It's not a circle

I have not been writing much this year, to the point that I didn't talk about the second part of Alan Wake, which came out a year ago. 

The first game, I remember it with mixed opinions. The story was spectacular, but the gameplay was not very fun, up until you reached the dark place where strange things started happening and was very interesting. But the previous sections, which comprise most of the game, felt....long. You were traversing woods at night and enemies came at you, the same enemies always, and you had to beat them to get to the next point, another wood section. 

 Also, for some reason, you tended to travel by night, when the enemies were more powerful. I kept wondering why not take a good night's sleep and continue in the morning when it was sunny and safe....in moments when you were stranded it's ok, but every time to go out at night seemed unnecessary...

Nevertheless, the story was very good. It was very smart to connect an evil entity with the power of stories, and to indicate that you could modify the story but had to beat it in a way that made sense, if you gave yourself superpowers in writing the evil entity could do the same with itself, so you had to respect the story. 

Since the first game, these people had made Control though. And I'm a big fan of Control and know these people can make great stories, so I was for sure very interested in this second part, even if I'm more interested in Control 2. So, of course I had to play this. 

And I have to say that Alan Wake 2 is so much better than the first game. Still not as fun as Control, but Control is about action, and Alan Wake 2 is about horror, and it does it quite well. Horror is based on making you fear for your safety, for what will be next after the corner, for thinking you're running out of bullets. And Alan Wake 2 manages this extremely well, much better than the first part.

First, let's talk graphics. This game is gorgeous, detailed and realistic. It's amazing how good it looks, it feels like you're playing a movie. The scenarios are very detailed and unique, and feel asphyxiating somehow, in a good way for a horror game. How light work and influences the environment is also very well done. And it's worth mentioning that they've abandoned the "only going out at night" approach and follow a much nicer and scarier method: Considering that overcast north-pacific weather can make areas quite dark, that's what you get in plenty of areas, just the inside of buildings with no power or cloudy areas or rainy areas. This gives a greyish dark look at the game that matches well with its themes.

The plot is complex: Seems like Alan Wake disappeared years ago, and there's people that also disappeared in the lake that are reappearing and getting murdered by a cult, and you need to investigate this as an FBI agent called Saga. You start playing as Saga, who's a very interesting character that seems to have something more than intuition when resolving crimes, and you start investigating the latest murder. The game includes a special mode where you write down clues and follow up logic threads to figure out what happens, which I found quite cool, especially because later on there's threads that you might not find or complete fully, depending on your findings. 

Soon enough things turn to worse as Alan Wake's pages appear and indicate future attacks by shadow creatures, which keep happening as described. Without spoiling much, eventually you also play as Alan Wake, but it takes a while to get there, and then you can switch between these two characters as you advance their plots in parallel. 

In the middle there's also the FBC involved, and Ahti, the Janitor from Control plus other characters from previous games, connecting everything together.

When you play as Saga you find possessed shadow people that you need to light to burn their protection and then shoot, while if you play as Wake there's plenty of shadows around, some are harmless but some of them attack you and need to flash with light to reveal as monsters to attack back. Each character has slightly different weapons and abilities (instead of investigating cases, Wake can do fixed reality alterations of scenes and places), but the gameplay is basically the same. Saga needs to deal with occasional boss fights while Wake just has lots and lots of enemies depending on the area. 

There's a bit of free-roaming aspect in the game, where you can revisit areas and affect their status (the water level is important in this game, since the dark presence lives in the water), but if you're progressing the plot you don't need to do that, this is just for the bonuses and hidden items and logs (and there's plenty of those). 

The plot is amazing, although I called several of its twists in advance, but that's just a well-made story with foreshadowing, not a fault of the plot. It feels quite epic and deep, with scary, weird and even funny moments all thorough the game. The use of real-video actors mixed with everything else makes it a very cinematic experience, but very artistic. There's even a short movie you can watch completely at a certain point, which is not required at all for the game and you can skip and miss, but it's cool that they recorded everything in case you stay to watch it. The developers are Finnish and this is an aspect heavily referenced and shown in the game, which I think it's a nice touch.

