Note: this review contains spoilers!
The first half of Resident Evil 7 is the scariest game I have ever played. After the horribly received Resident Evil 6, Capcom have pulled the once-in-a-decade trick of completely throwing out whatever we knew about how a Resident Evil game is played and starting over. Well, that isn't completely honest. Resident Evil 7 is the closest the series has ever been to the first one in setting and gameplay. Like in the original classic, almost the entire game takes place on one piece of property and focuses on inventory management, keys, and exploration. But Resident Evil 7 isn't a retread. As a matter of fact, I'd hesitate to say anything in the first half of the game feels like Resident Evil at all. Rather, the game feels more akin to the likes of Amnesia or Outlast with its first person perspective, use of harsh shadows and creepy sounds that really compliment a pair of headphones (just try not to throw them when you are inevitably scared). If that comparison weirds you Resident Evil or horror fans out, don't leave just yet. Full disclosure: I was never that big of a fan of Amnesia or Outlast. These types of "crouch and hide" games always felt a lot more tedious than scary to me (Soma gets a pass for its incredible story). Fortunately, Resident Evil 7 has the solution. Simply put: guns. Not a lot of them, and with very little ammo, but guns nonetheless.
Resident Evil 7 takes place in the Baker residence in Louisiana, an abandoned house that has been proximate to a series of disappearances over the last three years. You play as Ethan, whose girlfriend Mia has not-so-coincidentally been missing for the exact same three years, and has sent you an email out of the blue telling you to pick her up at the Louisiana residence, well after you thought she was dead. Of course, the Baker residence isn't abandoned, and of course there is a lot more than meets the eye. Resident Evil 7 feels like a disturbing hybrid of Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Blaire Witch Project, with all of their most unsettling properties. The Baker family are the most nightmare versions of the hostile redneck trope, made up of the determined patriarch Jack who wants you to call him "daddy" and join his family, Marguerite, his wife, and her horrific insect hoard, and Lucas, an intelligent sadist who designs elaborate Jigsaw-like torture games for you to run through. The house itself is grimy, full of trash and rotting things, and in general disarray. Your viewpoint throughout the whole thing is from first person - a first for the series - and it gives the experience a seriously unsettling vérité feeling, even going so far as to have the flashlight cause focusing issues. It can be somewhat nauseating, which (for better or worse) adds to the experience.
The early part of the game will have you exploring the Baker residence before finally finding Mia, who is alive in a cell. She immediately freaks out, confronting you as to why or how you are there, telling you she never sent you any kind of email and that you both need to leave now. While attempting to escape, Mia changes (her eyes going black and the veins in her face sticking out, all very J-horror in aesthetic) and begins to attack you, forcing you to lodge a hatchet into her neck. You receive a phone call from within the house of another of the Baker family, Zoe, who wants to get off the residence as much as you. But your fight with Mia isn't over. Like the rest of the Baker clan, she can regenerate, and she quickly takes a chainsaw to your left hand. This seems as good a time as any to mention: this game is grisly with its violence. I can't think of many games that are as violent as Resident Evil 7. After this sequence, you run around with a profusely bleeding stump for quite some time before Jack finds you and knocks you out. As an introduction, it works great, full of scares, ample tension, and several shocking moments. Having to kill Mia (or, think I was killing Mia) moments after rescuing her (knowing she was the entire reason I came to this hellscape in the first place) was a moment of serious pause for me. It wasn't just that I found her dead in her cell in the basement - something I honestly thought was going to happen - I was shown she was alive and that my plight might not be for naught, only to put me in the position of taking that away from myself. It's something games do best, by forcing you into a decision that forces reflection. It doesn't invoke something particularly deep about the plot or themes, but it sets a standard of unpredictability the game would follow for most of its playtime.
After this, the game starts proper. You were captured by the Bakers, who have stapled your hand back on and poured some incredible healing liquid over the wound that somehow reconnects it. There is actually a sequence you can get here where Jack cuts your leg off and makes you crawl to the other side of the room for the health bottle in order to reattach it. But soon after waking from being knocked out, you quickly escape, and are allowed to explore the house as you want, so long as you have the keys to do so. Throughout the main house, you will periodically bump into Jack, who can be taken out at the cost of a large portion of your ammo reserves, but he will regenerate after awhile. Likewise, the old house has Marguerite, who can sick a swarm of mutated insects at you. Much like Outlast, you can creep around Jack (and at at least one part, you will have to), but giving you the ability to fight - at quite the cost, but fight nonetheless - gives Resident Evil 7 a better sense of agency. Early in the game, I was afraid of getting sick of the Jack mechanic, but to my surprise he doesn't show up that often. It made the few times he did appear all the more scary. I would be roaming the house looking for supplies or where certain keys went while this palpable timer incremented in the back of my mind from the last Jack sighting. It was always a mounting tension between Jack sightings, a palpable gnawing at my sense of safety.
