Resident Evil 7: Biohazard (PS4) - All Shook Up

So one of the big swings since the advent of this current generation of consoles is we've kind of veered away from the modern shooter and developers have taken a renewed look at the horror genre and when games like Outlast and P.T. got released people really started to focus on the the first person horror game. With the development and releases of VR headsets this seemed like a natural progression of the genre.

Which is what makes this newest installment of this series so interesting. Now this is a mainstay of the survival horror genre dating back to the early stages of the playstation one. It practically invented the entire genre, the problem is when you get to this high of a number of sequels to the game things have to change to keep it fresh. They didn't with the sixth game, and it was roundly bashed for it. This demo was released and displayed that Capcom was going to indeed change everything up and take the series in a new direction. So after months of waiting, its time to dive back into the world of.....

RESIDENT EVIL 7: BIOHAZARD(PS4)

We start off with a completely new story. We open of from the perspective of someone watching videos on a laptop, we are introduced to a somewhat bubbly woman named Mia sending a message to her husband Ethan. She is on a work trip and apparently has been away for a while, all she leads on is that she is on some kind of babysitting project and can't wait to get home. After the video ends, our POV opens up another video. Mia is clearly panicked, exhausted, and scared. She exclaims to Ethan that she lied, and that she's sorry. But if he manages to receive this video to stay away.

Three years pass, and we take perspective of Ethan. He's driving from Texas to Louisiana. During the drive he takes a call and explains that he received an email from Mia telling him to come get her at this farm. Ethan doesn't know if its true, but he hasn't seen his wife in 3 years. He has to go and find out the truth, why Mia was gone for so long. And as Ethan approaches where the farmhouse is, that's where we take control of the game. (Outside of these characters, I am going to avoid mentioning other characters to avoid spoilers).

Not the most optimistic start to our adventure.

So I have to give Capcom some credit here. Not only did they completely shake up how we play Resident Evil but they also went out of the way to give us a completely original and new story. when you start playing you have none of the established characters, locations, or back lore to worry about. For a new player this would be an inviting change because you don't need to feel lost trying to learn Resident Evil's ridiculous and convoluted story structure.

Resident Evil has always been a series that managed to produce fear and tension because of a combination of things that kept you at a disadvantage. Namely its a relatively slow rate of movement, minimal weaponry to use against relentless enemies, scarce ammo for said weapons to use, and tight claustrophobic environments. Since Resident Evil 4 the areas started to widen out, the game got faster, and you had weapons to keep up a frenetic pace. For the initial shake up it was great but after 4 they became to feel cookie cutter and generic, hence the lambasting of 6 by most gamers.

Meet Lucas, Jack, and Marguerite Baker. The friendly southern family who will host our adventure.

Resident Evil 7 has decided to re-embrace these core roots, and felt the best way to shake up the dynamic is to take away the established 3rd person convention and go first person. The demo, Resident Evil: Beginning Hour, was indicative of this change. This from a control perspective feels like a blend of the horror walking simulators a la Outlast and Layers of Fear but unlike most of those there is some mild first person shooter mechanics which allow you to defend yourself.... Somewhat.

Basic controls are simple and natural at this point. Right trigger to shoot, Left trigger to aim. Analog controls to move and spin the camera. Click in the analogs to run and crouch. Triangle for the menu, Dpad for the hot keys. If you have a played a video game at all in the past 20 something years nothing about this control scheme should throw you a curve ball. 

I will say that there was one mistake I consistently made, and continue to make every time I play the game is that the right bumper is a hotkey to use one of your medical bottles. And without fail, every time while scrambling around for the menu or something I will tap that damn button and waste a healing item at full health. Can game developers please just put in a mechanic where you can't use health items at max heath for idiots like me?

While the melee combat feels loose and wild, it certainly adds a visceral aesthetic.

The game tries to strike a balance of creating tension while at the same time being fair in its regards to item use. Most of the time, you would be wandering around the house looking for items to break open or find. Bullets rarely come in groups bigger than 5 or so and there are not very many easy to kill enemies. So as you play through its a matter of making every shot count. You are given a melee weapon in the early stages of the game, but its just a pocket knife. This weapon is beyond useless. Its really meant for breaking open boxes and nothing else, because fighting with this thing in this game is a death wish.

