Note: This review contains spoilers.
The genre of survival horror is largely thanks to two fallen dynasties. While the history of the genre dates back to classics like Alone in the Dark, it didn't take off until the original Playstation hosted two games that established the baseline for (many) others to follow: Resident Evil and Silent Hill. While Silent Hill kept its focus on story, puzzles, and psychological toying, Resident Evil wanted more focus on combat, inventory management, and the general "survival" aspect of survival horror.
I'd never played the original Resident Evil before now, and was surprised at how well the game translated to the modern age. The game focuses largely on exploration and inventory management, giving you minimal space for things like ammo health, and keys, while you explore the Spencer Mansion and its surrounding property. Exploration is one of my favorite aspects of video games as a medium, an attraction I've retained since first playing Riven as a child. Resident Evil (at least when it sticks to the mansion) is full of exploreable nooks and crannies, full of secret keys, puzzles, and monsters. One of the final areas of the game is underneath the staircase in the first room you enter, locked behind a door that requires two items picked up at the first third and end of the game. The game teases you with initially unsolvable puzzles and locked areas in order to pull you through the game and give an air of mystery to the experience.
"Mystery" is simultaneously one of the most important aspects of the game, and a rather misleading implication of the plot. Resident Evil's plot is serviceable, and sometimes even good, but it's really just horror schlock to act as dressing and reason for you to be exploring a zombie infested mansion. The broad strokes of the plot are thus: You are either Chris Redfield or Jill Valentine, a member of S.T.A.R.S., a special forces unit underneath the jurisdiction of the Raccoon City Police Department. You and your fellow S.T.A.R.S. Alpha Team members are investigating the whereabouts of Bravo Team, who in turn were investigating a series of murders on the outskirts of Raccoon City. Your team finds their crashed chopper and makes a landing, only to be ambushed by zombie dogs and forced into the mansion nearby (your coward of a helicopter pilot deciding not to wait for the team before taking off). This is the Spencer Mansion, the site where the Umbrella Corporation is experimenting to create a biological weapon that can create a super being. The tests result in a zombie-creating virus called the T-Virus, which, after years of experimentation, the mansion and its inhabitants are accidentally exposed to. The residents and workers of the mansion and the labs underneath are suddenly infected, evidence of which you pick along the way through journal entries and final words written down for loved ones. The plot culminates in you finding out that Wesker, your leader in the S.T.A.R.S., is an Umbrella employee and totally aware that he is sacrificing his men in order to save the Tyrant, the successful fruits of Umbrella's labors towards an advanced super creature, and that the S.T.A.R.S. themselves were a pet project of Umbrella the whole time.
The game's plot is fine. It doesn't have any particular symbolic depth, but it is entertainingly genre-like. This isn't to say the plot doesn't have its moments of greatness. The Lisa Trevor plotline, about an indestructible enemy encountered several times throughout the game, is a particular standout. Lisa was a little girl when Umbrella started experimenting on her with the T-Virus. Her father was the architect of the elaborate mansion you explore, who was lured into one of his own traps and left for dead by Spencer, the man responsible for the mansion's creation. When Lisa and her mother Jessica came to see her father for the celebratory completion of the mansion, they were instead detained by Spencer's men. Jessica was killed, and Spencer, in an effort to calm Lisa, sent an assistant dressed and masked as Jessica to sooth her. Lisa saw through the disguise, and promptly cut the woman's face off and began wearing it, a habit she would retain for further victims. Lisa wasn't just an example of the T-Virus, however. She was also experimented on with the G-Virus (which allows for biological regeneration in its host), and fundamental to its creation. The story is a horrifying tale of personal anguish you get from multiple perspectives as you find letters of regret and desperation from Jessica, Lisa's father, and even the mentally degrading Lisa herself. The story is heartbreaking, and acts as great set up for the inhumanity of the Umbrella Corporation, as well as setting up the possibility for a serious, psychological plot akin to Silent Hill, but the game never follows up. The game isn't any worse for it, but the story of Lisa is a very interesting mystery through the middle of the game that feels a bit more weighted in plot than the rest of the game.
The mystery of what has been going on in the Spencer Mansion would be disappointing if the game cared much about the plot. Fortunately, the game knows where its strengths are. The real mystery you're exploring, and the one driving the whole experience, is along the lines of "What does this key unlock?", or "What is this riddle asking?". Puzzles aren't Resident Evil's strength, exactly, as all of them are pretty well spelled out for you immediately. However, when you finally collect the Armor Key after seeing half a dozen locked doors with that symbol on them, the sudden rush of remembering new wings of the mansion to explore is absolutely intoxicating. The mansion's layout is incredibly well designed. You'll find yourself bouncing back and forth between the West and East wings, and finding new shortcuts between the first and second floors as you progress. The layout of the mansion quickly becomes second nature to you because of this design philosophy, where locked doors and their corresponding keys are always a significant ways away. Hallways snake between nonsensically designed and sized rooms, and often the quickest way to get to a room a few feet from you will require you to ascend floors, make three room transitions, and descend again. It's labyrinthine design, but rarely to a cumbersome degree.