The game is not long, as with most horror games, but still may take 15-20 hours to finish. It's quite unforgiving, to the point that I ended up reducing the difficulty in the last part of the game to avoid repeating the same scene time and time again. 

The only flaw I found in the game is that, after all of it, it feels the progress we've made in Alan Wake's global story is...not much. There's progress yes, but there's a lot of unsolved things left for a third part, or maybe a second part of Control, not sure. But this ties well with the internal world, since in the dark place affected areas you tend to have to go through the same place three times before being able to finish them for real....

Recently there was 2 DLCs added to the game. The first one is a lot of fun, with three independent stories a la "Twilight Zone", with a very light-hearted tone and lots of humour, with the last story being genre-bending about what's a game and what you do in it. The second DLC is more serious, following one of the main characters, a FBC agent before she appeared in the main game. The tone is also quite sarcastic too, poking fun at AI and content-generation farms and declaring them evil, plus introducing really really scary areas and concepts, making it a very scary but nice addition to the game. 

Remedy (the developers) are really doing great games, interconnecting everything and creating a very interesting world, and I'm sure to try and buy whatever they produce next.

Resident Evil 8: Action-horror like RE4, but good this time

Recently I self-indulged a bit and got myself a PS5. I only had the original Playstation, so this allows me access to plenty of exclusives that, over the years , I had to miss. 

For the moment though, I'm also using it to see some of the newest games at their best, since it's quite a powerful thing. And one of these games that I got new was this Resident Evil 8, or VILLAGE (written so the initial "vill-" looks like VIII, like 8 in roman).

There was a lot of hype about this game but what I've saw beforehand was not very inspiring, reminding me a lot of RE4 (which I hate)....but I gave it a try, and was pleasantly surprised. For starters, the graphics are still amazing, very realistic, painfully so when getting hurt. The gameplay is streamlined and it's a lot more action-like, with less focus on the survival part and easier to manage and kill enemies. You need to pace your resources but there's more of everything. The inventory is huge and it separates consumables and weapons from keys and treasures. There's an upgrade and shop system, and well, some parts of it feel a lot like RE4 but somehow in a better way (the shopkeeper even jokes, saying the same sentence and intonation from RE4 and saying he's joking, he knew someone who said that).

You continue after 7 playing as Ethan Winters, living in "Europe" (probably Romania), and in the first 5 minutes of the game Chris Redfield apparently kills your wife Mia and kidnaps your daughter Rose, only for her to be stolen from him 5 minutes later too. So that's the main drive of the game. Things are not really as they seem, spoilers ahead, just in case. 

After waking up from the accident where your daughter gets taken by someone else, you end up in a village. At first the initial house looks very much like RE7, but soon enough you just go out and it's dawn, and you see yourself  in a small rural area with a huge castle and some weird houses, windmills and a factory. 

You discover the village has been attacked by these monsters that looks like a half-zombie half-werewolf, and after finding some survivors that die immediately afterwards, you're captured and brought to the presence of the 5 big bads of the game: Mother Miranda (the leader, like a religious local figure that has protected the town till she decided to kill everyone), Lady Dimitrescu (the lady of the castle, very very tall and drinks blood), Heisenberg (the one managing the factory, with magnetic powers), Moureau (an ugly half-fish person-monster) and Donna Benevento (a girl that has creepy puppets that talk for her). 

These people have...charisma, really. Maybe except for Mother Miranda, who is more hidden, the other characters are quite interesting. They're bastards, but interesting bastards. You kind of wanna know more about them, as you see them verbally fighting to decide what to do with you.

After escaping their little games, you go back to the village and meet Duke, the shopkeeper, who seems like a weird 6th member of the family but that is trying to help you somehow. He's quite mysterious. He tells you your daughter may be in the castle, and you go there to find her. There Lady Dimitrescu and her daughters try to kill you to drink your blood, together with their zombie-like servants, but after some going around you do manage to kill all of them, in the case of the lady with the help of a poisonous knife that turns her into a monster, because otherwise she's perfectly immortal. This castle section was really cool and big, mysterious, and the vampire theme, while ridiculous, was cool. It was also very nice to see their total disdain for males (they call you man-thing), although they treat their female servants quite bad too. You end up picking up a flask, and Duke tells you that's your daughter, split in 4 pieces, but that your daughter is special and is not dead, she can reform if you gather all 4 flasks, in hands of the 4 lords (the bad guys, apart from Mother Miranda).

