Conspiranoia

I've made a small research and it seems this is a term used more in Spanish than in English, were people usually just refer to conspiracy theorist. Nevertheless I like the term. 

During this period, I've not seen a lot of cases in my social networks, but there's an occasional one sometimes. And I cannot help but get nervous about them, but it's not much I can do. 

Conspiranoia would refer to this tendency to believe that there's dark conspiracies involved in certain world events.  Conspiracy paranoia, basically. And current events are easy to cause strange irrational reactions that make us believe such things indeed. However, applying basic logic can help diffuse these strange feelings, even if not everyone applies it. 

For starters, let's clarify that there has been conspiracies in the world, and even now I totally believe there's some conspiracies being executed. The thing is, they're conspiracies that make sense. For example, if you review the history of C.I.A., you'll see that yeah, they're bastards that have conspire to overthrow legitimate progressive governments in order to put right-wing corrupt dictators in the past. So yes, I totally do not trust any "official" occidental comment about South-American politics where USA and Europe are supporting some party in there that is trying to gain power, because more often than not they're trying to overthrow a legitimate leftist government. Venezuela is a mess and I'm not sure what to think about it apart that every side is bad in there, but I'm sure that the official opposition backed by USA is a corrupt right-wing piece of shit. Bolivia, I totally believe USA tried to remove Evo Morales and put some bullshit right-wing government that would let them steal the countries resources by bribing them. 

Same way, and considering how they don't want to release information about it, I'm totally convinced Kennedy was killed as an act organized by its own government and security agencies, because he was too progressive for their tastes. 

There has been proof about the surveillance that USA wants to apply to us all as revealed by Snowden. And there has been proof that, in Spain, there's a number of policemen, lawyers, judges and other law members, plus politicians and parties that are organized to lie, prosecute and condemn people that do not follow their right-wing fascists ideals.

So yeah, there are secret conspiracies in the world. Usually by right-wing fascist, by rich people, and by strong authoritarian powers. I will not talk about Russia and China because they don't hide it, so it's not secret they want to control their population and such things. They don't care as much about PR, and they're happy to point at the hypocrisy of other powerful countries that pretend to defend "justice" and other such concepts and then they do the same shit and try to justify it or hide it, like Spain with political prisoners as Russia pointed, or Spain with the police repression as China indicated too.

In general these conspiracies are "easy", usually. The surveillance one was a bit more complex, but we suspected it would be possible by just adding certain code to apps or by not sharing security holes in programs and such things. Other conspiracies are more in the sense of  "give money and weapons to this South American party", or "accuse this person of something so we can put them in prison", or just "kill this person". They tend to have a basic idea and with a clear objective that benefits certain people. Like, "this guy wants to prevent us from making money from this business that exploits people", so "we kill this guy, we scare others, we manage to make money exploiting people".  It's pretty straightforward, you can see the logic, it's basic.

We need to consider that people are idiots. Even powerful evil people. So, complex plans to achieve difficult weird objectives are quite unlikely, really. 

This virus is not a fucking conspiracy. The vaccines are not a fucking conspiracy. And for fuck's sake, the bloody stupid masks are NOT a conspiracy. 

Do I like to wear masks? No. Do I like to stay inside home? No. Is this some stupid "plan" to control us? Of course fucking not.

So, let's discuss some of these comments. 

-The Vaccine will control us and monitor us: Do you have a smartphone?  If you do, I can assure you that there's no need to provoke a global pandemic and to create a fake vaccine so they put a chip in us. We carry the chip every day, use it and provide information to it. I'm not saying different companies and organizations don't want to track us, but that there's a lot of easier ways to do it and they're already doing it in simpler ways. Also, most of us are not interesting enough for particular information, they just want "Big Data" to try to create models for prediction and control. Yes it's scary and not good, but vaccines and current situation has nothing to do with this. 

-The vaccine will modify our ADN: First, that's not how the ARN thing works. Second....why? What is gained by "modifying our ADN"? What basic gain will this provide to the organisers?? This enters the terrain of believing that someone has researched some way to modify our behaviour via ADN or some crap like this, which is just ridiculous and not worth mentioning.

-The vaccine is actually the illness and the thing that will kill us:  That's why before the vaccine people were dying left and right, correct? I mean, we're hiding at home for the shits and giggles, because before the vaccine everybody was healthy, yes? Actually scratch that, some people may believe this is the case. To that, please volunteer in a COVID ward in any hospital.

-The virus has been created in a lab by China/USA/Bill Gates/ Etc: First, virus occur naturally. Second, the people and countries you're proposing benefit from having big amounts of population to exploit, so they win nothing by killing it. Third, the people and countries you're proposing got hit nastily by it and are in shambles. For this to be some type of plan to destabilize the others, we'd need to accuse the country that has dealt with this better...which probably is New Zealand! Known conspirators for the fall of civilisation, of course. 

