A
return to form. Resident Evil is finally
a Resident Evil game again. These are
the things I kept hearing about the first person survival horror game known as
Resident Evil VII. Finally, save rooms
are back, storage boxes are back and limited inventory is back. Finally, your player character is a
vulnerable horror protagonist, rather than a wacky action hero, punching
boulders or roundhouse kicking zombies in the face. After seeing some
proper gameplay, I had high hopes that mainline Resident Evil was, in fact,
coming back home. So, the question is,
did it really come back home or was Resident Evil VII even more detached from
the core franchise than RE4 and its successors?
We’ll
start with answering the above. No, no
it is not a return to form, the game is, in fact, more different from its
predecessors than even RE4 could ever have hoped to be. Resident Evil VII is less a Resident Evil
game, than it is an amalgamation of gritty American slasher movies like Texas
Chainsaw and scary little girl horror, with some bio-terror thrown in. Oh sure, the game has you running to save
rooms and managing your inventory, but that’s not enough to really consider
this a return to the franchise’s roots.
Resident Evil: Revelations already did that and frankly, did it better.
Resident
Evil VII often feels like it’s going through some sort of identity crisis, it
isn’t sure if it wants to be a campy Resident Evil game, if it wants to be campy
slasher horror, if it wants to be grim and serious or if it wants to be J-horror. People may give RE5 and RE6 shit for how
straight faced they can get, but they’re consistent with themselves. People separate RE4 from the lot, saying the
camp was intentional, but it wasn’t. Like
RE5 and RE6, they weren’t trying to be ironic and like RE5 and RE6, the “ironic”
camp is the result of Japanese writers attempting to write cool American action
heroes. Resident Evil VII’s camp, on the
other hand, feels more artificial and intentional, given many of the game’s
campier elements are mostly just references to other horror camp. So on one hand, we’ve got this self-serious
horror story and on the other, it’s a celebration of horror and camp.
The
mishmash of Texas Chainsaw with the more Japanese imagery of spooky ghost girls
with long hair, doesn’t help in making the game feel consistent with itself or
the franchise it’s part of. The game
starts feeling even more out-of-tune with itself when Mia, the protag’s wife,
decides that she’s in an Evil Dead movie and goes Deadite, complete with
cursing and the campy growly voice. It’s
just a weird inconsistent homage to other horror media. Game starts off on a spooky Southern
estate. Becomes a found footage flick,
complete with a nod to Blair Witch, and then it’s Evil Dead, with your Deadite
girlfriend chasing after you and lopping off your arm with a chainsaw, just in
case you didn’t get the reference. This
is all within the first twenty minutes, before the game proper even starts.
This
identity crisis also find their way into the gameplay. Having been clearly inspired by many of the
modern stealth/hiding simulator horror games, RE7 often has you fleeing from, and
sneaking around, immortal enemies. So in
some moments, the game is a modern horror stealth/hiding simulator and in
others, it’s traditional survival horror. Unstoppable characters, however, are kind of
the antithesis of survival horror. A
major point of the genre, especially in classic Resident Evil, is to conserve
and wisely use the supplies and ammunition given you. You're expected to kill things, but you have to kill wisely. Even with similar enemies like Nemesis, the
monster could be dealt with. You had
options. Do you want to run away from the monster and risk running into some
difficulty when exploring areas for key items or do you risk wasting your
resources, potentially making future areas more difficult? There are no choices when it comes to the
Bakers. You’re not wrestling with any
decisions here, you know they cannot be killed or incapacitated, so you just do
what you’re expected to do in all these games, you run. These unstoppable enemies create further issues outside of the inconsistencies
brought on by two poorly fused gaming horror genres and the issue is that they're tedious.
The
Baker AI, frankly, isn’t very good. These
unstoppable enemies are easy to evade and easier to hide from. As a result, there’s really no horror or
tension when the Bakers are around, as would be in something like Alien:
Isolation. They’re really just
annoying. You dread them not because
they’re terrifying, unstoppable monsters, you dread them, because they slow
progress and they’re too stupid to make encounters with them thrilling or
rewarding. You don’t feel that sense of
catharsis when you outsmart and narrowly avoid one of the Bakers. All you feel is a sense of tedium. They’re not here to present any challenge or
threat, they’re just here because they were on Capcom’s checklist of modern
horror gaming tropes.