The castle occupies quite a lot of the map, but after finishing this section you never go back there. Next there's Donna Benevento and her house. She's in fact making you hallucinate. As part of these hallucinations there's this little segment of a very creepy autopsy you perform on a doll that represents your wife, and you discover clues hidden in the doll that allows you to escape and kill the creepy main doll, which in fact was Donna. I really loved this part too, it was like a ghost story, without enemies (except for a specific one that is best left to discover, that is extremely creepy and unsettling and not a doll) but with puzzles and mysteries. You do feel a bit of pity for Donna, she seems to have some mental problems or something, and she did attack you somehow but she could have killed you from the start and she didn't, it seems she wanted you to like her like a daughter or something.

Between these main sections you always return to the village for a bit, discover new areas in there and can gather some special treasures and recharge on ammunition. You also find out that all monsters are usually created though the use of the mutamicene from RE7, the mold thing, but with different variants and results, and that Mother Miranda was the one that found it, became immortal, gave immortality to 4 "childs" of hers, the 4 lords, and was isolating the village, getting tests subjects from it and keeping it uncommunicated from the rest of the world.

Next is Moureau, that lives in a reservoir with water. You find him fast, but he turns into a giant fish monster that is also blocking escapes with disgusting mucus-like substances, and you need to drain the water and fight him to escape. This section was a bit more painful, more generic, and you feel sorry for Moureau too, because he's not all that well in the head and he's not that much in control, it seems, and wants the approval of Mother Miranda. 

Finally there's Heisenberg. However, he contacts you and tells you he wants to help and get rid of Miranda, but you need to prove yourself. He leaves his flask in a stronghold with the werewolf-zombies, and after defeating lots of them and returning you can access his factory, where you talk. He keeps saying you need to use your daughter to kill Miranda, but Ethan says his daughter is not a weapon and gets all angry about it, so Heisenberg pushes him into the basement of the factory, where a weird monster with an airplane engine in the thorax and chainsaws instead of propellers chases you, till you fall even deeper. This section is full of robotic zombies, improved by Heisenberg with metallic parts. While talking he seems nice and a person you can reason with and the verbal fight you have with him seems extreme, but in the notes you find later in the factory you do see he's quite psychopathic too and has conducted horrible experiments with people in there. 

This area is long and dark and labyrinthic. After learning the paths it's not too bad, but it's quite hard to orient yourself and the map doesn't help, with levels and corridors that go up and down and up again interwoven with others, so when you see them in a 2D map it's quite confusing and then it's hard to find where you need to go. There are cool mechanics in there, but it felt claustrophobic and a bit too long. After clearing several floors and having to fight and kill the airplane-engine monster, Heisenberg drops you again to the bottom, which feels a bit annoying. In there you find Chris, who finally tells you that your wife at the beginning wasn't your wife, it was Mother Miranda, because she can transform into others and wanted to get the baby. This is very ridiculous in the sense that most of the tension between you and him could have been avoided with this simple explanation, but oh well...even other soldiers that work with Chris keep telling him later that he should have explained this to Ethan, so it's referenced inside the game that it's a very stupid decision. 

Anyway, he gives you control of a special tank that is immune to Heisenberg's magnetic powers, and you get into an elevator to the top and end up fighting Heisenberg, turned into a metallic monster. This fight is ok, but if he had remained in human form and instead used his magnetic powers, there's no way you would have won, while as a monster and just hitting you it's relatively easy.  Once the fight is over, Miranda appears, shows you she has your daughter and proceeds to rip off your heart with her hands, leaving you, Ethan, dead on the ground. 