-Masks are "muzzles" that want to silence us / they make us breathe CO2 so our brains get smaller: Here it's just a matter of looking at people that used them before this, basically doctors and nurses and lots of Asian countries. They were doing fine while using masks and were using them to avoid transmitting diseases long before this. So, no, masks are a bit uncomfortable but they're not controlling you or killing you. And yes, if you don't use them you're certainly a narcissistic egotistical piece of shit.

-Confinements are attacks to religious freedom, they don't want us to to meet in churches/other religious meeting points: I mean, if you think you need to meet in crowded places yes or yes to practice your religion, here I'm not going to argue, please do so. But please don't meet anyone else outside this community of people, and when you catch pneumonia, please stay inside your house and don't cough at anyone else.

- The whole pandemic has been planned and it will create a new world order: So no, it hasn't been planned because there's several important business that have been hit by this and they would rather not have been hit, even if others are having more benefits now than before. And about the new world order stuff, look, there's already a war ongoing as I said before, where rich and powerful are trying to fuck with the rest of us, yes. But they want to fuck us by making us powerless and make us work more. Closing us inside houses or killing us is just not profitable long term. So just consider profit, this situation is not nice for them either. 

All these have this issue of complexity, strange goals and dubious benefits. However, there's a few things that may be true, because they fit with what we've mentioned before, simplicity and direct benefit: 

-Some vaccines are not being approved or bought, or they're stopped suddenly from being applied, because different governments want to give money to only certain companies and countries: Yeah, I totally believe that, and you can see it by which vaccines are being treated worse in which areas. 

-Going to work with public transport and working in an office is a much worse infection vector than they say: Indeed, but they have to pretend it's outside work that people get infected, or they'd be forced to force employees to provide teleworking, pay more for risks or temporarily stop activity, and the economy cannot deal with these things so they ban the "fun" time people may have while keeping the "boring" working part, when both are equally dangerous, because one produces money and the other does not.

After saying all this, I have to say I'm as tired as anyone about the situation. However, being selfish about it and defending it with a conspiracy theory is not helping anyone.

Resident Evil 7: Awesomely Creepy

All this time that I played the older RE games was to lead to this point, to play RE7. This one I was told that it was again scary and good by several people, so I was very curious about it. 

The game clearly breaks itself from the past trend and decides to reinvent the saga, in another direction, a much better one. For starters, even if it's the 7th installment, the official name is Resident Evil: Biohazard, a way to start anew somehow. And what they did was to go back to its roots in some ways, regarding important details and regarding horror. RE7 is finally a horror game. Yes there's action, of course, but this game is again properly scary, properly tense and visceral and dark and very creepy. 

I have to confess I love creepy atmospheres. Creepy is a subtle feeling of dread. Not too obvious, not too evident, it's achieved by creating an environment that just feels....wrong, for some reason. And where you expect you'll be jump-scared at any moment, or that reality itself will crumble around you or something bad will happen. It can be lots of things, but when done right it creates a tension that is amazing to feel. It's like scared but interesting, like you cannot stop watching now and wanting to learn more, and it's fascinating. You don't achieve creepy by just making gore, for example, you can make gore creepy but it needs to be subtler than this. The creepiest things are the ones that look the most normal or innocent right before they don't. 

 RE7 achieves high levels of creepiness. It's also a bit disgusting sometimes, or not as subtle as it could be, or very gory at moments, but the feeling you get playing it has this special something that makes it extra interesting and compels you to go on and find out what's happening. 

Let's start with the "boring" part: Graphics again have been improved, the game looks very realistic. Humans appearing in it have a lot of detail, while still clearly being fake they are high on the scale of realism, to the point that they're a bit uncanny-valley too, a bit disturbing sometimes. The game is dark and greenish, somehow, that's the best explanation I can make of the general colors you see. The game happens in a single night, regardless of how many hours you really play, so you notice as you advance around, when it's still dark, or when you finally get to a point where the sun starts to raise, almost at the end. Most of the time you're inside some house, and the details you see are both gruesome, sometimes a bit too much, but also detailed and creating this special atmosphere. It feels claustrophobic at times, and it does make you wonder sometimes why the main character didn't run away like after the first 5 minutes of the game. 

The game is done now from a first person perspective, which makes it very immersive. At the same time it's not like a shooter, it's a first-person survival horror so you don't have a lot of ammo or health to just splurge and waste resources. Also, the main character is not an action hero. He does a lot of stuff for being a normal guy, but the game manages to make you feel like you're not comfortable with all this action around you somehow. You do need to aim and shoot from a first-person perspective though, but sometimes you need to run around or evade, more than fight. It has some similarities at times with Alien Isolation, in the fact that some enemies are only really vulnerable in some moments, and other moments you can only run away. These moments are a bit arbitrary, it's not clear why in one instance you can and in the other you can't, but it's fine, it's not too confusing anyway. Your inventory is very similar as to how RE1-RE3 worked, with limited space that you can increase if you find extra bags, but a general storage unit that is interconnected between locations so if you find one you can find all your items, regardless of the place. It has also this concept of a "Safe spot", the room with the storage that also has a save point, a place where you will not be attacked or followed. 

