Honest Opinion : The Return of Horror (Resident Evil 7 Review So Far) (PS4)

This post is serving as my feelings-so-far review on Resident Evil 7 : Biohazard through the handful of hours I've played of the game so far, I'll be posting a full review of it upon completion. 



When Resident Evil Biohazard was first announced through the launching of its demo, I was instantly torn. This was a series I had just about grown up with on the original Playstation. This was a series I was too scared to play as a kid, but was inexplicably still drawn to it time and time again.

But since those early games, the series took a turn away from the horror aspect of survival horror. And honestly, it was starting to lose the survival aspect too. Solving a puzzle only to discover a box containing a palsley 6 shotgun shells was being replaced by swiping your knife over a group of crates to discover dozens of assault rifle ammo. So while the story was still drawing me in, it wasn’t pulling me back after the fact. This zombie apocalypse franchise that had started out as a genuine experience for me, was becoming a bullet-riddled action sequence, much like the Hollywood films that bore the same name.

What was even worse? They were just becoming games.

So as the announcement of Biohazard dropped, I was skeptical at first and didn’t pay it a whole lot of attention. And then message boards and trending feeds started blowing up with it, and the fabled unsolvable incomplete demo. So I downloaded it.

And the instant it loaded up, I knew Resident Evil was back. The creepy setting, the puzzles, the big unknown hanging over everything, The series I was afraid of had returned, and the first person view, while everyone was busy complaining about it, I knew would fit and work perfectly. The series had slowly started turning the view to put the player behind the wheel, and this time Capcom was finally just throwing us into the drivers seat and saying “Here’s the wheel...drive”

Fast forward to now. I’m a handful of hours into this game, and while I know it has to end at some point, and it terrifies the hell out of me while I’m playing it, I really don’t want it to. It would be impossible for me to cover everything that I love about this game, but I want to share with you some of the things. So this is a warning that if you don’t want anything about this game spoiled, be careful reading on, However keep in mind that I’m only about three or four hours in, so anything I do spoil shouldn’t be too crucial to the greater story of the game.

The Bakers
I’m just going to go ahead and say it. These people are fucked in the head. And in a very very bad way. I mean, I remember playing Code Veronica and thinking the same thing about the Ashfords, but after meeting the Bakers I will be first in line for a weekend of wine tasting and antiquing in the country with the Ashfords.

I cant even begin to think about making these people seem normal, because they are the furthest thing from it. So far I have met Daddy (if they said his name I completely missed it) and Marguerite, the mommy. Marguerite definitely takes the crazy cake of the two.

My first encounter with her is through Mia’s VHS tape, while Mia is trying to escape. Marguerite begins chasing her down through wings of the house, spewing out of her mouth how ungrateful Mia is for what they’ve done for her by taking her in, feeding her, on and on and on. So clearly, this woman has gone postal, diving off the deep end into whatever skewed belief that her brain has made seem normal for her. If she spots you, she’ll charge you like a linebacker with a demonic screech that just puts music in your heart.

Daddy just might be the one holding down the sanity in the family, but even he is at least waist deep in the pool of crazy. After escaping the guest house in the introduction section of the game, you wake up tied down to a chair enjoying dinner time with the Bakers in the main house. Daddy goes to feed you, and you reject it, so he instead feeds you the sharp end of his trusty knife (yum), Sadly, dinner gets interrupted and while the Bakers are gone, you break free of your bindings and start trying to escape. Eventually, you come to a showdown with Mr. Baker in the garage, where you can actually get behind the wheel of the car parked in there and take him on at full ramming speed. Just when you think he bit the dust, he literally rips off the roof of the car off with his bare hands, takes the wheel from you and drives the car into a support beam that has fallen in the garage and ends up meeting it with his face.You finally think its over, and you start climbing the ladder to leave the garage, when he comes up behind you, ripping the gun from your hand, and asks if you’re ready to see something wonderful, eats the barrel and blows half his face off.

And that still isnt the last you see of him. So, not only is this man beyond fucking nuts, he also self heals like some crazed human iguana hybrid and is the literal embodiment of your worst nightmare. The Bakers scare me...buut they intrigue me just the same. I never want to see them again, but just as badly, I want to know their story. 

Mia
She's almost as crazy as the Bakers, almost. She jumps back and forth of the sanity fence so much I can't keep up.  One minute i think her and Ethan stand a chance, and the next I'm waiting for her to fall into a woodchipper and their story come to an end. The game begins with you seeing Mia record a video to Ethan telling him to stay away and not come after her, but once you gain control of Ethan, one of the items in your inventory is an email from Mia stating the town, the name of the family on the farm, and the words "Come Get Me".Then you find her underneath the guest house, and she is equal parts elated and confused to see Ethan, and when he tells her about the email she says she would never have said that to him. She's hell-bent on escaping from The Bakers, but only refers to the patriarch of the family as "Daddy" . 