While we are on the subject of fighting, There is a new mechanic I wasn't used to and that is the addition of a block button. While you have firearms to use, most of your enemies are all melee attackers and getting hit by them will deal massive damage. So with a quick press of the left bumper Ethan throws his arms up to absorb the brunt of the blow. Not getting used to using this is probably why I struggled at the early stages of this game. There are some points and enemies where using this ability is absolutely critical to get down or you will find yourself repeating the same fight over any over again.

I struggled at the onset because I grossly underestimated the importance of blocking.

Another nod to the traditional Resident Evil convention is the crafting mechanic returns as well. As you search around the house you will find items that by themselves are not particularly useful but when combined with chemical packs you find around the house you can create more ammo or healing items. As a chicken shit, I erred on the side of safety and made sure that I always had 3 health bottles in my inventory at all times.

It's also worth noting that there are a handful of weapons that you just cannot make ammo for, so be sure to make a note of that because those are the weapons that you need to hang on to to get you through some of the tougher scrapes of the game. This is primarily for two weapons specifically: The shotgun which is going to be your primary heavy for group fights. If you are fending off more than one enemy or something you are sure you can't take down with a pistol, and M44 Handgun which basically replaces the magnum. Ammo is next to non-existent so I'd hang onto this for the final boss like I did.

Fuckin'..... No thank you.

On the other hand though, if you use up all your ammo in every encounter you are going to find yourself without a bullet left to spend when you really need it. So sometimes it is better to just run and hide. A lot of the enemies won't open doors so you have that working to your advantage, and some enemies are nearly impossible to put down, so if you would want to survive, you'll need to pick your battles and use your environment to your advantage. 

So again, credit where it is due to Capcom on this one. This has completely shaken up the Resident Evil formula. Is it a new experience? Not as such but, but I do applaud the company for looking at what people didn't like about the last game, and decided to make some drastic changes to the formula to try to breathe new life into the franchise. It's a bold gambit to make but after Resident Evil 6 it looks like it was the smart play. Reviews of this one have been generally positive.

Interestingly though, while there are a few little nods to the Resident Evil franchise as a whole throughout the whole game, such as some sound effects and the saving/storage system, this game honestly could have been delivered as a new property entirely. There is very little connection to the Resident Evil as a whole. Like for example, if they just decided that this was going to be the first new installment of the Beginning Hour series or whatever, It might have actually been better received because it didn't have to contend with the lineage before it.

Backpacks are super important in this game so don't miss them.
Even with them you will be shuffling your inventory a lot.

Graphically this game is fairly impressive at points and sometimes less impressive in others. The whole game runs at a seamless 60fps so everything is smooth. It is clear this is a well motion captured game because all the movement and reactions of the characters feel realistic and natural. But inversely, and I don't know why this is, Any motion captured game always seems to have really awkward fake looking teeth. If you played through Until Dawn or Heavy Rain you know exactly what I am talking about. I also feel that some of the background elements don't seem as detailed as the could be, but its a dark dirty dingy house so I don't know what I really am asking for here. Nothing of it was jarring or so poor that it took me out of the game.

The sound design of this game is your pretty typical horror fanfare. Droning horror noises sparsed out by footsteps and uncomfortable silences. The voice action is pretty on point where none of dialogue feels hokey or cheesy. It definitely has the proper horror movie style score to set the scenes or kick in in moments of tension or battle. The tutorial boss fight is actually one of the best examples of this which I actually don't want to get into, because it was one of the best parts of the game. But the pièce de résistance is the opening song from the trailer, which is a modified cover of the folk song "Go Tell Aunt Rhody" by Burl Ives. It's just perfect and makes the intro movie perfectly haunting.

The tension aspect that they really wanted to push in this one is reminiscent of Resident Evil 3, because while the monsters won't open doors, that's not going to stop the family that is in the house and actively looking to hurt you.  They are relentless pursuers and will absolutely mess you up if they get their hands on you and you don't have that block mechanic down.

Unfortunately, this leads to my biggest problems with the game and surprisingly its because of the Auto-save, but not for the reasons that you might think. At the start of the game after a brief bit of walking around the farmhouse we actually step right back into the Beginning Hour demo. Everything felt familiar but since it was this was the actual game I knew something had to be different. What followed was a tense creeping through the house jumping at every sound effect which was followed by a terrifying close quarters fight defending only with a hand axe vs a chainsaw. Totally on the edge of my seat, this was great.

You will find Jack to be somewhat of a stubborn individual.

