Jack Clayton
Lantern Staff
Nowadays, making good horror is like your grandma making her world famous cookies. It’s not hard to make them, but if done too much, then they start to feel overdone and boring. Unfortunately, that seems to be the case with much that is done with horror today.
Now, even though most of horror is overdone, there is always that diamond in the rough.
Luckily for us, 2017 was kicked off with a positive start with the horror genre with the release of the sequel and prequel, Resident Evil VII. The story takes place through the eyes of Ethan, a man whose wife has been missing for three years until one day, he gets a mysterious email from her, telling him to come for her. But as soon as he finds her, he realizes there is a lot more to the story than meets the eye.
One of the much better traits of Resident Evil 7 is that it all takes place from the first person point of view. All of the other games took place in third person, so changing the perspective just added to the fear factor. Whenever something jumps out and spooks you, it really feels like it is jumping out at you, and there is no way you can see it coming. This is definitely not a game you would want to play in Virtual Reality.
Another positive about this game is the concept. When the demo was released in June, what was shown looked extremely different from any of the previous Resident Evil games, which fans absolutely loved. What was normally a zombie shooter game all of a sudden felt like an isolated survival horror game. Even when the full game was released and it was revealed that you had to fight zombie-like creatures, it still felt refreshing to have to think of new ways to take enemies down.
The creatures, which were actually called the Molded, were probably the biggest negative that there was to the game. When they are first introduced, they do seem terrifying at first, as you encounter them when you are down in the infected basement with no idea how to fight them. After that, they start to get rather repetitive, and that fear that you experience earlier in the game is lost and replaced with frustration/annoyance.
While the spawn enemies are rather repetitive, every single big fight feels terrifying and original. In the beginning of the game, you are introduced to “The Family”, a group of crazy bayou people who are believed to have kidnapped Ethan’s wife in the first place. Throughout the game, you fight each member of the family, starting with the father, and ending with the grandmother. Each fight is completely different from the other, from the garage fight with the father, to the gross fight with mother, who looks like a giant spider, to even the final fight with grandmother, in which all of the pieces come together.
In summary, what Resident Evil did was not only set the bar for horror games that are to be released this year. By changing to a new point of view, the horror that made the series great in the first place has been greatly enhanced. While some parts did feel repetitive, it feels like this franchise is finally getting back to its roots, and in total deserves nine out of 10 stars.