At the very least, her mental capacity has been compromised, and you can see constant hard evidence of the war she must be waging against herself. After you escape the system of tunnels underneath the guest house, you come into a hallway that only has two doors in it : one that is locked, and the one from which you entered. So after doing everything you can, naturally your only option is to go back the way you came. Except once you get halfway down the stairs, you're greeted by none other than your wife, crawling up the stairs in true Ring fashion to greet you. She attacks you, hurls you through the wall, to the point that you need to bury an axe in the side of her neck and watch her collapse in front of you. Then the next time you see her, she's apologetic, but then proceeds to literally pin your hand to the wall and lop it off with a chainsaw. 

I can hardly form an opinion on her and the storyline with Ethan, before she flips the coin and I'm scratching my head again. 

Baker Plantation and Soundtrack
This setting is just perfect. You're out in the middle of nowhere, all by yourself, and you become the plaything of a deranged and psychotic family. What adds to the ambiance is the soundtrack, or I should really say the lack of soundtrack. Most games (really anything in the realm of horror), you can gauge what's about to happen by the soundtrack. If it's quiet, the music will pick up. Or if the music has been blaring, it'll soften down. In this game, though, there's no music at all. So you can't walk into a room and go "Oh, the violins just started playing, something might get me." 

What the lack of music does too, is it almost forces you to become absorbed in the game. You're playing in first person, so you don't even have the option of trying to look one direction and walk sideways to not get scared, and on top of that the game forces you to listen to it. So you hear every single footstep (yours or others), every tree branch knocking into the house from the wind, every creak, every slam. EVERYTHING. So after you wander down a few hallways that have been uneventful, and you hear a quick tap sound, you just might stop in your tracks to see what it was. 





Now, normally at this point, I'd talk about the things I didn't like about the game so far. But I legitimately can't think of anything that I don't absolutely love about Resident Evil 7 : Biohazard. With the obvious exception of the fact that the game scares the shit out of me. Yet in some twisted sort of way I love it more because of that. I grew up loving horror. Movies, games, TV shows, I soaked it all in, and mostly because none of it actually scared me. So the things that always stick out in my mind have been the few instances where I've legitimately gotten scared of something, and this one takes the cake. 


Where do we go from here?

I do want to take a minute to speculate on the things I think I might happen, and the things that I want to happen/find out. 

- Umbrella. I don't know what it may or may not be, but I know there has to be some sort of connection to the rest of the Resident Evil universe. I've kept my eyes peeled for anything that might hint at Ada Wong dropping in out of the blue, or maybe even Sherry Birkin or Leon Kennedy himself. Whether it's just by name or by actual appearance, I just have this feeling that it will indeed happen. 

- Isolated Incident. This is more speculation. I do remember reading a while back, when RE6 was still in production, that after the release of 6, Capcom wanted to look into rebooting the Resident Evil franchise and going back to ground zero. And even though I'm hoping there's a connection, I feel that this could also be the springboard to that reboot. Back in the original game, the mansion incident was isolated, way out in the middle of nowhere in the mountains outside of Racoon City. And here we are, in the middle of nowhere in Louisiana, on a plantation, in what appears to be another isolated incident. 

- Viral Infection. What started with the T-Virus, turned into Las Plagas (RE4) and Uroboros (RE5 and 6). While it didn't turn people into zombies, it definitely made them zombie-like. Now, the first non-Baker enemy I crossed paths with bore a striking resemblance to the Ooze in Resident Evil Revelations, but I've also discovered notes around the Bakers residence that appear to be sort of fact sheets, documenting victim's names, ages, body types, and a note marking them as either "Turned" or "Dead" (Or the as of yet undiscovered meaning behind the L next to Clancy's name, the cameraman from the very first VHS tape). So I don't know what to expect. I start leaning more towards something between Las Plagas and Uroboros with the way "Daddy" is, but the appearnce of the Ooze-like creature has definitely left me guessing. There was also a note I found that mentioned a ship wrecking off the coast, much like the situation in Resident Evil Revelations. But unless this one ends up being an interquel instead of a sequel (because Revelations is confirmed to take place prior to Resident Evil 5), that's unlikely that it's the same boat. 

That's going to wrap it up for this midway review, and I will definitely come back to express my thoughts on this game after I finish it. Make sure you join in on my channel every Wednesday around 7:30 PM for when I live stream this game with commentary. Click here to go to my channel and you can subscribe to get a notification when I begin to stream, or you can follow me on Facebook and or Instagram where I also post the links when the streams go live.

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