One of the strengths to this floor plan is in how Resident Evil does monster placement. Main hallways for travel have their dynamics changed throughout depending on what creatures are there. Early in the game you will mostly only have to contend with the basic zombie enemy. You can shoot them dead, blow their head off, or burn them once they are on the ground. Burning the bodies isn't immediately useful, seeing as they never seem to get up after leaving the room. Later in the game, however, any zombie that hasn't been decapitated or burnt will come back as the extremely lethal and fast crimson head zombies, making them a far bigger problem. With the addition of several new crimson head zombies roaming previously empty hallways, if you didn't properly deal with these zombies early in the game you could have made the mid-part of the game more difficult for yourself. Its never overwhelming by any means, but it adds a fun bit of tension as you realize how you could have prevented this, and how thankful you are the few times you did. It's a fun dynamic between previous you and present you, and one I think works far better than most systems in games that try to give you superficial examples of your influence on the environment. Other enemies include the formidable zombie dogs which are difficult to kill given how fast they are and how easily they can pin you to the ground and rip your throat out, the Hunters which have deadly claws and can jump up to you, acid spewing spiders, mutated sharks, a giant snake, and these insect looking things that I honestly can't bother to look up the name for because they are easy to take care of and, other than looking disgusting, aren't particularly memorable or impactful.
These monsters wouldn't be so bad if they didn't take half a clip at least to take out (with the exception of those insect things). Half a clip is a lot for Resident Evil. In keeping tradition with the "survival" aspect of survival horror, ammo is rather scarce throughout (health is generally as well, but after a certain point in the game I had more health items than I knew what to do with). This means that felling a zombie takes with it quite a dent in your reserves, and must be balanced out in case you get stuck in a room with 3 of the bastards, because that knife of yours is more than likely not going to do you a lot of good without full health to take some hits for you (unless you're an experienced player, I assume; I am not). Likewise on the survival front, one of the more controversial aspects to Resident Evil's design is the use of Ink Ribbons as a non-infinite item required to save. This means you can only save sparingly, and each save has to count so you don't run risk of having a larger than comfortable gap between you and the end of the game with no saves left. I'm sincerely mixed on this feature. It added such a thick layer of tension throughout my play through, something I weighed my progress and session time against in order to gauge whether I had earned a confident use of a save, but at the same time, knowing that you could essentially blow your entire game hours in by overusing this item isn't something I think is good game design. The truth of the matter is that there are quite a lot of save ribbons throughout the game, depending on difficult and version of the game. You don't know this going in, and the game does a great job slowly dripping them in as you explore so you never feel too confident. There's a sincere bit of tension in the beginning of the game as you get close to venturing through each part of the mansion before being siphoned out to the other bits of the game, and you realize that you're running low on ribbons and have no clue where another could be found any time soon, and I will forever be appreciative of it. It was a unique thrill I genuinely enjoyed, even if it could have gone so horribly wrong.
The main issues I have with the game have to do with the non-mansion areas and some of the more obtuse key items. Other than the mansion, there is the courtyard, residence (for Spencer's security), the caves, and the labs. None of them are outright bad, and I would say I definitely enjoyed the residence which acts as a smaller, alternate version of the mansion with fewer doors and ugly giant spiders to contend with. The caves were rather small and felt a bit like fluff, and the labs felt like they were just there to gear us up for the end of the game with a little too much exposition and not enough story, but the part of the game I liked the least was the courtyard. Resident Evil's level design shines when it is labyrinthine and dense, but the courtyard area is largely hallways from a level design perspective, moving you narrowly down a path through woods or connecting areas such as the caves and Lisa Trevor's house. There's nothing overtly bad about any of it, but it definitely made me wish to get on with finding the helmet key so I could go back to the mansion and explore the last few rooms. The other major issue I have has to do, particularly, with the Eagle and Wolf medallions. Both were found in books you collected throughout your play through. The issue I have is with how you remove them from the books themselves. You can examine any item in your inventory, and if you are looking at the right part (like, say, a side of a jewelry box that has a concealed switch to press), you can interact with it. Most of the time this is obvious, such as when you look at a key to see a sigil of sword or helmet on it to identify it. For these two medallions, you had to look directly at the page side of the book, and then you could open it to reveal the hidden items inside. I had already figured out where these medallions went, and I knew it had something to do with he two books in my inventory since they literally said the solution to the puzzle on the cover, but couldn't for the life of me figure out what I was supposed to do with these books to solve the puzzle itself. Angrily, I had to look it up. There are several instances of things like this, such as with a jewelry box that has a small, circular hole in the front that acts as a lock which apparently requires a red gem that looks the size of my fist and isn't particularly round to unlock it. The most annoying and detrimental was the first aid kits. I had collected a rather large amount of these before I figured out with each one you had to look at the latch in order to open them and get their contents. Silly me for thinking I could just select them and hit "use".
These bits of the game are more an instance of the game being dated than anything substantial. Despite these minor trips, Resident Evil is an extremely strong experience that I easily and willingly spent 15 hours in. Usually from older games, I expect something flawed and clunky like Silent Hill 3 that can be appreciated, albeit through a particular critical lens. But occasionally, you come across a Silent Hill 2, which stands the test of time as something thrilling and memorable, and lives up to everything you've heard about it. I'm honestly surprised we haven't gotten indie nostalgic throwbacks to the archaic systems here, because they still work fundamentally well. Resident Evil is still a classic, and I feel foolish for having expected otherwise.
10
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