First of all, this game is gorgeous. I’m usually pretty good at spotting the differences between CGI and live footage, but the opening cutscene of Ethan driving to the Dulvey bayous made me do a double take. You spend most of the game getting a closeup look at your hands, as well, which are detailed enough to see the pores and the tiny hairs. When you get wet, you look slick. When you get insect bites, your skin develops bumps that remain for a while.
A huge benefit of having high-end graphics in a horror game is that they lend themselves to the scares super well and make them even more effective. I could give countless details of how great the game looks, but then I would go on forever. What I will say is that you should play the game and see for yourself.
Atmosphere
You feel it as soon as you see the old Baker home - there’s something just not right about this place. The start of the game offers a beautiful sunset, but there’s no comfort there. You pass a small pile of animal meat strewn on the ground and you feel unease. Then, you enter the Baker house. The windows are boarded up and the lamps are dim. You can practically feel the heavy, wet humidity blanketing your skin, the particles floating around your nose and eyes, the salty marsh air. The warm toned lighting ironically only makes you more wary of the inevitable encounter with something evil lurking around the corner.
As you venture further, the household clutter and initial structural decay morph into piles of weeping, dripping, pungent black mold - and to make matters worse, you get absolutely no warning when enemies start showing up. Once you hit the mold, the atmosphere becomes darker and creepier, until the name “biohazard” makes a whole lot of sense.
Pathos
Here’s where the bar is set for me personally. Every game, no matter the genre, length, or platform, has to have heart. You have to have some kind of emotional response, either a feeling of dread the whole way through, or an emotional stinger near/at the end. RE7 does just this.
This about the Baker family. When you start the game, you see a trio of insane mutated hillbillies who just love to eat human flesh and casually chop bits of each other off at the dinner table as their chosen method of discipline. But who were they before? They weren’t always like this. As you discover more and more about E-001, or “Eveline,” you realize that the Bakers were just an innocent family who fell victim to the E-001 bioweapon by simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time. You begin to forgive their actions. They had no control. It’s sad, and you can’t even save them, they were too far gone. I felt hollow at the end as the happy music played and you flew off in that helicopter to safety, knowing that if the antidote had come just a year or two earlier, the Bakers could have been saved. They didn’t deserve any of this.
Now let’s get into the technical details.
Inventory Management
RE7 is unlike other survival horror games in that your inventory is very much like a tetris puzzle. RE has done something similar with the inventory design with their fourth installment (see the image on the right). RE7’s inventory space is a lot smaller, though, forcing you to consolidate and really think about how much of each thing you plan on carrying. Do you want more health? More weapons? Oh, don’t forget about those items you need to progress the game, like keys and statuettes and missing pieces of metal reliefs.
You do end up getting upgrades to your inventory, which give you a total extra eight extra slots, but they’re few and far between, meaning you’ll at least once have to let go that extra health pack or those six bullets you found behind the potted plant. Making the player think instead of just letting them hoard the goods they find makes things challenging to say the least, and it also adds to the tension that you might not have everything you need to survive.
Combat
I’ve alluded to this before, so I’ll keep this section short.
Combat is scarier and more engaging when there’s a single target. Now, I’m not saying that all cases of multiple-enemy combat aren’t great, but a fair amount of them just don’t cut it. This is where RE7 shines. You can count on your hands the big baddies you defeat in this game (unlike RE 5 and 6 but I won’t go into that).
The sudden encounters you have with the members of the Baker family leave two choices, but one is definitely more sustainable: run away. Because you only have so much ammo and health kits, and you’re only likely to slow the baddies down rather than kill them permanently. So, not only is there strategy involved in combat (inventory management), but because of the nature of the encounters, you’re left looking over your shoulder the whole time, which only makes you more tense.
Conclusion
What else is there to say? Like I’ve said before, I’m not a critic. But I had some things to say and I think it’s worth reading. I HIGHLY recommend playing this game, as you can probably gleam from my glowing review.
Tomorrow I’ll write about a trilogy that went from excellent sci-fi horror to generic action shooter than happens to have aliens: Dead Space.