Weapons are varied. You progress from a knife, to a pistol, to a shotgun. You can get a flamethrower and a grenade launcher, you can find better pistols and shotguns for the second half of the game, and you can unlock a Magnum with very limited ammo, useful for the final boss fights and particular moments. You also find explosives, that are nice sometimes for the slowest but tough monsters. To heal yourself, you use disinfectant, which is frankly funny because you just pour it over your hand and ta-dah, you're cured, but it's part of the charm of the game, not taking itself very seriously but this time clearly being in parody-style, not like in RE4. Plus, there's another reason that I suspect about how you heal, but it's not confirmed, we'll talk later about it. In this game you need to combine base materials with chem fluids to obtain ammo, disinfectant or other useful items, and the end result is that you need to manage your inventory to have space but also have ammo and health. There's special injections that you apply directly into your arm that make you reload faster or have more life, but those are rare and hard to find or unlock, usually only as secrets. There's also sometimes secret pictures that show the location of those secrets. In general there's quite a lot of variety of things, rather interesting.

Puzzles are still simple, but better. You need special keys for different areas, you need to examine some objects, you need to think a bit for some sections and get the proper combination, or shadow, or examine the right thing, and overall the game feels less linear, having to go back to areas and re-explore them or access previously-shut doors. Linear games feel like movies, less interactive, plus purely linear environments feel very fake: Our houses and streets are not one long corridor, so when previous games did that it didn't feel right and here this is corrected. The maps themselves are interesting and very creepy, although most of the action happens in a central group of houses. The only weaker place is a section that happens in a salt mine that feels more monotonous and less creepy in the main game, but the rest do feel scary and tense. 

So, let's talk about the plot/campaign, and its ramifications. Previous RE were very old  (RE6 is from 2012) so I didn't warn, but here I do, even if it also has some years already: Spoilers ahead. 

In RE7, you're Ethan Winters, a married guy. Your wife, Mia, had some weird "babysitting" job a while ago, and then she disappeared, with one last message telling you that she lied to you, and that if you see this, to stay away and do not search for her. However, you get another message from her, not even a message, some card mentioning an address in the middle of nowhere, an abandoned plantation in  Louisiana, USA. Basically redneck/hillbilly territory. So you go to investigate. 

The game is set in the current time, but it has this strange very retro feeling, and it uses a lot of retro things. You don't bring a phone with you it seems, and you just get there at the fence of the property, leave your car and start walking around the forest. I'm not sure if you warned the police as well about this place, but it seems like you didn't exactly. 

Ethan....seems to be not very bright or something. Soon enough you find proof Mia has been in the area, her driving license, but at the same time you start finding dead birds and animals, and some weird sculpture made of cut up cows. At this point you should just call the police and leave, and there's actually two points at the start where he should have done that, this is the first one. You seem to see some guy in a yellow raincoat passing by, but he disappears. So, you find an area with several houses, and only one is accessible, marked as "the guest house". Inside everything is disgusting, with rotten foot and mold and worms, dead crows, etc. It's an abandoned horrible place, that also has some articles talking about disappearances in the area. Here you also find your first save point, in this game represented by cassette recorders. Yes, like if we were in the 80s or something. Also, you find an old CRT TV with an old videotape. Again, this feels...strange, there's no explanation why in the game you're finding usable old things. I have my theories but we'll get back to that. 

In RE7 when you find a tape and play it, there's this cool mechanic where you actually play what's happening on the tape, you turn into the character that is filming. In this first tape, you observe a crew investigating old "haunted" houses for a Youtube channel or something. You're the cameraman, accompanied by the actor and a producer I think. You enter the guest house, that looks exactly the same as not although maybe a bit better, and after a bit you lose track of one of the guys that seems to have disappeared into thin air. You discover a secret chain in the fireplace that opens a secret door, you go through this secret door to a basement and you find the guy standing against a wall and not saying anything. When you touch the guy so he answers you, he falls backwards on top of you, apparently dead, bleeding from his eyes, and the video gets cut there. That's the second time Ethan should just say "screw this" and leave as fast as he can from the place, but he doesn't: Instead he has the awesome idea of opening the same door and going the same path. The stairs to go down break, preventing you from going back up, and you need to navigate through horrible water covering up to your neck to get out of the area. You do find the body that you saw on the tape again, he floats suddenly in front of you, all gross but very dead and not a zombie or anything...and then you arrive to an area with a prison door and a woman inside. You unlock the door, and there's Mia!

Such a short game! And so easy! You can just go back now :).

