Capcom Revives the Dead:
A Resident Evil 7 Review
“Hard to have anything, isn’t it? Rare to get it, hard to keep it. This is a damn slippery planet.”
- Thomas Harris, Red Dragon
I find it poetic that over the years, Capcom’s flagship horror franchise, like its eponymous zombies, has had a tendency to die, only to come back stronger and fiercer than ever.
Capcom is a staple developer in the gaming industry. Though not the first developer to dabble in the horror genre, they are the developer that put the entire genre on the map…and the Resident Evil franchise is how they did it.
Though groundbreaking for its time, the original Resident Evil did not age well. Recognizing the demand for a fresh coat of paint on the old classic, as well as the marketability of the game’s core concept to newer players, Capcom re-released the game with all new graphics, puzzles, enemies, and voiceover work (and let’s all just take a minute to be thankful for that).
After the release of Resident Evil Code: Veronica, the series began to grow stale. Though Code Veronica was a great game, the old tank-style fixed camera control scheme and puzzle-solving rigmarole were hardly considered its best features. So, Capcom brought back the visionary auteur developer, Shinji Mikami, creator of the series, to be the Creative Director of a new project: Resident Evil 4. It featured new enemies, a new control scheme and an entirely different gameplay style, which would influence all RE titles that would follow it, as well as horror classics like Dead Space.
It came to be not just one of the best-received RE or horror titles, but one of the best video games of all time.
Resident Evil 4 managed to completely revitalize the series without rebooting it. It made people excited about Resident Evil games again. Compared to 4, the last two titles in the Resident Evil series have been lukewarm.
Yet, with Resident Evil 7, Capcom has once again brought a franchise in decline back from the dead. This time though, they seem to have accomplished it in less a George A. Romero kind of way – this time, more Frankensteinian. In this, I mean that they cobbled together what worked from several prominent horror titles to have been released in the past ten years or so, and made it their own.
The Story
Resident Evil 7 begins by establishing a similar framing narrative to Silent Hill 2 (2000). Unlike the Konami protagonist, Ethan does not give off the key impression that he truly has nothing better to do than answer the hail of his 3 years dead wife – Ethan doesn’t give off the same desperate scent that James Sunderland did. James was a man who had truly nothing left to live for but trek through a haunted town searching for his “maybe” dead wife, and it showed in his posture, his speech, and his reaction to other characters. Ethan, by contrast, seems to have more or less dealt with the disappearance of his wife in the 3 years that she was missing.
There’s a bit of a logical leap here that suggests not much thought was put into why Ethan went after his wife Mia in the first place. It seems obvious to the point of going without saying, but Ethan’s personality tends to express little more than sudden shock, horror or anger at the things he sees. He doesn’t really show affection or longing for her, except for the occasional soliloquy of stoic determination. This “damsel in distress” trope works as a device to further the plot, even if the device itself is a bit understated and bland.
Tracking his wife Mia to a remote property in Southern Louisiana, he quickly discovers that there is something very wrong with her…within ten minutes of being reunited, Mia goes all “Exorcist” on him, transforming into a monstrous version of herself before slashing him to shit with a kitchen knife first, and then a goddamn chainsaw.
Ethan meets “The Family” that has apparently adopted Mia. It includes Jack and Marguerite Baker, who at first appear your token crazy redneck old married couple. They have a son, Lucas, who later comes off like the Riddler of the Bayou, if the Riddler had been Jigsaw or John Doe from “Se7en” instead of some dude named Edward Nigma. Lucas is the Loki of this story. He may prove to be the new recurring antagonist of the series, which RE hasn’t had since <spoilers> Albert Wesker was killed at the conclusion of RE5 back in 2008. There’s also Zoe, the black sheep of the family who guides you over the phone for much of the game, and a mysterious older woman in a wheelchair with a nasty habit of showing up in places that make her quite unnerving – mostly because they’re not generally wheelchair-accessible.
Most of the game centers around rescuing Mia and discovering what turn the family took that made them cannibalistic, homicidal monsters. In one key moment, Ethan actually sees what they were like before the infection – he even gets to have a conversation with them. Unlike Resident Evil 4 and Resident Evil 5, Resident Evil 7 is full of moments that show the gentler, vulnerable, human side of the monsters who hunt you – the people they used to be, or could have been.
The true mastermind of the game takes a little while to be introduced, but even they have a moment in which they are shown in a truly sympathetic, even pitiful light. This one moment, just at the end of the game, precedes the final boss fight. Usually in Resident Evil games, this is the point where the villain gets angry and swears vengeance against the protagonist before transforming into a tougher monster. Instead, there’s a beautiful moment when Ethan’s tormentor, facing oblivion, breaks into tears and despairs at never having known what it feels like to be loved…by anyone. Compared to many of the villains in Resident Evil’s history, the villain of Resident Evil 7 is not simply a cartoonishly evil plot device the likes of a bad guy from “Captain Planet”, but a real human being whose endless suffering without the support or love of others transformed them into both a literal and figurative monster.
The Gameplay
Capcom has finally started paying attention to what’s been happening in the horror genre outside of their own franchises. I say that because the game is riddled with great gameplay design choices that seem to have been lifted directly from other scary games. Like Outlast, there is an emphasis on stealth-based gameplay; there are only a few, powerful enemies vulnerable only in very specific circumstances (especially in the beginning). As the in F.E.A.R. series, the player experiences surreal hallucinations involving creepy little girls with long, black hair. There are even a few boss battles that feel like they came straight out of Dead Space, as well as one particularly memorable fight involving – get this – a f***ing chainsaw duel. If that alone doesn’t get you excited for this game, nothing will.
