Resident Evil 7 will hit the shelves tomorrow (or tonight at 9 p.m. if you're on the West Coast), and this radical new direction of the franchise will exit the gates, as it were. But what is hiding in the creaky walls of the Baker Family mansion, and will its scares cut the mustard?
We're working through Resident Evil 7 and will be publishing our review in the coming days. Below are our impressions from what we've played so far.
Back to its old ways. Resident Evil 7 is once again crafting an excuse to get a hapless protagonist into a sinister situation, and the Baker Family mansion is definitely sinister. While many enemies do seemed to be "turned," or infected with some sort of virus, and items you find throughout the level seem to imply something of that nature, the phrase "T-Virus" has yet to be used, and I'm not even sure if it will be. Resident Evil 7 doesn't feel the need to be bogged down in the minutia of traditional RE plots and is perfectly content with scaring the pants off you in the interim.
First-person works very well. A lot of hullabaloo about Resident Evil 7 was in regards to its use of the first-person perspective, something that Resident Evil games are not known for, from the third-person-shooter style of RE 5 and 6 to the fixed-cam, voyeuristic perspective of the original Resident Evil. But, it's doing a lot to add to the experience, and they're working with that perspective well, in terms of developing scares by obscuring your view.
PC performance isn't an issue. I'm sure many are glad to hear this, given the recent history of tumultuous PC launches, but I haven't experienced any serious performance issues. Even with a graphics card and processor that doesn't quite meet the recommended settings, I'm still able to run the game on decent settings with only the occasional unspectacular frame rate. That being said …
PC graphics settings need attention. I don't know if it's just me, but the graphical settings to which Resident Evil 7 defaulted looked like it was made for the PS2. Definitely change those up, particularly the "Rendering Method," which defaulted to "interlaced," and made the graphics look like they were meant for 640×360. Watch out for that, and make sure you finely tune the settings to suit your rig, and you'll be fine.
It wears influences on its sleeves. There might be a small point of criticism of Resident Evil 7 in the question of whether it's doing anything original, or just mashing together different horror game and movie influences under the RE banner. Thus far, it's hard to argue with that point (although, I don't think that's necessarily bad), as you can see anything from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre to P.T. even to the Spanish found-footage horror film [REC] (remade in the U.S. as Quarantine). There's even a shot that's straight from [REC] that's completely recycled, seen below (note, this portion of the game is shot from a handheld camera, so the quality is intentionally poor).
Saving is handled well. Like many games, Resident Evil 7 has auto save points, but they're few and far between. It will suit you a lot better to use the scattered stationary save points as often as you can. I would almost like it better if the game only had stationary save points, a'la Alien Isolation, as it ups the ante and gives a huge sigh of relief when you finally find one. Still, nothing to complain about in RE7.
Crafting is more meaningful than expected. With the standard, third-person experience giving way to this new, first-person style, I expected that, if finding items, fitting them into an inventory and crafting new items was in the game, it wouldn't be very impactful. But boy, was I wrong. You'll be frequently injured and therefore glad you took the extra time to search for those items that form into a medkit. Likewise, many items you grab you won't even know you need them until you do, so Resident Evil 7 really rewards exploration.