I
think my biggest grip with the game’s inconsistency though, is how much the
game throws at Ethan. He’s supposed to
be a rookie, we’re supposed to feel weak in his shoes, because he’s not a
badass like Chris Redfield. He’s weak,
he’s inexperienced. Despite this, Ethan
ultimately feels more unstoppable than the entire cast of RE6, which includes a
woman with a Wolverine like healing factor.
Ethan takes more punishment than previous protagonists and barely seems
phased by any of it. He is stabbed countless times by Mia, gets a knife through
his hand, then gets a screwdriver through the same hand and finally, he loses
that same hand. What's he do? He casually picks it up, finds a handgun, says
"Okay, fine." as if Mia chopping his hand off is just a mild irritation
he's finally going to deal with. Then he
enters combat with his chainsaw wielding Deadite wife and he fucking wins. Guy
is bleeding out a stump where his hand once was, probably has a dozen or so
knife wounds and he still beats his Deadite wife, who just minutes ago had the
strength to throw him up a flight of stairs and later through a fucking wall. The game has the same problem Tomb Raider
(2013) did. It goes straight to 11 from the start, with how much they physically
punish the player character and then it expects me to feel like he’s weak and helpless. It just
doesn’t work and, again, goes to further create an odd inconsistency in how the
game presents itself. It wants me to
feel weak and helpless, while at the same time throwing Ethan through the
wringer and having him just walk it off like a bad hangover.
That’s
not to say the game doesn’t have its moments or that it’s all bad. Despite these issues, I did have a good time
with Resident Evil VII and I’ll definitely be playing through it again on
higher difficulties to get all those sweet unlocks and the like.
For
the positives. The latter half of the
game, is thankfully more consistent. Once
we get past mom and pop Baker the game starts to pick up. Lucas Baker, for instance, is a far more interesting and
menacing antagonist character than either of the elder Bakers. He's also the most entertaining to deal with. Unlike his parents, he doesn’t stalk an area, instead he lays traps around for the player to get caught in. This section provides a break from the tedium of sneaking past bad AI and,
instead, expects the player to pay closer attention to their surroundings. It’s
not challenging in the least, but I’ll admit it was a refreshing change and enjoyable change. Lucas’ section seems most like an homage to
the SAW flicks, as there’s more an industrial look to his areas and he
enjoys speaking to Ethan through televisions. He also gets off on trapping people in
small death rooms, complete with riddles and puzzles for elaborate traps. His section is definitely a highlight of the
game, because of his manic personality and the more inspired trap/puzzle
set-up. Still, Lucas isn’t the best part, a highlight for sure, but not the best. That award goes to Mia.
Once
we’re finished with Lucas and once Ethan takes a nap, handing Mia temporary
protagonist duties, the game finally gets really good and drops the references to horror
camp and starts to focus on horrible bio-weapons. In essence it starts feeling a little more
like Resident Evil. This section is also
benefited from the fact that Mia is just a more competent and interesting
protagonist than Ethan. For starters, she
follows the lineage of characters like Ada Wong, in that she’s something of a
secretive double agent, though with a little less femme fatale. She’s also just more fun and empowering to
play. The moment you take control of her
in a flashback, when she pulls out a fucking sub-machine gun and coolly
searches for a self-aware and increasingly psychotic bio-weapon, while calmly
fighting said bio-weapon’s dangerous minions, you know she’s far more
capable than her husband. The game does
a good job conveying this, not just through narrative, but through
gameplay. Enemies are nerfed and much
easier to take down when playing as Mia.
In this regard, she feels more like a classic RE character, she's competent and not just because the plot gives her super armor. Mia just feels better to play, because her
section doesn’t feel inconsistent with itself like Ethan’s does. She’s presented as competent and therefore is. The game even gives reason why she’s meek and
scared for a good portion. She’s got
some mild amnesia and doesn’t quite remember what happened before she arrived
at the Bakers’ residence. Amnesia isn’t
the best writing, but hey, at least it’s consistent and explains why she’s not
a collected badass like she is in the flashback.