..Except you don't, exactly. As you try to find a way out with her guiding you, she says she lost her memory, but that "daddy's coming" and asks why did you come. You tell her she wrote to you and she says she didn't. You find some door, but then while exploring another area she screams and disappears. You explore a bit forward, find some stairs out of the basement and go up, but find another locked door. You hear noises, go back to the basement and find Mia in all fours, making weird scary sounds and looking paler. She screams at you, hits you very very hard and her face contorts and changes, turning uglier somehow with rage and glee. She pushes you into a room where you grab an ax and are forced to hit her with it until you hit her neck and she goes down, dying. You leave the area for a sec, but when you get back her body is gone, and the locked door opens. As you exit, she appears again saying that it's ok, she understand...and then she goes crazy and ugly again, hits you, stabs your hand to the wall with a screwdriver and proceeds to cut your left hand with a chainsaw. You escape, find a gun and shoot her until she goes down, while bleeding from your left hand like crazy (yeah, that's impossible), and she goes down again...and then this other big guy with the yellow raincoat, Jack, hits your head and takes you and Mia away.

And that's the intro of the game :D. It's visceral, violent, creepy and scary. It resembles more a ghost horror story about possession than an old RE game. And it's amazing, cannot compare at all with the action-based crap they did before. 

So, you get kidnapped by a crazy family,: The husband (Jack), the wife(Marguerite), the old lady(?), and the son(Lucas). There's also a daughter (Zoe) but she somehow remains sane and actually helps you, she contacted you before on the phone and said she wanted to help you. They seem to regenerate, which explains why Mia is not dead, she also regenerates. And someone has stapled your left hand back to your arm, and it seems its working as if nothing has happened, which is ridiculous but funny. In this first half of the game you explore one of the old house and then another older one, where you fight dad and then mom, in that order. Jack is super strong and regenerates, and follows you around. You end up beating him and he explodes into goo, but you don't know if he'll stay dead, because he shot his head in front of you before and still recovered. Mom seems more fragile but she turns into a giant bug and her area is full of big flies/mosquitos, bug swams and other such nasty things. The old lady meanwhile keeps showing up at weird places around the houses, smiling at you, seeming catatonic and following you with her eyes but not moving more than that and being all creepy. You sadly cannot shoot her, the game prevents that if you aim in her direction because you know she'll try to murder you at some point....

Soon enough, apart from the family and the bugs, you run into "Molded", which seems to be converted almost-dead people, that have been covered in mold until the mold controls them and creates claws and giant mouth with teeth. They're quite disgusting and scary, especially because they're black and tend to show up on dark places, plus they look like some of the molded background walls. As you progress, you find out that Mia arrived to their house from some crashed boat found in the swamp with "Eveline", a little girl, and Eveline gave them a gift. Seems clear Eveline is somehow responsible for making them almost immortal and for creating and controlling molded. After the first house and before the second, you find the trailer where Zoe lives, apart from all the madness. She's not there but she talks with you on the phone and mentions a serum that can cure Mia and her from Eveline's influence. 

After defeating Mom, you find Eveline's room, where you can see that she's some disturbed little girl, and you find some disgusting weird arm, an ingredient of the serum together with a head. You hear Eveline for the first time, although you don't quite see her. She seems mad at you but wants you to be the new dad of the family or something, together with Mia, so you can turn into her parents. As you escape the molded she sends your way, you go back to the trailer to discover Lucas has kidnapped Mia and Zoe, and has the head. Lucas is quite the psycho, and seems he was disturbed long before Eveline arrived with Mia, his house is full of traps, in "Saw" style. After playign his little games and not being able to kill you, he escapes and you manage to get the head and liberate the girls. Zoe prepares two doses only of the serum. Jack appears again as some weird giant monster and you're forced to use one of the doses to "heal" him and kill him for real in the process.

After this you only have one dose, and you're forced to choose between Mia and Zoe. This is quite interesting because it's been a while since RE games had the courage to pull multiple endings, and I approve of it. However, it was badly implemented: saving Zoe gives you a bad ending, the game progression makes no sense and then her and Mia get killed, while saving Mia gets you the best ending, is internally consistent and saves both of them in the end. Saving Zoe seemed like the "morally" right choice, plus Mia has been clearly lying to you about some stuff, apart from being possessed, and Zoe has been really helpful and nice to you by contrast, but the game punishes you harshly for selecting Zoe, and I think there's room for improvement here, they could make the final sections more different based on your choice or something.  Anyway, let's pretend we save Mia, Zoe gets mad at you but says she didn't know what to expect, and you say not to lose hope, that you'll send help and rescue her too. 