You continue playing as Chris now, raiding the village with other soldiers (that this time do not die), because the mold in there is going wild and Mother Miranda has made a mold fortress around a place where she expects to do some ceremony. Some guys from an organization that was good in RE5 but is now bad seem to be trying to access it too, but they're killed by the mold. You fight waves of werewolf-zombies and get into the fortress, only to find Mia, Ethan's wife, alive and relatively well. You also discover that Miranda learned that the mold keeps consciences of dead people that died around that area, and wants to resurrect her daughter's consciousness inside Ethan's daughter, and all her experimentations have been for that purpose, to find a worthy vessel, while her other "childs" were not good enough. They also explain that this mold is the original one that was used to develop Eveline from RE7 later on, and that Umbrella's founder met Mother Miranda and was inspired by her to do the viruses and parasites, even using her symbol as the company's symbol. Chris tells Mia that Ethan is dead but Mia seems not worried, and says that's impossible, because there's something she has kept secret...

...and you start playing again as Ethan. You're having some type of dream where Eveline tells you you're actually dead, and that you died in the first scene of RE7, after Mia attacked you and the dad of the family basically killed you. But Eveline resurrected you, and you're mold, yeah. Which explains also why your daughter has some mold-like properties. Here I feel totally vindicated from my theories, as I expressed in my post for RE7. I mean, it wasn't that hard to guess, but still, I totally called it. It didn't help that Ethan glued his hand back in RE7, has flashes from Eveline, he can glue his legs too in RE7, and also in RE8, after Dimitrescu cuts your other hand during the castle, you just put it back and use some disinfectant to heal it. I mean, it's quite obvious, but still nice to have guessed it correctly. 

Anyway, even if you're mold, you're in horrible shape. You make your way to where Miranda is, and find her with your daughter. Your daughter does something to her, apparently trying to help you even if she's just a baby, which makes Miranda vulnerable. You fight her, and she's just very very tough, but you manage to kill her. However you're crumbling too, apparently, and you just give your daughter to Chris, and grab a bomb detonator and wait for the mold to come to you to detonate it, destroying everything and yourself, as Chris and Mia leave in a helicopter with your daughter. A final scene after the credits shows Rose, your daughter, older now after an indefinite number of years, visiting Ethan's grave. Then some guy in a suit escorts her out, saying they have a mission for her, and calling her Eveline. She gets annoyed and says her name is Rose, and pushes the guy but goes back to the car. This implies that she has some part of Eveline in her, and I really like this idea, because in her last moments Eveline sounded pitiful, she was a little girl that people experimented on and she just wanted a family and to be loved, so it does feel kind of nice to know she has had some type of redemption and can re-live a bit through Rose. 

And that's the game. I really really enjoyed it, although it can be ridiculous at times or make no sense too, but I think it's a similar idea to RE4 implemented a lot better. It's not so much survival horror this time, it's more action-like, but the gameplay and the characters give it a life of its own and made me replay the game several times. After the first playthrough I got some bonuses and managed to get some infinite ammo for some weapons, which helped in me wanting to play it again. It was also nice to try and complete many of the challenges the game has, which return special points that you can use then to get special weapons and stuff. Some of the challenges are insane, but there's a lot of replayability value. People said the same of RE4, that it was a good action game, but for me in RE4 the story implementation specially ruined it, and didn't make me want to play it, while in this case I'm happy to replay. The only shame is that the 4 lords were dispatched very fast. They're very colourful characters, even if evil, and I wouldn't mind seeing more of them in other games or DLC, but well,for the moment that's all we'll get it seems. 

Quite enjoyable and good, in summary. I'm pleasantly curious about what they'll do next after such strong 7 and 8.

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.

Resident Evil 2: The old version & the remake

 Although the first game was the original and the one I tried first, the second one was the one I played the most when I was little. 

 

Resident Evil 2 seemed to me easier, shorter, more approachable than the first one for some reason. There's also the fact that I played a version that came with an activated "cheat" that let you use powerful weapons with infinite ammo, which made things easier overall. This meant that I played the original several times, back to back, just for fun and to see if I could do it better or to show it to someone else too, playing with friends and relatives, and therefore I have quite good memories with it. 

