The days are getting shorter and darker again, so that can mean only one thing… Spoogy month, baby. It's time to play cold, dank, feel-bad games. This year's pick was Resident Evil 7: Biohazard.
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| Should have called it... BayouHazard |
We've both played a handful of games in the series, so we roughly knew what to expect. We made a little bingo card to bolster our bravery and cockiness, and jumped right in. Unfortunately I had to jump out, as this entry made me queasy almost instantaneously. Resident Evil 7 changed to a first person perspective, which wasn't very compatible with my stomach. After messing with the settings for a while, I gave up and just mooched off Allie's playthrough.
It’s up to the girl with the iron stomach and itchy trigger finger again. Also my toes are cold, better get my blanket. OK first of all, this game's really realistic looking. Damn. I’m already quite ascare and I don’t want to get chased by a stinky guy.
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| Revenge of the soyjack pointing meme!? |
I’m being chased by a stinky guy!!! I knew it, I bloody knew this would happen!
We're playing as "Ethan", a guy coming to look for his wife in some rural looking area in Louisiana. I wish I could tell you more about Ethan, but he doesn't really give you much to work with. He rarely speaks, and when he does, he says stuff like "You don't understand! You're not listening to me!", then continues not explaining things.
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| "You might be involved" well yes mate... im trapped in the house. |
Yeah it’s funny that he’s even made it to the house alive, because he damn near got himself shot by a cop coming to rescue him. At least he’s decently quick on his feet when it comes to snatching up power tools and going 1 v 1 in a frankly pretty tense and brilliant first boss fight.
So the main structure of the game is that you go to a part of this family's land, and each area is being watched over by a member of the Baker family. They're all pretty rustic, in the sense that they use rusty knives to settle family arguments. The first one is the aforementioned smelly guy. I think his whole deal was that he's immortal, because he kept showing off. It mostly seemed to illustrate that Ethan was pretty ineffective at doing anything to him.
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| Look who's finally out of his room! |
I do gotta say, I kinda feel like I'm just kind of swinging my knife at things and going “is this… anything?” The interactions can feel quite vague at first, though once I got a gun in my hands I have to admit I was pretty good at stoppin’ and poppin’.
That you were. Unfortunately for more than half of the game, there wasn't a whole lot of that. It was just sneaking and skulking, avoiding traps and finding items, and a whole lot of looking around. Every time we got used to an area's gimmick though, it was time to move on to the next one, and repeat the cycle all over again… Usually anyway. In typical Resident Evil fashion, they kind of lose steam after a while and put you in an action game where it really is about shootin' dudes.
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| Trust no bitch. |
Yeah I do think the sections themed around each boss character had very strong gimmicks. The second character, featuring wasp nests and centipedes was very NOT HEHE for me. They would also randomly insert these playable bonus flashbacks via VHS tapes. What did you think of the third guy, ACME’s second biggest client after Wile E. Coyote?
I thought it was pretty cool. It starts out as a VHS tape of a Saw-esque Escape Room a previous person who wandered onto the estate was subjected to. There's no combat or nothing. Just a series of small rooms with stuff in it, and your goal is to light some birthday cake's candles. There was a very ominous clockwork clown scribe in the room that you have to return to a few times, which I was very excited about since "creepy clown" was on our Bingo card. Cool section though.
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| Looks like hes about to sign the declaration of inde-pain-dence |
Shortly after this, you’re eased into the rather anticlimactic twist of the game. On top of it having the usual resident evil style secret military science zombie gone wrong type projects in a hidden underground bunker, the reveal of the source kind of… brought it in line with an awful lot of other horror games. And I dunno, I mean, I guess I don’t respect the genre of “redneck cannibals” either, but this is even more cliché to me actually. Speaking of cliches, upon the reveal of a second spunky female character besides the woman you came to rescue, I was dreading the likely opportunity for the game to “make you choose” between which damsel to rescue, leaving the other to a cruddy fate. Wow that’s so poignant. Like a harem dating sim.
Once we enter the lore-dump phase of the game, the game kind of takes a nose-dive in general for me. A lot of mystery and horror stories start crumbling once you start explaining, and it's no different here. Unfortunately combined with the pivot to a shooty game, it felt like they simply didn't really know how to make it all come together and have a dramatic climax. People started shouting more, I guess? Ethan called a child a "bitch" a bunch, which really felt unnecessary.
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| Drawer full of shoes. This is the most depraved thing i've seen so far. |
Man yeah, Ethan kind of gave me these weird vibes I can only describe as “deadbeat frat house boyfriend”. I didn’t hate the pacing of the game, and the final boss was a fun spectacle… but yeah. I came away feeling the game overall was well executed but lacking in that extra spark I look for in a horror game. It had jump scares, and it even had a brilliant sense of dread and suspense. But it wasn’t haunting like Amnesia, it didn’t make me agonize over my lack of agency like Danganronpa. It didn’t have bizarre and unexpected moments like NightCry.
I see it as a haunted house experience in the end, kind of cool, but also a little basic. So yeah, I'm in a similar boat as you it seems. Speaking of which… This will contain some light spoilers, but here's our Bingo card. Unfortunately we didn't hit a single bingo. Things were looking so great for a while, and a fan boat would have been the key to it all. We were so stoked when they were leading up to escaping over the swamp by boat, but unfortunately it was just a stinky lil regular motorboat.
Wait… his wife was called Mia… was she called Mia because she was M.I.A.?? OHHHHH I JUST GOT THAT
brb gotta fax this banger sentiment to the motivational poster dept
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