But in a later segment, I had some bullets and keep trying to progress through the underside of the house and I came to this hallway where I would have fight 3 monsters. I didn't have the block just down yet and I was getting destroyed. I would back up, fire my gun, take my lumps, take a few steps forward and get trashed by the next one. But after I while, I realized that the auto-save was keeping me pretty much right in front of the door where these fights started, so I could just let myself get killed and I'd be right back in the fray with all my health and ammo.

And that's the problem. Now I wasn't playing to survive, I was playing to get past this part. Now I wasn't getting tense or scared, I was getting frustrated. This was the issue I had with games like Bioshock and Outlast. When you have an auto-save system that holds your hand and gives you a minor slap on the wrist, you basically have taken away any sense of risk. Sure, the jump scares would still get me, but now I would approach new areas with much more reckless abandon because now I understood there was little penalty for failure. 

In the older Resident Evils at least up to the first 4, if you were down to critical health, knew you hadn't saved in an hour or two, and only had one first aid spray back in the safe room? That slow trek back would be fucking terrifying because you knew if you blew it you had to make all that progress all over again if a zombie or hunter took you. Sure, it might be easier the 2nd time around but not getting your save in time is what added a tangible penalty to your progress. So the tension would be through the roof. Even more so if you were slogging through a new area and didn't know if a safe room or healing item was on the way.

That's sadly what Resident Evil 7 lacks. It's not scary. It can be intense and it has jump scares, but its not the same thing. I sort of realized this when I played Beginning Hour earlier last year. They tried to do the cerebral horror thing but I found just not getting scared by the demo. So much like when I played Outlast, the moment I realized I wasn't set back I wasn't scared anymore. I know that Auto save to a degree is something we all enjoy and something feel we need to have, but in games like this it undermines the very theme its based around.

Now originally I had written some ideas to perhaps address these issues, but from what I'm being told is that if you beat the game, when you play it on the "Madhouse" difficulty it really goes back to some of the series more notable roots. Namely, saving your game becomes limited by collecting cassette tapes (much like the old ink ribbons of older Resident Evils), the auto-save triggers less, less ammo to find, and its shuffles the items and adds more monsters on top of them being harder. This is all great and probably exactly what this game needed, I just don't like that you have to beat through the game once to do it. It should be an available option from the onset, RE classic mode or something.

Cassette Tapes replace Ink Ribbons for save points. So another dated piece of
technology kids don't know what the hell it is. RE 8 will save with 3.5 Floppies.

I was happy to see when I beat it I would be getting free DLC later. Saw it and was like "Well that's good news, good on you Capcom," and then quite literally within the week of its release they released at DLC pack for an additional 10 dollars for a survival mode, and two other mini modes. Immediately then I was like. "Oh, right. Capcom." They've fucking pulled this shit before, so I don't know why it surprised me now.

The last issue I can think of really, is something that eluded to above and it's that this game could simply not be a Resident Evil game. There are a bunch of little homages and some story nods to the classic series, but outside of one real critical story moment it could have been called literally anything else and been a starting point for a brand new property. Honestly, if was called something else entirely I would have probably looked upon it even more favorably because I would be judging it completely on its own merit, without having to compare to what came before. Bravely Default did this: it's clearly a classic Final Fantasy but they didn't call it that, and it felt new a different because of it.

But while these problems exist, I wouldn't go as far to say that makes Resident Evil 7 a bad experience. Actually, pretty far from it. While the intensity and scariness definitely dissipates after the first hour of the game, there is certainly a fun factor to it that made it incredibly hard to put down. I had it finished in almost two sittings at just under 10 hours, and that first night I ended up going to bed 3 hours after I wanted to because I wanted to see what was behind that door now that I had the key to open it. Or solve this one last puzzle. It kept me engaged and that ultimately is the sign of a good game.

And Resident Evil 7 is a good game. In fact its probably a great game. I went through my initial play-through in about 10 hours or so, and now I learning there are more unlockables if you get it under 4 hours so I'm playing it again on easy. This is something I haven't done since like Resident Evil 3. I won't go as far to say its the greatest of the series, and I certainly won't back off saying the game is not scary because I don't feel it is. But this shake up was exactly what the series needed to breathe new life into it, and they managed to keep some of the aspects that make it FEEL like a  Resident Evil game without it aping off the convoluted lore it set before it.

In my review of Resident Evil 6 I lamented that I felt Capcom lost their way with this franchise. This feels like an attempt to find it, or at the very least make it something new. I would play another game like this one. I think with a few tweaks it could be even better. Resident Evil 7 is absolutely worth a play.

This game honestly could have been directed by Rob Zombie.