The old version plays the same way as the 1st one, with weird camera angles and basic block graphics, herbs and sprays to heal, and basically same weapons, with maybe a few new ones like a flamethrower, an electric stunner and a machine gun. That's the standard weapons, of course. The special edition I played also had an infinte rifle, an infinte bazooka and an infine gatling gun, which made things easier of course. The enemies were more modular than before, making it easier to aim for certain areas and maim them or shot their heads off. Enemies were still mostly zombies and zombie dogs. Hunters did not appear again (luckily, probably the reason why it was easier), and lickers were introduced, which are harder than a zombie but not very hard overall, although quite disgusting and more intimidating at first. 

This time around we had a main antagonist, the chief researcher that created the virus, that got infected and mutated worse and worse as we won fights against it. And of course, the setting in this one is also very different: The virus has escaped around the city that was close to the mansion in the first game, and all the city has been infected. This means that the streets are full of zombies and that your only hope is to reach safe places that have been barred shut. 

The game has again two characters, Clarie Redfield (Chris' Sister, that has come to try to visit him or try to find him) and Leon Kennedy (a rookie policemen that has come to join the racoon city police department). They meet by chance while finding the first zombies, and then get separated by accident. You select one of them, but to finish the game you need to play as both, since each has a slightly different plot and they meet different people, although the areas and puzzles are mostly the same. The characters here are likeable and nice, which I mention because Leon in later games downgrades his personality quite a lot. 

The game starts in the streets of the city, which makes the first moments of action probably the hardest overall: You need to evade a lot of zombies with almost no weapons, till you get to the police station where most of the game, the first half, happens. The police station in turns acts like the house of the first game, with weird secrets inside, strange puzzles to open doors and sections requiring special keys. This is explained in-game by the fact that lots of officers are corrupt and working for Umbrella, to the point where part of the station is linked to secret areas and labs. From here you travel to some underground passages and abandoned areas till you reach the central Umbrella lab. The general feeling is that you spend most of the time underground. In the process you met occasionally some people, the most important ones being Sherry Birkin (a child, daughter of the monster that keeps following you) for Claire and Ada Wong (an FBI agent, or so she says, that clearly has other intentions too) for Leon, characters that appear also in later games (Ada is especially good about "dying" to then appear again and save you in some way while being always ambiguous about if she's bad or not). 

 In order to see the proper final ending, you need to play first as one character and then as the second one. The first character has more encounters with the final boss, but the second introduces a new villain: "Mr T.", a huge guy that clearly is some kind of monster, that follows you around and tries to kill you, which is revealed to be a new type of Tyrant (the final boss of the first game), a bioweapon that they dropped on you basically. Mr T. was a lot more annoying than the zombies and it made the game more interesting for the second playthrough, so you don't just repeat the scenarios and puzzles and some bosses. Both stories were matched nicely, making you avoid certain boss fights and just finding the result of them with your second character and the other way around, which was a great idea that forced you to play with both while presenting you with new plot.

The remake changes some things. For starters, the graphics are now amazing and realistic, to the point of being a bit disgusting at times: What before where blocky things now they can show gust and gore. The game is quite gorgeous though, that is true. Also a lot darker because now they can do torch light and show you only what you're looking at. The puzzles have been downgraded I have to say, being easier to do, and although each character has its own story still, there's more overlap, so it's less interesting to play the second character. The game is a bit more action-oriented because now you have a permanent third-person view behind the character, and you need to be accurate and shoot at enemies more like in a shooter, instead of being able to point in their general direction. They've also added some new areas, characters and a bit of new developments inside the plot. I'd say the biggest change is that now Mr T. appears in both playthroughs and he's a lot more mobile, tougher, more annoying, and it is quite scary to hear him walking around. The improvements it has are good to create tension, but it also feels they copied the idea from the 3rd game, which we will comment a bit later. I think the fact that it appears in both games now is not as nice, part of the fun was knowing the other character had no idea what you were going through. Same way as the puzzles are easier, the action part of the game becomes harder, with tougher enemies and more chances to miss your shots because of the new game mechanics. Overall is still really great though, and the new graphics are truly amazing, making you feel like you're in a movie. 

