Survival horror has seen a bit of a comeback in recent years. It is a bit hard to look at Resident Evil 7: Biohazard without seeing influence of other popular games like Alien: Isolation or the incredibly horrifying experience that was P.T.
Visually, it appears to take a lot of cues from Hideo Kojima's brilliant P.T. With a slow-moving character in the first person perspective, players must cautiously explore the creepy, disquieting Baker family mansion. Obviously, where it deviates is in the gameplay. P.T. was meant to be a single, relatively quick interactive experience. Because they wanted to make the game as horrifying as possible, they needed it to be quick. Designers have to create a delicate balance with horror games. Make it too scary; players are liable to drop out and stop playing. You want the game to be frightening, but not so much that players don't want to keep going for fifteen hours. So, P.T. can be completed within an hour, which is perfect.
Resident Evil 7 is a relatively short game itself, capable of being finished in anywhere from eight to twelve hours. That's actually a pretty good duration for it, frankly. (I enjoyed the game quite a bit, but was glad to be done playing it by the time the credits rolled.) The pacing is solid, with stretches being incredibly tense and slow-going - particularly when a member of the Baker family is giving chase - but also periods of relative calm and quiet, allowing players to explore with only the occasional run-in with the Molded monsters.
In terms of the gameplay, it might be more appropriate to compare it to Alien: Isolation. To be completely fair, these games do different things for different goals, and any comparison isn't an exact 1-to-1 situation. Still, the similarities are noticeable. First person shooter in which a big, bad, indestructible enemy will give chase while you find your way through the map. Instead of a xenomorph stalking you through the levels, it's Jack or Marguerite. You can't kill them, although you can inflict enough damage to take Jack down for a few moments. Instead, you have to try and escape their notice while advancing through the level. You also collect items that you can combine to create useful resources.
None of this is pioneered by Alien: Isolation, of course. And this is where the two games really diverge. Alien: Isolation does a good job balancing a sense of powerlessness against the alien with the empowerment of objects you can create and deploy to distract it. It's always tense, but there's always a variation of actions you can take. Resident Evil 7 leans more to the tension in powerlessness. There isn't a whole lot you can do. You walk and even run slowly. Ammunition is limited, so every shot feels significant. (There is no worse feeling than completely whiffing on a head shot.) The materials you can craft primarily contribute to boosting a few stats or creating special ammo. Otherwise, it's largely just a shooter.
This isn't inherently a bad thing, obviously. Again, different games doing different things. The more player actions in Alien: Isolation allows the game to be a little more interactive and, thus, a little more fun. It's tense, scary, and entertaining while Resident Evil 7 is mostly just tense and scary - which means the game is successful at what it does. It's hard to fault anyone who subsequently finds the gameplay a bit boring, but these elements work to creating the atmosphere of terror and intensity. Late in the game, it sort of devolves into a bit of a generic first person shooter, but because it lacks the speed and smoothness of an action game in order to achieve its tension, it still feels overwhelming to be shooting at multiple enemies.
However, there is one aspect of Alien: Isolation has that makes it a better horror game overall: randomization. Sure, there are certain stretches in which Resident Evil 7 randomizes where one of the Bakers is, but overall, every level is the same. It's the same layout with the same enemies spawning at the same locations. This effectively means that each level is intimidating...once. Running through the basement of the main house for the first time is suspenseful and scary. You don't know when and where Molded will come out from. When they suddenly drop from the ceiling right as you enter the door, it is startling and will force you to react quickly. It's great! But if you manage to get killed and have to restart (or if you run out of ammo and have to restart - since there's no real way to actually take out Molded with your knife, even on "easy"), well, the second time through is substantially less tense. You can take it slow, but you still know where everything is. You can plan a lot more effectively, and the sense of fear is completely removed.
Boss fights are another area where this can be a problem. Firstly, the controls work for the normal levels, but their clunkiness doesn't really feel at home facing off against the bosses. Often, they feel designed for normal FPS mechanics, which the game doesn't have because the ordinary levels are designed for the slow, tense, survival-horror mechanics. The bosses are there because it's a video game and there needs to be bosses, but it can easily feel like you're fighting the controls more than the enemy (especially in most of the Jack fights). Horror games lose something when that fear turns into confusion as to what to do, which turns into frustration. Constantly repeating fights goes a long way to removing the terror from the game.
Alien: Isolation avoids both of these issues. It doesn't have traditional "boss fights" at all. Easy fix to that one. And while many stretches of Sevastapol have the same enemy lay-out (a section, for example, will always have X number of androids in one room, or the same humans show up in another room), but the xenomorph appears at random. You can get a sense of where it tends to show up more frequently, and you can help yourself by keeping tabs on the vents and ducts, but even when you know it can show up, you never really know when it will, or where it will. Repeating the same stretches still feels tense because of this randomization, which is relatively constant through the entire game, save the early part and a few small stretches later. In essence, if Resident Evil 7 is a tad scarier upon initial playthrough (and I think it is), Alien: Isolation retains that tense atmosphere upon repeated playthroughs.
The story of Resident Evil 7 is somewhat forgettable. One doesn't exactly pick this game up for its narrative. Perhaps the worst thing it does is leave one plot thread dangling so openly for some DLC that it feels a bit sleazy. It doesn't help that that particular thread is kind of uninteresting, and that the character in question isn't exactly a presence throughout the game. Players might even struggle to remember that there was no conclusion to his storyline, which, for as blatantly as they did that for DLC, is indicative of poor execution. Watching video tapes is an interesting, yet confusing addition. Occasionally, you will find a VHS tape and can pop it into a VCR to play a new level of someone apparently holding a video camera. These can be tense moments given no one has any items, so you are completely defenseless. Still, in terms of the narrative, it makes no sense. If you are watching the tapes as Ethan, why do you then have to play the tapes as the player? More, why is it possible to fail and effectively get a "Game Over" screen during one of these side quests? They try to use the tapes as quasi-puzzle solutions, to inform players of where to go next, but it still feels unnecessary and often tedious.
One area the game excels generally is in its implementation of VR. Unlike most games, which incorporate only a few levels for the virtual reality experience, Capcom opted to make the entirety of Resident Evil 7 playable in VR. The game overall relies too often on Hollywood jump scares, which is actually pretty annoying, but it's still extremely discomforting to walk around the Baker house in the VR environment. Honestly, I had to stop with the VR after the first hour because it was borderline traumatizing. It really highlights the potential of the technology for particular experiences. The graphics for VR still aren't great enough to merit being the preferred way to play, but if it's possible to experience a little bit of it, definitely give it a shot!
I've never played any other game in the franchise, other than a little bit of Resident Evil 4, so I have nothing to offer in regards to its standing in the series. It is a solid survival horror game that has a number of noticeable flaws, but still succeeds in creating tense moments. It isn't amazing or anything, but it is easily a good choice if you're looking to pick up a spooky game for Halloween.
REDUCTIVE RATING: It's Fine.
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