Resident Evil 7 is filled with nail biting moments. A lot of those moments are achieved with interesting design techniques. But they only work as well as they do because of the move to First Person.
I think a lot of people would agree that Resident Evil 7’s most tense moment occurs at the beginning of the game.
It’s the start of the story. When Ethan first enters the thought-to-be abandoned house in an effort to find his wife. Ethan isn’t some secret agent or a war veteran, he’s just some guy. And he doesn’t have a gun, or any weapon at all.
We know we’re playing a Resident Evil game. We know there’s going to be zombies, and monsters, and creatures of the night. But we don’t have anything to defend ourselves with.
This changes things. Would you go into an abandoned house that you know has heinous evil lurking inside? Despite that, we have to press on. In that back of our minds anticipating, with bated breath, a jump scare or some crazy zombie attack.
When we open the door to the house, it’s completely dark inside. There’s a sliver of light shining through, and we follow it into the surrounding darkness.
Then the door closes. And it’s pitch-black. We can’t see anything, but only for a moment. After a second or two we automatically turn on a flashlight that our character brought with him.
That moment of complete darkness is terrifying. We have no idea what lurks in that blackness, we can only hope that nothing happens to us during those couple of seconds. However, an even scarier moment is when the flashlight turns on, and we finally get to uncover our surroundings.
We find ourselves in a tiny room. Its wood paneled floor is littered with broken scraps of paper and trash. The cream-colored paint on the walls is chipped, and caked with dirt. There are cracks in the wall, spare floorboards covered in tarp are resting up against it.
It’s more akin to a shack than a room, given the size. There’s a moment of tension when we scan the room with the flashlight, hoping that whatever might lurk in the darkness isn’t in here with us. But there’s nothing. Relieved, we can push on.
This is something that happens occasionally in the game. We enter an unknown area shrouded in darkness, waiting for our flashlight to turn on. Those few moments of pause are terrifying (especially if you’re afraid of the dark). But then, when our flashlight turns on, we have to muster the courage to actually look. To resist the urge to immediately turn of our PCs and consoles. To brave the darkness.
It’s even more terrifying at the beginning though. Braving the darkness is riddled with tension on its own. Knowing you have no means to fight back against whatever is lurking in there is something else entirely.
The entire beginning section uses this fact to its advantage. The game asks you to continue down long dark hallways and rooms with old tables and furniture strewn all over the place. But it also asks you to go around dark corners with no knowledge of what lies beyond.
Doing that, knowing you’re defenseless, is one of the most horrifying acts in the game. It takes a tremendous amount of guts to push onwards during those moments. It makes us feel vulnerable, like there’s nothing we can do except close our eyes in fear and accept our death when there really is something around the corner.
The designers use doors for this effect as well. In previous traditional Resident Evil games, doors were nothing more than a buffer to other areas (setting aside the fact that you often needed keys to get through them, obviously).
But in Resident Evil 7, they’re used much more creatively. Since, for the most part, loading screens aren’t necessary, we can move from one area to the other seamlessly. Doors simply act like doors would in real life!
To open a door, the game forces us to press up against it. We get as close as humanly possible, as if it weighs a ton. During this motion, the only thing in our vision is the door. As we slowly widen the gap, we start to unveil what lies on the other side. We venture into the unknown once again.
The door acts a lot like a curtain, unveiling the secrets behind it. We have no idea if there will be a jump scare, a dangerous enemy, or simply an empty room. There’s tension as those doors open. As their rusty hinges squeak and squeal. If whatever lurks in the darkness didn’t know we were coming before, they sure do now.
It’s incredibly claustrophobic. It’s a fear that the game plays into often.
Once we’ve moved on and gotten ourselves a weapon or two, that vulnerability is somewhat gone; we can defend ourselves. But that claustrophobia, opening doors and peaking around dark corners, still remains.
Throughout the entire Resident Evil 7 experience, we’re thrust into tight hallways and tiny rooms. It doesn’t matter if we have a shotgun or a flamethrower. In the back of our minds, we’re always wondering if we’ll actually be able to fight back against the creatures of the night if they’ll be two feet away from us during every encounter.
The game often puts us in situations where we have to contend with enemies in rooms that never feel big enough. We end up struggling to put them down before they have enough time to stagger forwards and take a huge bite out of us. It can be incredibly awkward and makes for very tense situations.
That tension increases as the game progresses and we go up against enemies that can run at high speeds or can soak up way more bullets than usual. Sometimes, it’s just better to accept defeat and run away.
It doesn’t help that the our character, Ethan, has an incredibly slow run speed, though.
At the beginning of the game, we have to sneak past Jack Baker, the father of the zombie infected Baker family household. He’s incredibly strong and practically impervious to weaponry (at least at the beginning).
So, we’re forced to quietly walk around him, hiding behind knocked over furniture and cracked walls. If we’re caught, we have to run away.
But our character runs at an insanely slow speed. We’ve all had that dream where we’re running away from some horrible creature or serial killer. Except our legs feel like noodles and it seems like we’re wading through pudding.
