honor the prequels, which sounds dreadful, but as someone who’s largely stuck by the Resident Evil series, I appreciated the effort to honor the good bits and the bad bits, too. Adi’s right that the game’s second half isn’t nearly as spooky as what precedes it, but I think the later missions are loving homages to Resident Evil 4, 5, and 6: the over-the-top boss fights, the heavy weaponry, the widening of scope. The estate channels the original Resident Evil, but the player’s need to hide from the game’s immortal family reminded me of Resident Evil Nemesis, and the story (a hero searching for someone who has disappeared under mysterious circumstances) echoes Resident Evil Code: Veronica. Resident Evil 7 is a greatest-hits collection. And unlike pretty much every installment since the first ( Resident Evil 3’s nemesis monster excluded), Resident Evil 7 genuinely scared the hell out of me.Ĭhris: I agree with Andrew, though I’ll go a step further. The sparse survival supplies, the cryptic and convoluted puzzles, the jump scares - it felt familiar. It looks like a drastic departure, but cautiously exploring the sprawling Baker estate felt a lot like venturing into the giant mansion from Resident Evil in 1996. Resident Evil 7 does a very similar thing, updating the core of the original Resident Evil for 2017. This is the ‘Resident Evil’ equivalent of ‘Metroid Prime’
It wasn’t exactly the same as Super Metroid, but Prime had a remarkably similar structure and feel. Prime took a classic game concept - Super Metroid’s isolated alien planet and ability-focused sense of progression - and nearly effortlessly transported it to a modern first-person game. It’s a very different kind of satisfaction than you get in those games.Īndrew : For me it felt like the series’ equivalent to Metroid Prime. You get a mix of being stalked by enemies that you’re completely helpless against, and ones that you theoretically could kill, but need to ration your ammo around, with this slow buildup of serious firepower leading up to the endgame. The first-person perspective shift made for an interesting twist on the Outlast / Amnesia / Alien Isolation “run away from everything” genre. I found the first half’s Southern Gothic vibe a lot creepier than Resident Evil’s overall military / corporate-warfare mythos. While I won’t complain about this too much or get too specific, I think I would have enjoyed it even more as a standalone piece of fiction.
#RESIDENT EVIL 7 PLUS#
Are all of these changes for the better? Does the game cling to the past too much? And where does Resident Evil go from here? How well did this game fit into the Resident Evil series?Īdi: I’ve actually played relatively little of the overall series, so I primarily enjoyed Resident Evil 7 as “ Texas Chainsaw Massacre with mold zombies” plus some franchise lore thrown in at the end.
#RESIDENT EVIL 7 SERIES#
In some ways it’s a drastic reinvention of the series - shifting to a first-person perspective and even being playable in VR - but it’s also a return to the terrifying, exploration-based structure that created the subgenre known as “survival horror.” It also raises a number of questions. But Resident Evil 7, which launched last month, changed all of that.
What started out as a slow, ponderous take on horror slowly morphed over the years into a fairly generic action series. Resident Evil is one of the most iconic names in video games, but it’s also a series that’s been floundering for a long time.