Resident Evil 7 takes some big risks with the long-running horror series. But even as some succeed and others fall flat, this new first-person take on the formula wisely remembers that it’s survival-horror adventure — composed of tense exploration and careful item-hunting — and not solely its action that made its early predecessors memorable.
With one of the creepiest single settings since the Spencer Mansion and an enticingly bizarre mystery to unravel, this is the most fun I’ve had with a Resident Evil game in years.
The atmosphere in Resident Evil 7 is the strongest the series has seen in a long time, and that’s owed entirely to the eerie Dulvey plantation, to which the player character Ethan has been summoned by a cryptic email from his missing wife. If classic Resident Evil games were rooted in the zombie films of George A. Romero, this is Resident Evil in the tradition of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, with all the gruesome imagery, dilapidated old shacks, and cannibalistic horrors that come with it.
Sometimes that makes for an interesting backdrop, especially as you begin to trace the residents of the Dulvey Mansion’s descent into savagery and uncover the way it’s manifested in their domestic life. Traces of humanity aren’t hard to find behind all the locked doors: old photographs, trophies for academic achievement, a discarded football helmet. Compared to the cold, medieval interior of the still-beloved Spencer Mansion, the Baker household actually feels like a lived-in space rather than a grandiose maze of traps and hidden laboratories, which is an interesting and more intimate change of scenery that focuses on something that the series has never fully explored before.
Other times, Resident Evil 7’s roots in “hillbilly horror” relies too heavily on overplayed tropes about rural America and begins to border on the cartoonish. The Bakers are disgusting, dysfunctional, and at times pretty laughable, but most of this is at least explained later on, which — without spoilers — satisfactorily avoids putting the blame entirely on their rural upbringing. But even with its faults, Resident Evil 7’s change in style and setting never fails to deliver a strong sense of place that makes frequent exploration and backtracking through the dingy Dulvey property and its secret underground lairs work without wearing out its welcome.
The setting’s only real failing is its puzzles, which were disappointingly rare and far too simple. Rather than hiding codes and passwords behind riddles or forcing some kind of threat or fail state on me if I entered in an incorrect solution as previous games have (think of the Armor Room puzzle from the first Resident Evil), Resident Evil 7 doesn’t even seem to try to make its obstructions interesting or challenging. I felt like I simply stumbled upon answers more than I did employed any kind of real problem-solving to get there.
On more than one occasion, the solution to a problem was handed to me before I really felt like I was given the chance to start investigating it. In one area that required me to open up a wall panel that housed a secret room, a child’s drawing just a foot or two away from the wall panel in question circled exactly where I needed to look to find it. A more subtle approach that let me investigate the room of my own accord would have greatly improved scenarios like this one, especially because the first-person perspective lets you take a more detailed look at your surroundings than the traditional third-person view of other Resident Evil games does.
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