Anyone here playing Resident Evil 7? I just picked it up based on the strength of the demo. I’m still at the very beginning of the game, but it’s starting strong. So far, this game feels like a real departure from the rest of the franchise. You’re a dude following a message from his dead girlfriend (hi Silent Hill 2) who wanders into a creepy hillbilly family’s mansion in the middle of New Orleans swamplands. This is basically a straight-to-videogame sequel to the Texas Chainsaw Massacre. There’s grisly folk-art installations made of bones, there are frequent chainsaws, and there’s a bizarre cannibal murder family who first appear in a scene that is directly ripped from the 1974 movie.
I’ve seen some very surreal moments too from what I’ve played so far. You find a VHS tape with footage from some dead urban explorers who’d been there before, and you get to play as one of the guys in the videotape. There seems to be ghost-related activity in addition to the hillbilly horror stuff. People are chopping off and reattaching limbs for fun like they’re biological action figures. None of this has time to feel goofy because the game is constantly throwing you into crazy setpieces that feel intense in a way that I am NOT used to from a horror game. It’s so visceral and grotesque.
You can really feel the Frictional Games and PT influences here. Imagine if someone took Amnesia, changed the theming from Lovecraft to 70’s Grindhouse cinema, and ramped up the pacing and violence to 11.
So far I have to give this a pretty unqualified recommendation. We’ll see how I feel as the game progresses.
Dang, I’m sorry to hear it gets more conventional! Cuz that first hour is pretty crazy. I just beat the first boss fight. It was… not what I expected! Reminded me of the RE4 boss fight with the cult leader guy in the burning shed.
When it goes more regular RE, does it stay roughly as enjoyable, or does the quality dip?
it tries very hard to be like resident evil 1 after the first hour or so
there’s a relatively linear section late game where you have a machine gun and plentiful ammo that feels like an appeal to people who like the newer games
I enjoyed it!!! just, uh, nowhere near as much as REmake
I feel like I have no idea what this series’ DNA is reducible to at this point
it’s become such a weird catch-all for so many disparate elements based on how it was leveraged around the time of its release
like, there’s the milla jovovich movies, there’s apparently the first good big VR vidcon, there’s the mikami cover shooter design documents, there’s the extreme unfortunate racism, there’s the old fixed-perspective jump scares, there’s the umbrella corporation conspiracies …
i have beaten this game, i enjoyed it quite a bit!
it feels like a combination of elements from REmake, RE 4 and 2016 Doom, oddly enough (including a somewhat self aware dumb protagonist and collectable bobbleheads). it is the first legitimately unnerving (and gross) RE game i’ve played and a lot of that has to do with me thinking about how i’d experience this in VR (i’m playing on an Xbone). But yeah after a while, anything fresh about the new approach feels moot when you’re backtracking around a huge house trying to find 5 different keys and animal heads that open different doors. this is the most “classic RE” the series has felt in a while.
i do appreciate that the story itself is somewhat trying to do its own, totally Sam Rami-inspired thing (that chainsaw fight and the cartoonish gore…) but there are some ties to the overall series but they are minimal and…confusing.
This is one of the greatest videogames I have played. Everything funnels toward atmosphere and compressed resources, and RE7 handles the precious balance between power and powerlessness masterfully.
Unlike Beginning Hour, RE7 has a sense of humor to let off the right amount of pressure when the game gets most intense.
Jack is now one of my favorite videogame characters ever.
Pretty much everything @ronk said. Madhouse (hard) mode’s first “boss-like” fight has been quite a hurdle.
This too.
I decided not to go out of my way for RE6, never got around to playing through it. 7 is a generally solid compromise of classic/root RE with modern delivery though, so maybe the series recovered enough for me to learn what the hell actually happened in 6.
I’m persisting on despite the spoopiness but i had nightmares last night about a guy with a neck tattoo breaking into my house and trying to kill me so uh
I played thru this recently and I agree with Adi that it is definitely one of his favorite games of all time.
The first half of the game is Perfect, the second half is Just Amazing w/ spots of Perfect. Game also probably has the only good puzzle I’ve ever seen in a video game in its later half.
The difficulty you unlock for beating the game once is also fantastic and subverts expectations you have going in for your second playthrough really nicely by completely changing the item placement (which works out especially well in a few places) and bringing back the ink ribbon placement and basically getting rid of auto-save checkpoints.
It’s also probably the first Resident Evil game to have a good antagonist, which is something.
I dunno. This game is fantastic and way more than I expected from its awful demo.
