Review: Resident Evil 7
Written by Ben Vollmer
It takes about ten minutes. That’s how long you have in Resident Evil 7 until it flips humanity on its back and shows off its grotesque underside. Perhaps that’s what makes the game so frightening: it feels rooted in real human evil.
The premise is pretty standard horror. You take over as Ethan Winter, a young adult who seems to take little issue with venturing into an abandoned house to find his lost wife, Mia. It’s unclear why (at first), but Mia has asked that you don’t come to the house and find her. Of course, Ethan ignores that warning and marches forward with conviction. It doesn’t take long before Ethan’s hand is sawed off by his wife and the whole thing seems like a very bad decision.
Once you get past the sheer absurdity of Ethan trying to find his lost wife alone, with evidence (in the form of a video tape) in hand that she was kidnapped, the narrative is pretty intriguing. You’re soon met by the Baker family, the quintet who kidnapped your wife and put her under some weird, manic spell. There’s something abundantly twisted about the Bakers, from the way that they speak to their brutally violent behavior, but you can’t quite put your finger on it. They all seem to be in on the same weird joke.
Ultimately, Ethan finds himself imprisoned in the household. It’s an interesting situation, because you find yourself able to roam freely for the most part. The house paves way for some of the most interesting level design since Dark Souls, creating avenues that lead to shortcuts and safe havens. So much of the game rests on exploration, which plays perfectly because your discoveries are as often terrifying as they are useful. Resident Evil 7 flawlessly weaves horror with sanctuary, giving you just enough room to breathe that the scares never become superfluous.
The game essentially has four chapters, with the first three being near perfection and the fourth being decidedly inferior. The first three deal with the most volatile members of the Baker family, each with their own sections of the household to patrol. The first might be the most terrifying, as it’s your first real experience with how powerful and undecidedly manic the Bakers are. Without spoiling anything, the patriarch of the family is damned near invulnerable and his slow, relentless chase is a never ending boss fight. When you finally rid yourself of a family member (or at least think you do) you are a little more free to explore the area. This is nice, because every item you come across is going to be used to survive.
Survival horror really struggles finding a balance between giving the player too much and not giving them enough at all. At the risk of having players run endlessly from one point to another, trying to dip and dodge enemies, Resident Evil 7 empowers the player with powerful weaponry and scarce ammo. It’s just enough to get the job done, and the ammo is perfectly spaced so that you’re never feeling too good about yourself. There’s also a simple crafting mechanic that involves pairing two items on the go for either ammo or health packs. Death doesn’t have a ton of consequences, but it’s just terrible enough to have to retread the same scares over again that avoiding it at all costs is something most players will likely do.
The game isn’t inherently difficult, even though Ethan is far less imposing than his foes. The wonderful thing about the game’s difficulty is that, with the exception of a single family member, the Baker family really just isn’t all that smart. Ethan, on the other hand, is able to use his environment well enough to make it a fair fight. There are a handful of puzzles in the game that all feel pretty well done, even if they get a bit repetitive toward the end (each area involves a very similar “fit the shadow of an item against the wall” puzzle, for instance).
The game reaches its climax in a third act that asks players to sift their way through a booby trapped kitchen. Masquerading itself as a birthday party, the player has to find a way to light the candle in a birthday cake with a handful of tools that will get you there. It’s a bizarre psychological play that’s eerily reminiscent of something like Saw, and it works as a nice breather from the more imposing mother and father of the Baker family. If anything, it’s more than enough to keep the formula from getting stale, ala Outlast. In fact, the game refuses to overstay its welcome as everything moves at an incredibly brisk pace, moving the player from one area to the next until you’re met with what should have been the final boss of the game.
Unfortunately, the narrative eventually topples over itself and the gameplay settles into an odd retread of the worst parts of the game. There are several things not to like, here, including the fact that the game totally removes you from the Baker house. This wouldn’t be a huge deal, but one of the game’s key collectable items revolves around spending them at a centralized hub. If you’ve been saving them up for any item in particular, the game gives you no option to spend them after the “3rd act” of the game.
Instead, you spend time exploring a crashed cruise ship along the shores of the Louisiana bayou. It’s not a bad idea in theory, but it plays a lot like a poorly thought out piece of DLC. The narrative continues to twist and turn its way into an eventual reveal that makes the whole thing worth it, but the few hours you spend in between the aforementioned boss fight and the end of the game are largely spent meandering the ship in hopes of making the right turn.There’s so much that this game does well, so it’s unfortunate that it chose to rely on some of the things it didn’t for the final act.
Resident Evil 7 excels as a horror game and less so as a first-person shooter. When the two are blended, it works really well. When the game begins to ask you to shoot your way out of a situation, things get a little more streamlined and much less exciting. It’s good that, even in the game’s weaker moments, it manages to keep you intrigued by feeding you the exposition involved in the world’s most recent strain of whatever illness it is that’s sweeping the world. It’s no surprise that the game feels Resident Evil, despite fan’s concerns that the series was taking too much of a jump. The first-person camera does wonders to immerse you in the freaky, atmospheric Baker house.
Even with its shortcomings toward the end of the game, Resident Evil 7 manages to be the most polished and provoking horror title since Outlast. Even when compared to some of the latest greats and the infamous “P.T. Demo”, the game exceeds any expectations that one could have reasonably expected.
Score: 7.5
