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dkirschner's Resident Evil 7: Biohazard (PC)
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| [December 3, 2020 06:44:52 PM]
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Wild ending on this one with a couple twists. I've always enjoyed these games for the weird stories, huge monsters, and intense always-almost-out-of-ammo-and-health panicky gameplay. This is the best one since RE 4, and I'm super excited to play the remake of RE 2 at some point.
I spent much of the beginning of the game rolling my eyes. It seemed ripped straight out of Saw, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Outlast 2, and every other gory horror movie that makes rural white Americans scary. You play (mostly) as Ethan, who goes to the bayou in search of his wife, Mia, who has been missing for three years. Their "relationship" is stilted; when they reunite, they don't hug or laugh or cry or anything. Also, Mia appears to be wearing the same clothes from three years ago and is well-fed, despite being locked in a cage by crazies. Some shit happens, and Ethan again is unbelievable. A police officer comes checking on the house and instead of being like, "Sir, this family is trying to kill me. Missing persons are here. Go get backup," he decides on being vague. Of course the family kills the officer too, but maybe they wouldn't have if Ethan had made sense!
Since this is Resident Evil, the "it's a crazy redneck murder family!" plot didn't last too long before going off the rails. I won't bother with spoiling story, but it gets weirder and worse and then better as it goes on.
There are a couple notable things I very much liked:
1. They make all the villains turn out to be sympathetic. It's hard to do that after seeing how vicious they are, but it makes sense and was surprising.
2. Each of the family members has a unique "style." The dad regenerates over and over and keeps popping up at you when you least expect it; the mom likes bugs; the son likes traps. This makes you play a little differently in each of their areas (e.g., strutting around like an exterminator with a flamethrower in the mom's old house or moving slowly and constantly checking for remote mines and boobytrapped boxes in the son's party area).
The family is a huge presence in the game, and I really liked the level design, which had exploration and boss fights quite intertwined. Usually there was a bigger fight at the end of each area, but the family members were omnipresent throughout the game.
Other little things:
1. I liked the simple crafting system, but inventory space is at a premium.
2. There are four or so scenes that you play in the past. That was really cool because those (usually) took place in the next area that you visit in the present, which means that you have some idea of the layout of the level, of where some items are, and so on. Really clever!
3. Speaking of inventory space, this is a game that has--I don't know how to call them--persistent storage. If you store things in a chest, they exist in every chest in the game. This is fine. I can ignore that it doesn't make any sense because it's convenient for gameplay. But there was one time that it stood out. You have to go into an escape room (Saw, yes) and are forced to leave all your things in the chest at the entrance. When you exit the escape room, all the things that--according to the story!--you left at the entrance are magically in the chest at the exit. Like, persistent storage makes sense if it's unexplained I guess. But when a character says, "leave your things in this chest," and then your things magically appear in a different chest, it actively doesn't make sense.
So, weird story as expected, and had me on the edge of my seat the entire time. Definitely would recommend.
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dkirschner's Resident Evil 7: Biohazard (PC)
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Current Status: Finished playing
GameLog started on: Tuesday 1 December, 2020
GameLog closed on: Thursday 3 December, 2020 |
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