The
writing and characters, which I’ve so far failed to mention, are also kind of
flat and just as confused as the rest of the game. The first big issue is just how stupid the
whole set-up of the game is. Ethan just
decides to continue pressing forward, despite all indications telling him he’s
in a bad place and should get the fuck out of there. This isn’t some James Sunderland like
character, who’s motivated to trek into a spooky place because unconscious
guilt draws him to this place of punishment.
This is just some dude, whose wife has been missing for three-years and
just turns up in bum fuck Louisiana, in a creepy dilapidated estate with saws
and animal heads decorating a side entrance.
I get horror characters need to act stupid, but this is pretty up there
in terms of really, really dumb, unbelievable decisions in horror media.
The
biggest question all over this game, however, is the tanker and the Baker
estate. Some missing oil tanker running
aground in some Louisiana bayou is bound to draw some attention. Sure, the ship was missing, but it clearly
wasn’t far from shore and a map in the end credits marks the last location of
the ship. No one looked for it in those
three-years and if they did, no one decided to maybe check if some of its
remains washed up onshore? There are also dozens of people who went missing in this area and some investigations are said to have occurred. Yet the tanker draws no attention. Blue Umbrella
knows about it, so you'd think the authorities would've noticed a big ass tanker just hanging out by some random Louisiana farm, which is also around the same place people have gone missing. Three-years and there were no other investigations? Maybe I missed some document indicating why
no one other than a private military organization and some other bio-weapons
company knew where the hell the Annabelle was.
Also, what the hell is up with
the Baker’s house? I get it was
renovated by a company likely working off of the same wacky shit thrown
together by the guy who helped oversee design of the Spencer Mansion, but it
doesn’t make sense here. Why is this
family just okay with random dog head emblems locking their front door? Why do they have shadow puzzles which open up
secret passageways into their den? Why
do they have a clock puzzle in their room, which opens up a passageway to the
basement? Why do they have such a HUGE
basement with a full generator room, an incinerator and a fucking morgue? Why do they have a shotgun statue, which
locks you in the room if you remove said shotgun? These were normal people prior to the
infection and many of these renovations were shown to have been contracted long
before they were infected. The Spencer
Mansion design makes some sense in universe.
It was an intentionally wacky booby trap filled place and it was owned
by a weird eccentric who hired an eccentric designer to oversee its
production. Same goes for the RPD
building. It’s silly, but it’s also part
of the bad camp charm of the original games.
REVII is just too grounded for this zany shit to fly without reasonable
explanation.
Anyway,
the writing. Ethan’s not the most
strongly written of protagonists, he’s pretty bland in fact. Occasionally, they spice things up with a one
liner here or there, but, again, they just feel inconsistent with the character
we’ve been presented with. One minute,
he’s freaking out about some centipedes crawling around a tight corridor he’s
creeping through, the next he sees an older woman turn into a human/spider
hybrid and remarks “That’s special.” He
alternates between being a corny one-liner spewing Leon clone and a scared
husband trying to save his wife.
Mia,
while being more interesting, is still pretty under developed as a character. Her whole shtick is neat, with her having a
double life and working with a shadowy company or some such, playing caretaker
to a bio-weapon. Beyond that though,
there’s not much to her and she’s just kind of hard to endear to as a player,
given our first meeting her ends with her attempting to kill us with a
chainsaw.
The
Bakers are just psychotic yokels. The
performances are good, especially from Jack, but they’re your typical redneck
murder family. Zoe is also just as
uninteresting as Mia and her relatives.
She calls us on the phone a few times, we meet her in person once and
then she’s gone from the game. There’s
not much to her, other than being the cryptic/helpful phone lady.
It’s
all just so basic, which is odd considering this is the same guy who wrote the
much praised Spec Ops: The Line, a game which played with stereotypes
nicely. Here, he’s just offering a
by-the-numbers horror plot, with the gritty tone of the Platinum Dunes Chainsaw
movies, the bio-weapons shenanigans of traditional RE and a myriad horror
references. While all this stuff can be
good and could even be potentially awesome together, REVII’s plot is ultimately
less than the sum of its parts.
At
the end of the day, REVII is a good game, a flawed game, but a good one. I didn’t hate my time with it, but I do hope
this isn’t the kind of stuff we’re looking at for the future of the
series. Say what you will about Resident
Evil 6, but at least it’s a Resident Evil game, over-the-top action and all. This? Other than the bit with Mia, not so much.