While I prefer some of the game design of the original, I cannot complain with the remake and I hope more older games get this treatment (especially thinking about Dino Crisis and Parasite Eve, which were also classics of the time and amazing games)

Latest Confinement Games

This past year I've strongly reconnected with my gaming side, since there was not much else to do sometimes.  I'd like to comment on a few of these games that I've played or I'm still playing.

 

 First, there are the Resident Evil saga. With plenty of time and seeing as we were in lock-down, I decided to get myself most of the resident evil saga games, from 1 to 7. There are other spin-offs, of course, but some of them I never really finished or played properly. Others were just re-maked recently, and seemed like a good idea to replay all of them. They have faults, but it's one of the first horror games I played and it's still fun to revisit and check it. For them though, I've decided I'll write a post for each one, and here I'm just mentioning them for the moment. I will just say that it took a while to get through all of them...

Then, Control. I've talked about Control before and it's still awesome, but recently there was some new DLC. I've done the first part and it was as good as the rest, introducing some new mechanics and being overall really good. Now I've heard that the second part of that DLC includes a section that ties with Alan Wake, and I'm very curious to play this soon, as Alan Wake had lot of potential but it was at the end that this potential shined, to then be left hanging and unfinished, with the protagonist still stuck in a nightmare dimension of some type. I don't know what will happpen in the DLC, but I'll be happy to try it soon and see if there's some closure finally.

 A game that I also talked before about but that I left unfinished was Alien Iolation. This game was very very scary, as mentioned, and playing it required a special state of mind. However during this period I finally played it for longer periods and more seriously. Once I got into track, I have to say that it's still scary, but also a bit frustrating and a bit too long in the end. There were sections that felt a bit repetitive, and also there's a limit to "and then things got worse" can happen without being tired about not catching a break ever. Nevertheless the game is still pretty good, and I consider it as a horror masterpiece for sure. I was very glad to finish it I have to say....

For a while now I've heard good things about the Doom remake that was published some years ago. This year Doom Eternal was also published, a continuation of the other one, so I decided to give the first one a try. Doom would correspond, by number, to Doom 4. I've played 1st and 2nd, of course, and they're classics. I didn't play the 3rd one because at the time I didn't feel like playing as much, and what I've heard is that it tried to be more like survival horror, something that Doom should not be. Well, I have to say that this new Doom recuperates very well the spirit of the first ones. It's brutal, it's fast, and it's a lot of fun. Playing it feels like dancing, you don't stand in one place for a second and you transition from enemy to enemy, from gun to gun, in a complicated pattern of jumping/shooting/evading/crushing that feels organic and challenging. It's not an easy game, but it feels rewarding. 

I've started Doom Eternal recently, and it looks amazing and more open, with lots of things to explore, but also the difficulty seems ramped up even more and I'm struggling a bit with that. I didn't get stuck that fast with the previous Doom. I believe this is not ideal in any game, but well, we'll see. It does have even more mobility and tools, so I'd say it's a more complex type of dance. Also, plot-wise it lacks a bit of connection between the two games. I don't know if there were expansions or something that I missed, but original Doom and original Doom Eternal should be enough to understand what has happened in a linear way, and currently they're not, which detracts a bit. Still feels like a good game though.

As part of promoting their new game shop, Epic games have been giving awesome free games, and one of them has been Civilization VI. I didn't play any other Civ games, although I've heard a lot of good things about them, so I gave it a try. I have to say it's quite addictive, quite complicated and well, overall awesome. I understand a lot better now what other people have been saying about them. It's a complex strategy game with different paths to victory (science, military, religion, culture...I feel I'm missing another one. But you get my point), although some seem easier than others. It has a crazy amount of options and combinations, and it's turn based and rather long, I'd say. But well, I've played a couple of games against computer and yeah, definitely recommending it if you like strategy and civilization-building. Reminds me in a good way of the table game 7 Wonders.