You leave with Mia but find the ship that had the accident, a huge tanker that is just sitting there, and at that point "Eveline" attacks you, a giant-molded tentacle. At this point you change perspective and play as Mia, where she sees Eveline taking Ethan. You explore the big ship as her, at first with no weapons which creates a lot of tension when you do find some molded crawling around, and while having hallucinations where Eveline shows up, really a little girl that seems quite psychotic. You seem to start remembering things, and Eveline shows you a tape that shows what happened. This is the moment you quite see that "tapes" in this game seem more like an illusion, a mechanism where I guess Eveline transfers knowledge to you mentally, because there's no way Mia was recording what happened on the boat in first person and then she transferred this into a VHS tape inside the boat. Which makes sense, since no one would use tapes and CRT TVs in this current time.

In the tape it's clear Mia worked with some Umbrella-like bad organization that was developing bioweapons, and they created Eveline, a girl that produces fungus spores that can infest and control people, give them powers but also turn them into monsters. The girl itself then has control and communicates with the infected people and creates illusions in their minds, which is why Mia sees her and gets possessed. Mia and another guy acted as her parents for transport, but she reveled and escaped, while keeping Mia as a mom figure. After reviewing the tape in which she infected all the people in the ship and made it crash against the swamp, she asks you if you'll be her Mommy, and when you reject her openly she gets mad and dissappears. In this section you search for Ethan in the boat, replaying a lot of things you've seen already in the tape, which makes it a bit repetitive. The only enemies in the area are molded and they're scary but less interesting that the family, so this was the more cumbersome part of the game, although still interesting. You rescue Ethan but Eveline possesses you, and you kick Ethan out of the ship before she makes you kill him. 

Now back as Ethan, you escape the ship and reach an old salt mine. You go inside the mine, and found out Lucas was cured from Eveline's control by the company that made her in exchange for reports, and he's just bad, he's not really possessed, although he is regenerating. Eveline unleashes a lot of molded on you while signing a children's song, being all creepy, and after you survive the attack you find yourself back at the guest house. You also make a special venom from her cells, that Mia gave you, that is the only thing that can apparently kill her. In the guests house you confront Eveline, who is plaguing you with hallucinations of the attack Mia did to you in there, but now you see she was controlling her and guiding Mia's actions. As you advance towards her as she unleashes psychic waves against you, you inject her with the venom, which disperses the hallucinations: Eveline was the old lady that you kept finding, that you assumed was a grandmother of the family. Leaving the lab made her get old super-fast. As she complains no one liked her, she dissolves.....just to come back a second later as a huge tentacle mold monster with her face in the middle. You fight her one last time, until a passing helicopter drops a special gun against bio-weapons, that you use to freeze and finally kill her. The helicopter lands, and Chris Redfield, this time with human proportions and being a lot nicer, rescues you and shows  you Mia is in the helicopter (if you choose her instead of Zoe). And the game ends. 

So, there's a few loose threads: What happens with Lucas? And What happens with Zoe? These are solved in expansions that I will comment quickly. The first expansion is free, you play as Chris Redfield, working for Umbrella. Yes, Umbrella turned its head around and decided they had done horrible things and now they have started working to fix what they have been doing. And you fight Lucas and his traps, in the Salt mine, now saturated with spores and quite claustrophobic, I have to say, very good atmopshere, you want to get out of there as you play. You again lose a lot of soldiers from your squad (that's starting to becoming ironic, Chris loses people left and right) in Saw-like traps (the movie, I mean), but you manage to hunt down Lucas and kill him The second expansion I had to buy, you play as Zoe's uncle, a big strong guy that decides he can punch molded until their heads explode (yep, this one is a bit ridiculous). You find Zoe infected but are told there's a cure, and you punch your way around enemies till you manage to save her with the help of Chirs. Chris tells her Ethan sent him, and Zoe is happy that Ethan fulfilled his word.  

And thats RE7, at least what I played and found interesting. I will comment a couple of extra things: First, the fact that Ethan has glued his hand back and also sees Eveline as a girl that appears and dissappears, and is affected by her powers may mean he's actually infected but not yet controlled. That would make a lot of sense and would explain how can you survive all the crap that you do, or how come you see tapes with what happened in the past: All those are Eveline making you see things or somethign like this. However, a bit like the indoctrination theory in ME3, this is not explored, at least in this game, which is a bit of a shame.

Second, that I loved this game a lot. I found the plot quite dark but interesting, and that it was the right decision to reduce scope so much and focus on a little story here in a small place with a few houses. That's how you do horror well. Horror that is at planetary scale is not really horror, is usually just action. Great horror needs to be minimalist, and here it was done perfectly. I liked this so much I don't mind playing it again and sometimes I have replayed some section or watched some area again, and it's still interesting and compelling. 

Apparently, RE8 will come out soon. The game is set in some village, and there's apparently werewolfs and vampires ans who knows what else. This doesn't fill me with excitement, because reminds me too much of RE4. However after an RE7 that was this solid and good, I'm definitely curious...

Resident Evil 6: Some Improvements

 Although I enjoyed RE5, I didn't really feel interested in RE6. I've heard it was more of the same as RE4 and RE5, no original ideas. The one I was curious was RE7. However, for completeness' sake, I played it too. 

