Tyler Davis
It’s January 23rd, 2017, and I’ve laid awake long enough for the clock to roll past midnight. To my family, it’s my birthday, but for me, it marks a defining love affair I have with one of the most historically important horror franchises: Resident Evil. After waiting for about twenty minutes, I snuck downstairs to my family’s Xbox with a Visa gift card saved exactly for that night in order to purchase the game that made me a horror games fanatic. After patiently enduring my Internet’s slow download speed, I found myself sitting before the boot screen for Resident Evil VII: Biohazard, readying myself for a chilling plunge into a world of terror and despair.
As a kid experiencing their first survival-horror game, Biohazard was different from everything I had played before. I was enthralled by its grungy take on rural American horror reminiscent of Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead and Rob Zombie’s House of a Thousand Corpses, both horror film delicacies I managed to sneak by my ever-watchful parents on the nights they turned in early. Dirty around every corner, everything about the game had my heart pounding. Back then, I couldn’t quite put my finger on what made the game perfect outside of it’s surface level, horror genre perfection.
Seven years since that night, the Resident Evil series has exploded into a renaissance, helping lead the mass revival of horror games in the Triple-AAA gaming space. However, having played the mainline series in its entirety, there’s something special about Biohazard that you can’t find in other games. Even now, with much of the current survival-horror gaming landscape riding on the massive success of this title, it still feels original and smooth to play. The opening fall foliage, music, and lighting all swirl together to lead the player into a false state of calmness. It’s a Resident Evil game; you know there’s evil lurking around every corner, yet the game manages to evoke unexpected emotions. When the horror hits, it never quite shakes its saddening edge.
Before diving into story analysis and passionate rambling about the game’s storytelling, let’s talk about game play. If you haven’t played this game yet, you owe it to yourself as it remains one of the smoothest and engaging games I’ve experienced even with its age. While linear in design, the game play allows for experimentation with both combat and puzzle-solving that keep’s player coming back time and time again.
Puzzle solutions are strict, but figuring them out can come out of order, allowing the player to move at their own pace while figuring out how to tackle the game’s combat and inventory management systems. At its heart, Resident Evil VII: Biohazard is traditionalist in the survival horror game format but doesn’t need to do too much new mechanically. Everything has been streamlined and smoothed out to have little to no roadblocks.
The controls are purposely stress-inducing in their lack of finesse, but the game is built around that, so failure is never frustrating but combat is always tense. Progression is framed in various ways, through discovering new weapons, an emphasis on precise backtracking, the shift in difficulty, but my personal favorite is how all of these help evolve the game’s visual storytelling and heart as an ode to western horror tropes. From the game’s opening section with Jack and Mia to Lucas’ Saw-inspired dungeon of puzzles and madness, the level progression is always fresh if not always consistent. However, what this all makes for are boss fights and skill challenges that get to build upon one another and still always have something special unto themselves that makes none feel redundant.
The game’s only major flaw is how jarring and drawn-out the ending(s) can feel after a tonal swerve in the third act. The game follows a trend most Resident Evil games do: the front half, often my favorite part, is scarier and more focused on quiet atmosphere than the back half. That being said, the game’s finale is still really well done, it just doesn’t necessarily feel like a proper ending, something confirmed by how direct of a sequel the follow-up to this, Resident Evil: Village was.
The game is more suggestive than explicit with its messaging. it is easy to get soaked up in the main story without the emotions of said story hitting right away. The game drives players forward at all times with a game play loop that never ceases to satisfy, making it hard to stop and absorb everything going on. While the events of the game paint a hopeful yet tragic picture of the strength of love, it’s only as effective as it is because much of the story is absorbed through its diegesis.
The Baker family, a good family, opened their arms to Eveline and Mia without knowing what they were. As a catalyst for unrelenting horror, Eveline’s need for familial belonging thwarted by third parties’ need to experiment and torture for the ‘greater good’ calls into question whether the ‘greater good’ is ever truly for the benefit of anyone besides those obsessed with it. Ethan, seeking the Louisiana estate in a desperate search for the woman he loves, places him at the heart of this horror. In the end, it’s that heart that trumps all.
The second ending, a bleaker rejection of love, helps make the game’s integral themes clearer. The enemies you face in the game are faceless apparitions of goo, their cold exterior a perfect picture for the game’s point about power, humanity, and love’s impact on society at large by showcasing what a simple microcosm of its absence can do to the ‘picture-perfect American family’ stereotype.
None of this is expressly stated, but the power of it can be felt in music, the dilapidated estate, and all the artifacts of the Baker family strewn about. Absorbing the game through its visual design, which perverts everything a young American like myself was raised to value in dark, twisted ways, left me shaken by the end.
While what was happening on-screen was certainly interesting, it was how the game followed me from each play session that truly provides the type of lasting terror a masterpiece in this genre should provide. A design aspect I loved were the bonus video tapes that could be found around the game that acted as micro-levels to help add lore context without being a text dump or a long winded burst of exposition from Zoe. It was tight and left players engaged at all times without pulling them out of the game play experience completely.
This added layer of terror helps the game stand above what has come since in so many ways. Nothing is scarier than seeing some of our deepest human desires have such horrific consequences, calling into question the nature of human wants themselves. Is love such a good thing, and can our need for it be more disastrous to ourselves and others than we’d like to believe?