Ethan runs like that. And it makes every instance where we’re running away from an enemy absolutely cringe inducing (cringing, in fear).
Regarding the Jack Baker sequence of the game, whilst running away from him we can hear him yelling at us. Telling at us what he’s going to do to us if he catches us. If we’re running away from a more conventional zombie or enemy, we can hear them shrieking and scratching their way towards us, from behind.
The thought of being turned to mince meat in some dirty basement or getting our entire body cut off is absolutely awful. It makes us want to run away as fast as we can! But we can’t! We’re practically jogging away from harm. And that makes it all the more terrifying.
Playing those sequences gets you thinking. There are definitely a lot of design decisions calling back to revolutionary games like Amnesia: The Dark Descent and titles of its ilk. They set the standard for a new kind of horror genre, and Resident Evil 7 clearly takes a lot of pages out of its book.
Everything from not being able to fight back against enemies (at the beginning) to the claustrophobic First Person View, is something that other horror games have been doing often over the last decade.
It definitely shows that Resident Evil 7, and 8 of course, are redefining the Resident Evil series with a modern lens. Except their not just incorporating the ideas of other teams into their work, their expanding upon them in really interesting ways.
Of course, most notable of these expansions is simply having the traditional puzzle like mechanics that defines the series.
It’s interesting having to think critically in stressful situations. Running away from Jack Baker while trying to find a way out of the living room area is a fascinating duality. Trying to find the pieces to a puzzle while roaming around avoiding monsters and killing zombies is something that gives RE its own flavor.
Beyond that, the lighting techniques used are just as scary. Something that I’ve noticed when watching footage of other Resident Evil 7 play sessions is that their screens are too bright.
While I understand the need to turn up the brightness due to visibility issues (just try playing the game during the day to see what I mean), it definitely subtracts heavily from the experience.
If the brightness is correct, everything is cast in this eerie shaded look. Cracks in cream colored walls are pitch-black. Corners are shrouded in darkness, and it becomes really hard to tell if there’s something there. While the Baker Family house has color, everything feels extremely dark and grey, and dead.
It creates an atmosphere that’s unsettling. We get the sense that there’s something wrong here. There’s a stench of death, even though we’re just playing a video game. . .
. . . Although I’ve never watched it, apparently the VHS version of the movie Alien is leagues more unnerving than its DVD and Blu-ray counterparts. From what I’ve heard, it’s because the scan lines and grain filtering that covers the TV screens on CRT makes it really hard to see what’s going on during dark sections of the movie.
When a character is walking around the darkness looking for the alien, you never really know if it’s with those characters on the screen somewhere, hiding. They’re often in shadowy areas, with the only source of light coming from a flamethrower or a flashlight. The grains create artificial movements on the screen to create this totally accidental movement in the dark.
In the same light, Resident Evil 7 uses its effects to it’s fullest potential in the darkness as well. Underneath tables and behind half closed doors lies complete blackness. Obscured shapes veiled in shadow make it hard to tell if there’s a creature lying in wait or just some old lamp.
If the game is designed to make you uncomfortable, the lighting adds to the effect just as much as everything else. If you turn up the brightness, well, that whole facet of the game is pretty much ruined.
Not only is the claustrophobic effect ruined, but so is the aesthetic. Every texture and environmental detail look incredibly bland without pairing it with the lighting. When the brightness is down to it’s intended level, the visuals are absolutely stunning, life-like.
There’s a lot of interesting techniques used in Resident Evil 7 to make us as uncomfortable as possible. While I didn’t really go in depth at all with this it’s still cool to think about how a lot of this is really only possible in the First Person.
You see, it’s hard to make a player claustrophobic when they’re controlling a player avatar with a camera four feet away.
Opening doors doesn’t have the same effect if that door isn’t directly in our face. In the First Person, we feel almost exposed and vulnerable, having to go through doorways that are two inches from our face, not being able to perceive danger until it’s too late. If we were looking at the world through a camera a couple of feet away, it wouldn’t have nearly the same effect.
In that same vein, running away from creatures and serial killers doesn’t really have the same effect if you can just turn the camera around and look at them (take the alligator sequence from the remake of Resident Evil 2, as a random example). The fear comes from the unknown: not knowing what the hell is running the heck after you.
Being in the First Person puts us in the action. I guess that’s why I’ve heard so many good things about the VR version of the game. It’s more immersive.
While we’re controlling Ethan, who’s an actually individual person, he’s also our player character. We’re directly playing as him, and we’re in his shoes. We see what he sees. There’s no barrier between what he’s doing and what we’re doing (well there is, but you get the idea). If there’s a zombie in his face, it’s in our face. If there’s a serial killer chasing at his heels, they’re also chasing after us.
That’s why playing Resident Evil 7 makes us feel so vulnerable. We can’t hide behind Leon or Claire or Jill when shit get’s real. We have to muster the courage to push forward into the darkness, by ourselves.
And that’s absolutely terrifying! (Happy Halloween!)
Slickaria! 