In the end, I have mixed feelings about RE6. There's aspects of it that are great and huge improvements, and other aspects that are just like in RE4 or even worse. RE6 tries to combine lots of ideas, consisting in 4 different campaigns with different characters that are all interconnected. It returns back to the zombie/virus concept, while keeping also the parasites(now they're called J'avo for some reason) although they're also caused by the virus administered differently, so it is quite diverse, that's true. The action happens in different parts of the world, and the timelines of each campaign overlap, and sometimes you play the same moment twice but from another character's perspective.  

Let's start with the easy part: Graphics are still awesome, even more now, and the detail and color it achieves is great. The setting is more focused in dark areas or at night-time, and the end result of shadowy areas feels again scary, finally. It is still an action game, but it recovers some horror elements that I've been missing from RE4 and RE5. Zombies are so much creepier somehow, maybe because they show they've lost their intelligence in the process, or because they're rotting. Not that parasites are nice, but with parasites in previous games it seemed like they were still people, and it hits very different if they're like mutated people with superpowers and mind-controlled or if they're actually dead, rotting people that were alive before. Zombies now die gruesomely, falling apart, while the parasite enemies show varieties of mutation that are also disgusting, like the two giant grubs that explode. Hunters return, together with plenty of other varieties of animal-like creatures, and regenerators too, although they don't have spines this time but still move creepily and jump at you.

The gameplay is almost identical to RE4 and RE5, third-person view where you aim at where you shoot and you need to be mobile. They added a lot of physical contact, which is nice: yes, now you can punch and stab enemies as a valid way of killing them, and it works well except you're limited by a fatigue attribute that gets used in these attacks or while running. The interface is a bit more chaotic, even changing between campaigns, and the inventory is weird, I didn't really get it apart from the fact that you grab things until you cannot grab them any more and then you may need to use something or just discard it. This time you don't upgrade weapons nor grab money to purchase anything, but at the end of a chapter (each campaign has 5 chapters) you can use the points to get specific boosts, although you can only have 3 active boosts at a given time. Your save file actually registers your status, like in RE5, allowing you to replay chapters, change settings or re-select boosts, but there's less motivation for it, since you don't have the shop system or the money or the individual weapon upgrades. Overall the changes are not bad, not great either, just shuffling a bit the situation, or even simplifying it I'd say: You don't need to worry much about anything, you just need to keep playing the campaigns. Enemies continue to drop ammo and health, and sometimes points (since there's no money and you can use the points to buy boosts). You will get the weapons, they're not secretly hidden or anything, and you need to use all of them in different situations. Each campaign even has different ones, although some repeat of course. 

There's a lot of characters you play as, because each campaign has 2 except for the last one, with only 1. You can select who to play as, although the game has a very sexist bias and the "proposed" main player tends to be a guy in every campaign where there's a choice between guy or girl. To talk about the game it's easier to talk about each campaign separately now, because they're very different experiences.

Overall, what we need to know is that Umbrella is now called Neo-Umbrella (which is ridiculous, why would you change your name to that) and they've developed a C-Virus that turns people into zombies or mutates them into J'avo or turns them into cocoons that then transform into big monsters or, basically, turns them into whatever the plot needs.

The first campaign you play as Leon or as Helena. Leon has turned into less of an asshole, although he's still "defending the president of USA" and such crap. he's still quite intense, more than in RE2, but now he seems more reasonable and he's actually likeable. Helena is a new character that is also part of the people defending him. And the game starts as you shoot the president because he turned into a zombie. Of course Leon is like traumatized by it (while I cheered as it happened), and Helena says she was somehow involved and that has info about it, but she won't tell until going to some church. You need to cross the now-infected city, helping survivors (although they all have awful cutscene deaths or similar) and reach the church. This area is full of zombies, it's dark and it's scary again, finally. You get back the feeling of RE2 and RE3 of an infested city, which is dramatic and tense and proper horror again. The church is like very very far from you and you go through a cemetery, where zombies are even creepier, as they're old corpses that are coming out of their tombs, again a move in the right horror direction. Helena keeps saying she'll explain something but she doesn't, you reach the church and find some secret lab with some disturbing things, like a video where apparently Ada Wong emerges from a C-Virus cocoon, although that makes no sense at the time. You find Ada there too, all cool and mysterious, also not telling you what's happening, and Helena finds her sister that was kidnapped, but she's infected and you need to fight her (while she's naked, of course, turned into a monster but a nice-looking naked-lady monster. Sexism is still a big thing in this game). Eventually you learn that the president wanted to explain publicly how the government was also at fault in RE1-RE3 because they were working with Umbrella, and this other guy from the government, Simmons, that is kind of your boss actually works for Neo-Umbrella and infected the president, gaining access from Helena after kidnapping her sister. After all this you decide to go against this guy, which for some reason makes you travel to China, where your plane gets infected and crashes, of course. You meet with Sherry from RE2, now an adult and also working with you, and some guy that is helping her called Jake, that has taken the mantle of  asshole protagonist in this game. Together you all fight a big monster similar to Nemesis from RE3, Ustanak, that is following them. You get separated and fight some regenerators, and then you meet Chris Redfield who's very angry at Ada and wants to kill her. Together with him you find an Ada, that has different clothes(purple dress) than the previous Ada(red jacket and black pants) and acts more evil, but you convince Chris to not kill her because you trust Ada. Somehow after that the whole city gets infected from a C-Virus missile that is launched on it and is full of zombies. Then Simmons gets infected too, and he becomes a huge monster that you end up defeating with the help of the first Ada(the red and black one) before she disappears, ending the campaign. 