The game slides into more Resident Evil 4 type territory as you enter the latter half. The final boss battles Marguerite and Jack feel very much like something Leon Kennedy fought in that Spanish town, and while I've read several complaints about this section I really liked the change of pace. Jack, in particular, was really fun as I cathartically shot out each of his many eyeballs. The final sections of the Baker property are much more gamey as apposed to the atmospheric frightfest that inhabited the early half, but I enjoyed the pacing this created and, as I was getting more and more familiar with the shadow drenched dilapidation, it was getting harder and harder for the game to remain scary. When you get off the Baker residence, however, is where the game starts to suffer.
The final section of the game finds you at a wrecked ship and a secret lab in the nearby salt mines. In the ship, you will play as Mia for a little while, where you learn exactly what all is going on. The story is pretty simple: Mia is a covert operative working for The Connections, an Umbrella competitor working on a psychoactive mold with biological warfare potential. She was on the boat transporting a little girl named Eveline, genetically modified with the mold in her genome as a bioweapon capable of controlling peoples minds and infecting them with the mold. Eveline, however, had other plans. Desiring a family (of which there is a lot of theories posited in the game, none of them particularly interesting), she decides to outright attack the ship to stop it from reaching yet another lab for her to live in. She tries to convince Mia to become her mother, of which Mia agrees if just to calm her down, but it doesn't stop her. Eveline can vomit the mold beyond her body weight, and this mold can form into these black, mold creatures. Using these and mind control she is able to wreck the ship in a Louisiana swamp, where the Bakers unfortunately rescue Mia and Eveline. Eveline, then, has been controlling the Bakers the whole time (although there is some evidence that at least Lucas is fucking nuts all on his own, having written about killing a peer of his when he was a child by locking him in the attic for days), making her the real baddie.
I don't really like this plot. It is pretty standard Resident Evil bioweapon stuff, so I suppose I won't complain too much about that, but the scary, black haired girl is straight out of take-your-pick J-horror. It is a an incredible unoriginal concept, executed pretty much by the standard rules, and, maybe worst of all, was done quite a bit better in the F.E.A.R. series (at least the first two...). Thematically, it does provoke imagery that is particularly interesting, but doesn't quite go anywhere. The plot, summed up by its predominant moving parts and not its underlying mythos, is about a redneck family possessed by some hateful entity that are trying to "indoctrinate" (really: infect with the mold) people into their family. For the cherry on top: the mold looks like oil. It seems the game is playing with some modern political imagery, talking of a possessed impoverished group led astray into believing in a family unit, but it obviously doesn't really go anywhere. If I was being generous, I could say that Eveline is a weapon created by a corporate entity, and thus fulfills some complete theme - one of the horror of our time - but I'm not convinced. I don't think it works as a complete thematic whole, but I do thing the imagery works in its own right to provoke something truly frightening and relevant, even if it does so a bit loose on the landing. The plot isn't great, but the pieces are.
Those before mentioned mold creatures are the weakest part of the game by far, and they populate this entire latter section. The mechanic is good enough: shoot their limbs off the kill them, but they do massive amounts of damage if you don't kill them fast enough. Add to this that the creatures are bullet sponges most of the time (I could never tell when they would take a few shots or a few clips, outward appearance indicating nothing), and you have an enemy that is trying to tell you not to kill it. Shoot the legs off and run. I like this, if it weren't for the fact the things are so ugly and, damning enough, not scary. They are comical looking humanoids with wide, cartoonish mouths that I assume where going for the uncanny look, but missed by a significant margin. They were more frustrating than anything, and severely dampened the ending of the game for me. Luckily for us, the game quickly ties up loose ends and it ends. You have a couple hours, max, in this section and then roll credits.
Taking the game as a whole, I personally loved what Resident Evil 7 did. It was precisely the kind of horror game I'd wanted for a long time, and didn't know it. It was unsettling, grisly, and unpredictable with an excellent setting, memorable enemies, and that exploration mechanic that keeps you engaged between the scares. Now lets see how Capcom fucks it up again.
8.5
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