The First 15

The story starts with two videos from my character’s girlfriend. The first one is happy and carefree. The second one is decidedly creepy and frantic.

The gameplay opens up with me talking to a friend on the phone about why I’m here. Good to know that I’m smart enough to at least let someone know where I am.

I spend a few minutes walking through the forest. This game really loves its invisible walls. Fortunately it’s daytime. There are a few creepy objects lying about, but nothing too scary yet.

Eventually I come upon a rundown house. I open the side door and peer into what looks like a gaping maw of pure blackness. I am being told that I have to leave the safety of the daylight and enter the blackness if I want to search for my missing girlfriend. Against my better judgement, I step on through.

Inside is complete darkness. Fortunately I brought along a flashlight. I wish I had brought along a brighter flashlight, but I’ll take what I can get. I very slowly start to explore the house. It’s seen better days. The food is all rotting. The boards creak as I walk over them.

Wait, was that a person I just saw?

Story

The main story manages to remain creepy from start to finish. Even as you learn more about what’s going on the knowledge never really makes things any less scary, it just transforms them into a different kind of horror. That they can maintain such an atmosphere for the entire duration of the game is quite impressive.

Occasionally you find VHS tapes. Watching these tapes puts you in the shoes of another character for a short time. I found these to be a very clever way to expand the story while maintaining the sense of immersion.

Interface and Controls

Many times throughout the game I found myself wondering where I was supposed to go next. The map lists objectives, but doesn’t tell you where to go to complete those objectives. A line of dialogue sometimes points you in the right direction. But if you quit playing and continue again later, you may have forgotten where you were told to go. Of course other times the game just never says. Having such unclear objectives often times lowered the tension since I spent so much time just wandering around areas I’d already cleared trying to figure out what to do next.

As you approach an item a small indicator appears above the item. When you get close enough it displays the button for you to press to interact with that item. Out of all of the systems in Resident Evil VII, I found this to be the most distracting. The pop-up icons look so out of place that frankly they caused me to lose my sense of immersion every time I went to pick up an item. And as with all horror games, there are items everywhere if you take the time to look for them. This only gets worse when you use a supplement. The supplement allows you to see the pop-up icon for items from much further away and through walls. So while the supplement lasts, you constantly see a bunch of tiny icons floating all around you.

Personally, I would like the pop-up icon be replaced by a white outline of the item once the player is close enough to ‘notice’ the item. The item itself would then gain a grainy white filter over top of it once the player was close enough to pick up the item. As for the supplement, I would rather the supplement cause some sort of synesthesia reaction. This would cause items to create sound that players could follow to locate the item. The supplement would need to last longer than it does currently to allow players time to track down the item making noise, but I feel like this would be far less damaging to the game’s sense of immersion than the current system.

Inventory space is limited which is supposed to create decisions about what to keep and what to toss. Unfortunately what actually happens is you waste a bunch of time going back and forth to your chest where you can store all of your unneeded items. This is mostly due to the need to actually store quest items.

Quest items also take up inventory space, though I honestly can’t figure out why. Each time you acquire a quest item you typically use it a time or two right away, then never need it ever again. And so all they seem to do is limit your inventory space until you manage to dump them into your chest. There’s also the issue of having to pick up items during a fight. The game doesn’t warn you that you’re going to need the extra space before the fight starts, so you end up having to spend time clearing your inventory in the middle of a fight which usually gets you killed. Of course once you die you then have plenty of time to clear enough inventory space before retrying the fight, but it just feels awkward. Instead they should give you less overall inventory space, but remove the need to store quest items in that space. It also might be worth exploring the idea of removing the chest as well.

Gameplay

This game utilizes a system of checkpoints for if you die. Unfortunately the designers have a tendency to be somewhat sparing with where they place these checkpoints. I imagine they did this to create a sense of fear over dying. Unfortunately, it had the complete opposite effect. When you die and reset, everything is in exactly the same place as it was the last time you went through. Enemies appear in the same locations, items are in the same hiding places, everything is exactly the same. What the designers failed to anticipate is that when you walk through the exact same hallway knowing nothing is going to jump out at you, fight the exact same creature knowing exactly what it is and where it’ll come from, and find the exact same items knowing that picking them up isn’t going to trigger anything (or even if you know one of them will trigger something), the game stops being scary. There was a particularly egregious section in the basement. I only died 4 times, but the entire area is a series fights and dying on any one of them forces you to redo all of them. As a result of this repetitive section, it absolutely killed any sense of terror I had about the game since I knew where everything was and how it would come at me. This loss of fear stayed with me for a while after I made it through this section of the game and had a negative impact on the remainder of my gameplay. I’m not saying that bad checkpoints ruined the game, I enjoyed Resident Evil VII. But the predictability of the environment gave me a chance to concentrate on the enemies long enough to learn all of their tricks so that they too became predictable. The game could benefit immensely from some randomization. Having enemies appear in different locations and shifting items/traps around would go a long way towards keeping players on their toes even when they are repeating a section of the game due to a death.

One other complaint about the gameplay was the lack of indication about a boss’ health. There’s often no indication that you’re actually damaging a boss rather than just making it angry and wasting ammo. One of the bosses would flee whenever I damaged it, making me think that all I could do was scare it off. As a result, I wasted a lot of time wandering around trying to find a way to actually kill the boss when all I had to do was chase it down and unload more bullets into it. It would have been nice if periodically the boss would indicate it was actually being damaged such as having pieces of it break off. I don’t need an HP bar on the screen, but I do need some indication that I’m actually doing damage.

Something very odd was going on with the health and/or damage I dealt to enemies. One enemy would go down with 4 shots from the pistol, and the next identical enemy would take an entire clip plus a shotgun blast to take down even though I shot it in the exact same spot as the first. I’m not sure if this was due to enemies having different amounts of health, weapons doing variable amounts of damage, or some other mechanic which I wasn’t aware of, but whatever the case, it made dealing with enemies odd since some went down easy while others required an obscene amount of hot lead before they died. This might have been intentional to make enemies feel more unpredictable, or it could simply be a bug. In the end though it seemed to simply lead to a lot of cheap deaths when an enemy hit me despite the clip of ammo unloaded into its head.

I should point out that despite the negative aspects of the gameplay listed above, I did very much enjoy my playthrough. The game certainly has its flaws, but it succeeds at creating a compelling horror experience despite them. Remember this site is largely about dissecting a game and trying to find ways to improve upon it.

Conclusion

You will enjoy this game if you like a well crafted story which will scare and creep you out on a consistent basis. The type of horror you experience shifts many times but never goes away.

You will not enjoy this game if you frighten easily. This game is designed to scare you and it certainly will do that at some point (even if you don’t frighten easily).

Resident Evil VII: Biohazard is a well crafted game with a more personal story than your usual Resident Evil title. Despite that, or maybe because of it, the story manages to maintain a constant sense of horror. The gameplay suffers a bit from some aspects becoming predictable if you die often enough in the same area (often enough being 3 or more times). All in all though, I enjoyed my time playing this game.