This was a bit confusing, because it was. In the first campaign you don't know why Chris is so mad at Ada. Also, it's weird that Ada keeps switching between two outfits, but Leon or Chris never analyze this further. Also, it was a bit anticlimactic to kill the big bad guy in the first campaign. A problem this game has is that we've run out of Albert Wesker as charismatic bad guy, so they had to introduce random ones and pretend they had control over a global conspiracy while also being quite easy to track and kill in the end. And this push of being bigger and bigger and bigger, started in RE4, makes it hard and ridiculous because stakes are higher and higher, crazy people want to basically destroy the world for no apparent reason and well, doesn't makes much sense what's their ultimate goal, really.  Having said that, this campaign has a creepy vibe that is much welcomed, with proper zombies and dark and mysterious areas and catacombs, stuff that is actually creepy and I like in a horror game.  

So, second campaign: You are Chirs Redfield again, more buff and gorilla-like, angrier and more soldier-like than before. You're joined by another soldier, your second-in-command, called Piers. You seem to have forgotten something that happened and are just drinking somewhere, and you're brought back to commanding a squad to fight J'avos in china leading a new platoon. In the process you somehow finally remember a previous situation like that some months ago, fighting J'avos, where your platoon discovered some C-Virus lab. You cross paths with Sherry and Jake, and Sherry has the mission to bring Jake back so you let them go even if you and Jake get all alpha-male on each other and seem to want to fight (blergh). You end up finding a lab, and in there there's Ada Wong (purple one), that betrays you and infects all your squad with the C-Virus, turning them into horrible monsters, except Piers and you. After this flashback you go back to current time, where you again loose all your squad except Piers to monsters and are following the purple Ada. You find her, but Leon stops you from killing her because he trusts her (by now it's clear there's two Adas, the original red-and-black and the doppelganger, which seems to be the one you saw emerging from the cocoon, but Leon and Chris didn't understand this and cannot tell them apart even after seeing one in different clothes minutes ago.). Things get confusing, and you follow her again to an aircraft carrier (both Adas are there but you don't notice the difference) where the purple one gets shot to her apparent death in a very anti-climatic way. You travel to some sunken platform where a superweapon is being created, and also discover that Jake is the son of Wesker, he's immune to C-Virus and his blood can be used to make a cure, and you again fight stupidly with him, just saying you killed him and kind of taunting him to kill you in an unnecessary way. You split ways in the end and as him and Sherry go away to extract the cure you and Piers stay to stop the super-weapon. The super-weapon seems to be some type of giant skeleton/mutant/zombie thing that emits C-Virus stuff, and Piers ends up getting infected. However this just means he gets cool superpowers, and together you defeat the monster. Piers sends you away while remaining in the sinking lab, and giving the final strike to the monster and dying together. You survive and are seen again about to lead another platoon of soldiers on some other mission.

Ok, this clarifies some things, while others remain as obscure as ever: Why exactly is Neo-Umbrella creating a giant zombie that infects everything? I mean, what's the benefit of that? Apart from being able to cackle maniacally, of course. And why is Chris still doing missions when he clearly has a horrible case of PTSD? Also, the fake Ada is killed so easily and it's also not clear what exactly she expected to gain from her actions. This campaign starts to have over-the-top action too, although the plane crash on the previous one was pretty exaggerated (and how you survive it so easily). The different timelines crossing is fun, but the plot is still an absolute mess. Also, Piers was clearly conscious enough, maybe he'd be able to control the virus, but he stupidly decides to kill himself for some reason when he had cool superpowers. Sure he was ugly, but well, he's a soldier and shouldn't care that much about that, should have seen if he could be stable and have powers, that'd be cool. But the writers of this one were too conventional to let that happen, that's clear. This campaign felt a bit like a drag after the second half, I have to admit. But well, we deciphered some other aspects of the plot, while still having some doubts (ignoring the ridiculous parts that are just bad writing). 

