2017 Developer: Capcom, Directed: Koshi Nakanishi

Score 3/5

Horror games are fun, but they’re also a lot harder to enjoy all the way through for me than say, a horror movie. That’s because for me, the atmosphere of a horror game dies the first time I do.

The opening of Resident Evil 7: Biohazard is awesome. It’s so gross and fucked up and you play through this recording of someone else getting fucked up in this house in the bayou and then you need to follow in their footsteps. Awesome. Then you get caught and you’re getting stalked and you’re hiding and you’re hunting for healing items and ammo and anything that might help you if you get attacked. Great.

Then I fought the first boss. Had trouble moving the narrow-fov-fps camera fast enough to track the guy in an enclosed space. Died. And the atmosphere went with it. Now It was just a guy I had to kill. An annoying guy that had like 2 or 3 phases I think, and I didn’t have a huge amount of ammo at this point, and he moved fast and I moved slow. Ugh. I beat him after a few tries, but I’d already died and gotten a little annoyed. I could die and die again and it didn’t matter as long as I could also make a little progress here and there. Beat a boss when I needed to.

This happened to me with Outlast (Red Barrels, 2013). Amazing atmosphere. Then I died a few times and was just sprinting past and away from monsters as long as I could to try to solve nonsense puzzles and make some semblence of progress because all the stakes disappated with my initial failure.

It’s still good fun. I jumped a couple times when a being appeared from around a corner. I recoiled at the often disgusting nature of this area I found myself in. Speaking of the area, that was the really interesting part of it for me. I knew Resident Evil found itself in some troubles after RE5 and 6. They weren’t received well. The series kinda chilled for a little bit. And RE7 was the revival that’s kicked off a kind of Capcom golden age right now. And this whole game was taking place in this little farm in the bayou! That’s wild! A whole AAA development studio and publisher making such a contained horror/action experience. Wild.

I finally escaped the farm. And the game didn’t end.

I have trouble with this every now and then. A game doesn’t know that it doesn’t need an epilogue. I was satisfied with Ellie and Dina at the farmhouse at the end of The Last of Us: Part II (Naughty Dog, 2020). I didn’t need to go to California. I was satisfied with RE7 after I beat the “final boss” as I thought him. I didn’t need there to be more.

I guess they had to tie it all into some kind of private corporation experiment gone wrong, Resident Evil style, but I wasn’t too bothered by the idea of never finding out why this farm was as fucked up as it was. And that final act was the weakest of the bunch in my opinion. Sure, I didn’t go into it in the most willing of headspaces, but it wasn’t great. The Resident Evil part of it was fucked up, sure, I guess, but by the end I was once again just sprinting past the monsters.