As you might have read in my last two articles. I have been covering Resident Evil 7 up until its initial release date in January of 2017. We already know that Capcom has decided to step away from the casual game roots it has gotten so accustomed to since 4, 5, and 6. It is now going back to classic Resident Evil roots which have made the games so successful in the first place. Horror.
That being said, the ESRB has revealed some clues as to what this game will be about. They have confirmed that there will be many graphic cut scenes. The notes confirmed dismemberment with chainsaws and even impaling someone’s face with a shovel. Sounds like we are no longer dealing with the usual “shoot through cannon fodder to reach next said destination point” anymore. I think that is for the best. I like that there will be different weapons to use. If I wanted to only use guns, I would have picked up the latest brown shooter they have out now and called it a day. In case you are still left in the dark wondering what kind of rating Resident Evil 7 is going to get, it’s M for mature. Not really a shocker considering what the ESRB has leaked to us.
We have also come to find out you will be playing a character named Ethan who is searching for his wife in a derelict mansion. Though to be fair, the name Ethan was mentioned by a female character in the latest trailer at GameCom, so that was not much of a spoiler, rather a small reveal to a character we already knew existed. It seems that Ethan will be using a number of weapons such as flamethrowers, chainsaws, shotguns, and explosives to kill “mutant” creatures. Mutant creatures could be any number of things since we don’t know exactly what virus we are dealing with. Again, this is all great news. But the main problem I seem to have with this is why he is in this mansion. Maybe there will be a more developed story line than what the ESRB has revealed. But in my opinion, it still seems somewhat boring.
This story seems to take a more personalized approach compared to the first Resident Evil, but I feel things could have been more interesting if we kind of switched roles, as a women looking for her husband is typically not often done in these types of settings. It could be the over generalization of what is revealed, and I hope that there is much more to the story line than this. The last time we got a storyline like this was with 6, and we all know where that ended up. Some crazed man who had an obsession with Ada Wong and was prepared to end the world if he could not have her… so we played through a bunch of character stories for this to be the only end result. Sure, 6 had its good stories, Chris’s story line being one of them. But I still don’t render this as an excuse for the end result of this game. So many teams were put to work on this game for that to be the end result. My only hope that with these changes for 7, they have learned their lesson from 6 and have kept the budget cost low while still producing a great story.
Though I would have appreciated a third person view of the character, a positive point to take from this is the first person viewing that games like Silent Hill have proven to be successful. Not just this, but the environments are that much more scary and gross looking. This gives a grimier feel to the game and will possibly work great for virtual reality players. Some players didn’t really like the virtual reality experience as it made some people sick. But it may work better for some players. Capcom has insisted that players will still be able to play without VR capabilities, so that is something that other non-fans of VR, like myself, can at least be thankful for. Needless to say, Capcom would have preferred this to be kept out of the public, but at least we don’t know all of the details surrounding the story yet. We can only hope that the story is everything we horror fans are craving as we approach the January release date.