Like the legendary P.T., Resident Evil 7 also makes use of limited characters and space. I wouldn’t necessarily consider it a spiritual successor to P.T…rather, an evolution of it. Unlike some horror games, RE 7 doesn’t feel like a grand, macabre adventure. It feels like a traumatic night in the lives of Ethan and Mia that took hours of tenacity and resourcefulness to survive. The fact that the game takes place in a very limited environment compared to other games in the series really reinforces the sense that the player is trapped…seven hours in, I realized I had barely travelled 700 feet. Not since the original nightmare in the first game’s Spencer Mansion has a Resident Evil game captured this so well.
Although a new entry, it marks an important return to form in many ways. For example, it wouldn’t be an RE game without emblem keys and green herbs. Certain enemies also resemble enemies encountered in RE4 and RE5. Barring a fairly straightforward first hour or so of the game, things open up and get somewhat open-ended. There’s a similar feel to the Baker’s house to that of the mansion in RE1 – it’s big, it’s mostly empty, it’s full of strange rooms and strange objects – and you never know what, or who is waiting around the corner.
Besides the solid story, scares and core gameplay, Resident Evil 7 boasts an extremely intense VR experience. In addition to being chased by monsters, bugs at times fall from the ceiling and crawl all over the player. As Ethan, we see our arms desperately slap at the giant creepy crawlies, which, gross as it is to watch it as part of a traditional video game, is worse in VR. The feeling of watching a monster bite into your neck flesh while you’re in VR mode is truly horrifying, one that compels me to recommend not playing it in VR if you have a heart condition.
Despite being full of great design choices, there are problems with it. Some of the puzzles, though way more unique and interesting than what has been seen in the series before, are straightforward and rudimentary, and thus much easier compared to other titles. Even certain Resident Evil games released in the nineties had me, at some point, scratching my head for hours trying to get past a puzzle to progress through the game, so if you’re looking for the thrill of solving a difficult problem with your mind, you may find RE7 somewhat lacking.
The scares aren’t the most potent I’ve experienced, but as this game was clearly designed to be absolutely sh**-your-pants terrifying…in VR. It’s not that the game isn’t scary without VR; it’s definitely scary either way. Yet, without VR, some of the freakier moments just don’t have the right amount of sting.
The Graphics
As mentioned before, there’s a lot in this game that seems to have been inspired by other horror games. For example, a big part of the scares in Condemned (2005) was the environment; tip-toeing through dilapidated crack dens and tangibly filthy abandoned department stores helped create a sense of dread, like the player really, really shouldn’t be where they are.
A lot of work went into the environment on this one. Little touches in each environment give the house a distinct sense of being in disrepair and neglect. It’s done well because it’s done with subtlety. Capcom doesn’t make it look like a crack den or meth lab by filling it with crack pipes and dirty test tubes, they fill it with blasé old board games, the kind you’d see in a grandparents’ attic, as well as schlocky paperback novels, both of which can be seen cluttering the shelves and tabletops of the house. They fill it with old magazines and newspapers that look like they’ve been sitting where they are for decades unopened. They make the lawn full of four-foot blades of grass concealing rusted out old trucks and derelict toilet bowls.
Unlike the posh interior of the Spencer mansion, the Baker property gives off a distinct sense of its creepy itself. These details create a distinct sense of place – not just “where” the character is, but the nature of that setting. After all, nothing says “Gothic Americana” quite like a voodoo doll made of corn husks.
The graphics are used quite well in this game, but the quality of the graphics themselves are a little rough. A lot of the characters’ lips blatantly don’t match the words their characters are saying, which tends to break immersion. The textures are nice, and the facial expressions of certain characters actually manage to be expressive without a trace of uncanniness to them, which, even with modern technology, is definitely not an easy task.
The Sound
The voice acting and dialogue in RE7 is some of the best in the series, even if there is some classic Resident Evil campiness to it at times. Zoey’s voice sounds like someone from Beverly Hills trying to do an impression of someone from the Deep South. Otherwise, the quality of voice acting is actually pretty solid.
The sound is an important component of gameplay in Resident Evil 7. It helps you survive by allowing you to gauge how close or far an enemy is to you, given how far away their insane grumblings or sickly gurgles sound. Still, this isn’t something you can necessarily rely on, as enemies can sometimes sneak up on you.
The main standout in this category is the soundtrack. The cover of the old American folk song, “Go Tell Aunt Rhode” shows up throughout the game, starting with the title screen.
The Replay Value
Resident Evil is not known for the depth of its storytelling, but this one managed to knock it straight out of the park. It ends with all the conflict of the immediate story wrapped up, but with a few unanswered questions: for example, the whereabouts of one or two Family members, depending on your choices in the game. There’s also a mysterious cameo at the end of the game. Without spoiling anything, it seems clear that Capcom took a page out of EA’s book for this game, specifically in the case of Mass Effect 3 – they saved some of the best parts for the DLC. It’s not as though the game isn’t enjoyable without it, but those interested in the story are definitely intended to check out the additional chapters, including one to be released this Spring.
Besides the DLC, this game has moderate to moderately-high replayability.
The Final Verdict:
Resident Evil 7 Gets a 9/10.
I find it poetic that, over the years, Resident Evil as a franchise has refused to die. Instead of being renewed through a reboot, it mutated into something new, coming back stronger than ever – much like the monsters that characterize the games. I’m glad that Capcom has adapted – and that they have been able to make something which, in addition to innovating, is full of heart. You can really tell that the people involved in the creation of this game loved what they were creating. I, for one, look forward to seeing more of it.
Although it has its flaws, Resident Evil 7 is a rich experience packed with mystery, scares, and interesting characters. It is hands-down the best entry in the series since 2004.
Special Thanks to my pal Albert Garcia for helping make this review possible!
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