Let's move to the third campaign: You're Jake and Sherry. Jake is a mercenary that has been infected by C-Virus but doesn't transform, and Sherry is tasked with rescuing him and convincing him to give a bit of blood. He accepts for some ridiculous price, and joins her into leaving an area infected with J'avos. You cross paths with Chris and Piers, play a bit together and then you go separate ways. At this point you meet the Ustanak, that seems another version of Nemesis in charge to capture Jake to avoid him giving the cure for the virus. You avoid it as much as you can, and it's revealed that Sherry can regenerate from wounds thanks to the infection with G-virus her father gave her in RE2, or something like that. There's some discussion about bad fathers, of course, and you end up being both captured for some months. You're not killed so in the end you escape. In the process you're mysteriously saved several times by a shadowy figure (it's clearly the good Ada, even if you don't see her right away), and meet Leon and Helena. You fight the Ustanak again but now from their perspective, and somehow after this and some more plot about Simmons you get captured again and send to the secret platform. In there you again escape, find Chris and Piers and go your separate ways. As you're exiting the place, you have a final confrontation with the Ustanak and you finally kill him for good. Jake decides to help for less money, and accepts his father was a kind of bastard in the process but that he doesn't have to be. 

So, this campaign ties up the cure subplot, but apart from that doesn't introduce much else. I think it's the one that felt more like a chore, because it has a lot of areas that you already explored with other characters. Also you fight J'avo, which are more annoying than zombies. There's also the fact that this campaign exaggerates a lot the action, even more than in previous ones, with car-riding through houses, impossible jumps, surviving falling from helicopters, etc... However, the biggest "sin" this campaign makes is that has been labelled as "Jake" campaign. Jake is a new character, a rather selfish person, clearly an anti-hero, and not even as half as interesting as Sherry! Sherry from RE2! I wanna know what happened to her, how she discovered she's almost immortal now, regenerating from horrible wounds as if it's not a big deal, how is she working against the monsters that plagued her as a child, if she kept in touch with Claire too...I mean, I have so many questions about Sherry! And guess what? The game doesn't answer any of those. They focus on Jake. That's, to me, the biggest, worst problem of RE6, the blatant sexism in this campaign in particular, the inability to see that we don't need more stupid male protagonists, we have already lots, we could have explored this other character a lot more. I mean, of course I played as Sherry, but the focus of the campaign is Jake, and it's the main thing in RE6, the introduction of this guy. There's also the fact that we haven't heard anything else from Jill or from Claire, and that would also be interesting. RE games do have a good list of interesting female characters, and they could have split the game between them, really. But well, in RE6 we did get a little treat, the last campaign.

In the fourth campaign, you play as Ada Wong. The real one, in red and black. You play alone of course. First you start in a submarine full of J'avos, a submarine that proceeds to sink, quite a cool section actually. In there you find proof of the other Ada, which puzzles you, and you don't know what's going on. Then you go to the research facility Leon and Helena also visited, and you help them fight Helena's sister. At this time when Leon asks whats going on and Ada says she doesn't have time to explain, now it makes sense: Ada, you, have really no idea either and are just investigating. You discover the video with the fake Ada, and you go to China to investigate too. You find out about Jake and Sherry and decide to help them a bit, saving them from the shadows, what we experienced in the previous campaign without knowing who saved us exactly. You follow the fake Ada to the aricarft carrier where Chris and Piers are too, and they confuse you with the fake one and chase you. You see how the fake Ada "dies", but this time you manage to talk to her, she infects herself with more C-Virus and turns into a giant face monster that you need to kill, a better end for her, considering she was the other evil guy in this game, apart from Simmons. You figure out she was another person, a research partner of Simmons that turned into a copy of you for some reason and to blame you on stuff, so you go back to where Simmons is and help Leon and Helena in killing him, as in the first campaign. 

Ada's campaign was the most enjoyable I'd say, because even if she did outrageous action stunts, it had quite original settings plus she was the smartest character of them all, really. The others could be quite stupid, but Ada being herself means she was more aware of the general plot, and it's nice to play as a character that is actually intelligent enough. It was also nice to help others, and in general her campaign felt shorter and more informative and tying all general loose ends. It seemed easier too, somehow. The only problem is that at the end, instead of getting some little video of Ada doing something, they show Jake killing some random monster-guy, which is again a wasted moment to show more of whatever Ada was doing next. But oh well.

 So that's RE6. The campaign was very ambitious, a bit too much, and it goes into exaggeration. The different timelines crossing is a bit confusing but not bad, although repeating scenarios does get tiresome. It's main problems were the need to make everything bigger, the stupid over-the-top action, Chris' evolution and the focus on Jake instead of Sherry, but the 1st and 4th campaign were quite solid and it went back to being more scary, which I find I prefer.

Since they had gone that big, they had to do something for RE7 to change the trend or they would have run into issues. So, for RE7 they re-analyzed the situation and took some risks. We'll talk in the next post, but I loved what they did in RE7.