Resident Evil 7, review

See this rice?

It's "White rice with Orient flavours" served in the Yakitoro restaurant, by Alberto Chicote, in Madrid.

It's the type of wonderful food I wouldn't care to be diagnosed with morbid obesity for if I could get a daily bowl of it in exchange.

Starting with a simple rice, grain by grain, with the little hints of flavour granted by the polen, the nori algae, and each and one of the different spices, it manages to stand out from any other rices. Just like the piece I wanted to talk to you about today, which started from a kinda-sorta-good...ish saga and evolved into something quite interesting:

Captures taken from the PC version

When this game came out a lot of people accused it of not being very Resident evilish, and I think that's the best thing that could've happened to it.

It was also compared to the famous demo Silent Hills: P.T. but I think the biggest resemblance (and only) that it has to it is the subjective camera.

LET'S GET TO WORK!

SCORE: 4 CROQUETTES!

• The good:
• Fights against the bosses. They've got a lot of varieties, which makes you sweat your ass off. Plus, let's face it, there is nothing more satisfying than cracking an enemy's skull with a chainsaw as if it was a watermelon.
• Secrets spread around the house. This will make you tour the whole house a few times.
• Setting, illumination and sountrack. They are in charge of scaring the hell out of the player, and damn, they really know their aim.
• The speed. Subtly, the game introduces the house to the player and throws the keys.
• The dubbing in many languages. I played the game in english, however, I laughed my ass off when I put it in japanese.

• The bad:
• The only "choice" the game gives, A or B, is expendable.
• The last part of the game. It's just a lot of senseless enemys, an insult to intelligence and to everything that the game had been building during the previous hours.
• The weird:
• Why ain't I feeding of that incredible rice everyday?

Let's read a bit:

Choreographies: lots of games make the mistake of making the player walk through a corridor and excessively controlling what's gonna happen. Even if the player smelt something's wrong or simply wanted to avoid doing a certain thing, the game takes the control from us with a script, a cinematic... This is exactly what was happening to this saga, while the first games invited us to get lost in the mansions, the last ones overcontrolled the player. Thankfully, this characteristic has been recovered with this last title.

From all the scary videogames, Alien Isolation does this perfectly, it never takes the control from the player. But comparisons are hateful, almost as the damn creature.

Alien Isolation

Resident Evil 7 has its scripts and cinematics, but they take place rarely, and after all, you are the one who chooses how to move around the house, and despite having some cinematics, these change depending on how you fight.

This is a detail that I LOVE, you and I may have fought completely different, leaving behind a broken wall or not...or in my case getting a leg broken...and those differences are reflected in the cinematics.

Depending on where you're standing and your combat decisions or reflexes different stuff can come up. I think this is a key characteristic that I really admire.

The "choice" the game gives us in the middle of its development could've been spared. It's not wrong to not have any choice to make, whatever happens, happens, but don't put an absurd decision that lead to a senseless consecuence.

SPOILER: you have to choose between A or B, Zoe (the girl who helps you during the entire game) or Mia (your girlfriend). In my game, I tried to be original and save Zoe, Mia stays ashore. Your character and Zoe leave in a boat, and a second later the game decides to kill Zoe and continue AS IF MIA HAD GOT IN THE BOAT, where's the common sense there?

P.D: They weren't really inspired when they made this sequence's boss.

Resident evil 4: final boss, with deformed arms and little eyes to shoot at.

Resident evil 7: Jack, with deformed arms and little eyes to shoot at, again.

The final game segment is what throws everything they had been building the previous game hours away and keeps this game from getting the five croquettes. It turns into any Resident evil, and makes the same mistake than the others and The Evil Within in its final chapter: they give the player plenty of ammo and LOTS of enemies, huge hordes of them, regular ones and even bosses.

When a horror film or videogame starts, it slowly increases the level of fright. I starts subtly, hinting...dropping some clues of what's happening... It makes you participate in an intelligent game and lets its atmosphere catch and unease you, making you expect the worst of it and letting your imagination do the dirty work, terrify you.

But you can't insult the player's intelligence choosing the easy way when there is only one game hour left: lots of enemies...lots of shooting... MEH, it's not going to surprise anyone to have to shoot, that's why shooter games exist. This game is about exploring, puzzles and little encounters with enemies, don't end it differently, taking away its identity.

There is a moment when we have to go from some mines to the house and it's plagued with zombies. I swear I killed NONE. As if it were a Dark Souls Speedrun, I ran and dodged every enemy, making it completely unscathed to the house. This is the perfect example of a completely stupid moment in a game that started intelligent and terrifying.

Last combat? I have nothing against it except for its difficulty, it's easily surmountable.

Final conclusion: for the most part, the game bets on a subtle intelligent terror, making varied encounters with different bosses, it RISKS and at the same time it recovers great qualities from the first titles that had been lost, turning it into accion games with ugly monsters' saga. However, in the final segment, it turns into a generic terror game with the most boring qualities of the Resident Evil games: mines and enemies with no other purpose than to lenghten the game and hinder the player's progress.