One of the biggest announcements at Sony’s press conference at E3 2016 was the reveal of Capcom’s Resident Evil VII (Evil?
EVII? If you squint it totally makes the name-number transition work),
and with that game out of the bag, Capcom had it in the spotlight on the
show floor the day after. Capcom’s booth (with the exception of a
mini-courtroom for Ace Attorney: Spirit of Justice and an airship for Monster Hunter Generations) was a huge, dilapidated house built for showing off the new game.
Capcom took me on a tour through its spooky booth to let me try Resident Evil VII in PlayStation VR. REVII will be entirely in first-person, and you’ll be able to play the whole game using PSVR. It takes place in the Resident Evil universe after Resident Evil 6.
I have no idea who the main character is — you don’t play as Chris or
Leon — or what the story is. With that out of the way, let’s jump into
the VR experience.
My silent character woke in a run-down room in an abandoned house. I had
a flashlight affixed to my view, to point directly in front of me; I’d
later conclude that this was the light of a video camera I was
constantly holding. No one was around, and a single objective popped up
in the center of my view: Leave the house.
Besides a few traces of light coming from a fusebox and switch, and
through boarded-up windows, the house was completely dark. I only had my
front-facing flashlight, which not only was very effective in
illuminating what was in front of me, but thoroughly vignetted my
peripheral view, making me vulnerable to jump scares that were
thankfully quite few. I wandered around the first floor of the house and
found a dummy’s finger, a chained cabinet, and a set of bolt cutters. I
also found the back door to the house, but it was closed, the entry
room was filled with cow carcasses, and a spooky baby doll dropped out
of the ceiling. So, I tried to open the cabinet, instead.
Since this is a Resident Evil game,
I assumed that the dummy’s finger would have opened the lock on the
chains. The bolt cutters instead worked with remarkably un-Resident Evil directness. A video tape was inside the cabinet.
I also crept upstairs to an apparent dead end, where three mannequins
stared at the wall. I knew exactly where this was going because I’ve
played horror games before. I looked at something else in the room,
turned around, and the mannequins turned to face me, with a fourth
mannequin at the top of the stairs. They didn’t seem to be enemies —
only tools for a jump scare — so I went back downstairs. I returned to
the room where I woke up. A television was there and turned on, and a
VCR was on top of it. I put the tape in the VCR and my view shifted to
the test pattern of the tape, which transitioned into what was on the
game, which became a flashback I also played.
I was a cameraman for a ghost-hunting reality show. The star and
producer were arguing about how there was nothing in the house and how
the star was jaded. I followed them in through the kitchen door. The
producer disappeared moments later, and the star and I looked through
the first floor for him.
We ended up in the room I originally woke up in that had the television
and the VCR. The star found a switch in the fireplace that opened a
small door in the wall, which we crawled through. There was a hole in
the floor with a long ladder going down into the darkness, which I
climbed. The producer was standing, silently staring at the wall, and
just like the mannequins, I knew where this was going. I nudged the
producer, who ended up having a hook through his mouth and being
incredibly dead. I then fell over and came out of the video flashback.
Now that I knew about the secret door, I pulled the switch myself and
went into the room with the hole in the floor. The ladder was gone, but
the key to the back door was on the floor near the hole. I found the
back door to the house, opened the door a crack, and was attacked by a Hills Have Eyes-style redneck not-zombie. The demo ended. If you didn’t tell me this was Resident Evil, I would have completely assumed it was a new Condemned game.
First-person horror with emphasis on flashlights in total darkness, no
zombies in sight, a crazed hobo killing coworkers, and mannequin jump
scares? It screamedCondemned.
Resident Evil VII looks to be as big a departure from the series as Resident Evil 4 was
before it, which shifted the genre from survival horror to horror
action. This looks like a return to survival horror, but with a
first-person view to make the scares even scarier. And to be fair, the
mannequin thing would have freaked me out if I hadn’t already seen it in
three games before that.
Mechanically, Resident Evil VII looks really interesting, and I’m curious how it will turn out. The Resident Evil world
is completely stupid, and the idea of a reality show where some people
explore spooky houses in a world where weaponized zombies have already
killed tens of thousands of people is ridiculous. We have no idea where
the story will actually go, or who you’ll play as in the full game,
though, and the formula is there for a compelling return to actual
horror.