Resident Evil 7 is a return to the horror genre from the survival action games that the previous three games had been. Presented in a first person perspective, you play as Ethan, a man who is trying to find his missing wife, who sent him a mysterious message, first telling him not to look for her, then where to find her.
The game starts off very promising – the house is suitably creepy, and when you run into the Baker family for the first time, they’re proper horror game enemies. Completely impossible to kill, they are implacable and unstoppable, and all you can do is slow them down and then run and hide. Horrible things happen to the main character, and there is something fundamentally wrong with his wife, Mia. Zoe, who seems to be related to the Bakers in some way, helps you out over the phone, and the whole thing seems to be unfolding rather nicely, as you try to explore a house while being stalked by a man who can’t be stopped and can’t be killed.
There are even boss fights against these enemies, where you use powerful environmental objects to seemingly cause them severe damage and even “kill” them, but just minutes later they pop back up again and start throwing you around.
The problem is, the game has to move on, and after that point, the game stops really working.
The reason for this is fairly simple – when you’re early on in the game, you are weak and helpless. The house is creepy, the enemies are implacable, and you don’t know what’s going on. The few “lesser” enemies you face are really tough to take down and take a ton of shots from the pistol to the head to kill.
To finally break out of the house, you get a shotgun and you manage to take down one of the Bakers before you break out. The fight is suitably dramatic – after multiple prior encounters where no matter what you did, your foe kept on coming back, here, you can finally do a good number on him, and there isn’t the same sense that he’s just going to pop back up again.
But at this point, the Bakers are no longer invulnerable, and you are better armed and can actually meaningfully fight back. And this pretty much makes the game fall apart, because now, you know what’s going to happen – you’re going to creep around for a bit, there’s going to be a boss fight, and you’re going to kill them, and then they’ll come back and you’ll kill them again.
So what was originally a really cool horror game turns into a more action oriented game. The enemies are still not something you want to waste ammo on, but the fact that you know you CAN just take them down makes them feel a lot less menacing – something that stays until a brief section towards the end of the game, where you are temporarily disarmed again (well, sort of. It’s complicated). The feeling of helplessness is gone.
Worse, after searching the first house, the next two areas just feel like rehashes, where you’re just going up against a different member of the Baker family. The third area does mix up the formula a bit, but it still ends up following the same structure, which makes the game feel too predictable, which undermines the horror.
And frankly, the other two members of the Baker family just aren’t as good at being intimidating as Jack is.
The result is something like letting air out of a balloon, as the game feels like it just gradually deflates, transitioning more and more into a FPS game as enemies become less and less of a threat – but it still feels a bit janky, because it was originally a horror game.
All in all, by the end of it, I was armed to the gills and ready for anything, and while this served as a bit of catharsis, it ultimately felt like the game was too long even at only 10 hours in length.
It doesn’t help that the protagonists of the game – Ethan and his wife, Mia – are frankly not very interesting characters. Ethan feels kind of generic, and often seems to be kind of useless, and Mia’s character is very vaguely defined for most of the game, until you get to nearly the end of it. And while Jack Baker is a cool foe, the other two members of the family aren’t as interesting, even if a late-game twist tries to fix that.
So what are my overall feelings on this game?
On the one hand, the start of the game was really good, and delivered the horror, “don’t get caught” feel very well. On the other hand, the game just kind of goes downhill after you escape the first “real” area of the game.
So I’m not sure I can really recommend this. It was interesting to play through for a bit, but at the end, I wasn’t terribly invested.
2.0