For Christmas, in my new place we got some credit to buy in amazon as part of a Christmas basket. I took the chance to get some of the games I comment here, plus I also got Tony Hawk Pro Skater 1+2, a remake of the skateboarding games. I played 2 and 3 when I was a teenager and I really loved them, 2 more than 3 I have to say but 3 was still rather good. I know that after 3 it got all weird, but the original idea was simple, amazing and good. You just have different scenarios with goals, and 2 minutes to do them. This version has much better graphics, although I remember the scenarios as if they were the same, because of how immersive the original was. You have a selection of skaters to use, you can max up their stats, and in the end you get a video of the real-life skater doing cool stuff. The things you do inside the game are quite unrealistic, but it's still really enjoyable to do different tricks, combine combos and mess around. One thing that helps a lot is that the soundtrack of the games was quite amazing, and it motivated you into doing tricks. It's a game where you keep learning how to do increasingly more complex goals, and while simple it's strangely compelling. I've finished all the main goals already of all the stages, but there's still plenty of secret goals, and skater videos to unlock, and it feels relaxing and fun to play it.

Finally, I'd like to talk about Hades. Hades is a rogue-like slash-them-up game, similar to Bastion. It has an isometric perspective, you control the son of Hades, Zagreus, trying to escape the greek Underworld, armed with a sword or some other special weapon, and you find random rooms with random monsters. When you die, which is normal, you appear again in the underworld where you can interact with the people there before trying to escape again. Every time you may recollect certain items and experience that may make your life easier, unlock new weapons and in general get better, so next time you get further. What's more, that's a bit of a spoiler but even when you finish the escape successfully, you end up dying again and having to repeat the whole thing, around 10 times to reach a point where the main plot is "complete", while leaving subplots and branches to investigate. That may seem tedious but it's not. It has amazing art, great voice acting, the gameplay is intuitive and fast and never boring, and every time a number of gods give you special boons to help you and the different combinations are quite interesting and change things quite a lot. The plot is developed between escape attempts, and characters are rich and interesting. This game is an independent game that has received quite a lot of praise, and it's very well deserved. Also, the developers of this game have folowed rather ethical practices, so I'm more than happy to support such things. I really recommend it.

 

That's all for the moment, I'll try to write posts for the Resident Evil games soon :)

True Horror

We have been playing Alien Isolation for a bit now, in small doses.

It's one of the greatest games I've played in a while.

It's also mind-numbingly terrifying, to the point of nervous breakdowns.

Alien is one of the greatest horror movies ever created. The other movies are not true horror movies any more. There are good action movies there (well, in some of the cases), but they are no longer pure horror. The first movie manages to be scary every time you see it.

The secret for a movie, and for anything, to be scary, is to not reveal too much. Our imagination fills the voids quite nicely, and we can always imagine really bad things. I think Stephen King mentions that if you fully show a 10 meter mutant monster, people will always breathe relieved and think "well, it could have been worse. It could have been a 100 meter mutant monster".

To do good horror movies, you need to know this and to know about atmosphere. You need to hide the scary things, because our minds will do the rest, but you also need a situation where we, the spectators, feel always tension in the air, danger close by. The place needs to be claustrophobic, as if there's no escape from whatever lurks in the dark.

Alien did all this perfectly, while also being gory for the time, and I believe it's an example of movies as art, an example to follow.

Games, as a new media, are still evolving. However, they tried to make horror as well, now for some time.

Horror in games is achieved slightly different than from movies.

First of all, the game needs to be immersive. If you feel detached from the protagonists, you will not be scared much. You need to stop noticing glitches, bad graphics, and acting issues. If the game does not manage to do that, it will hardly be scary.

For example, in the first Silent Hill graphics were laughable, and the fog was a method to avoid having to show you a full map that the game was unable to draw. However, the game managed to make you forget about all this details by being really scary and immersive.

A second point, very important, is that you need to feel threatened. Resident Evil games (the original ones, not the ones after 4 were they became action films like so many other Hollywood productions) were supposed to be scary. However, some of them failed in that, especially the second one. Most of the time you had abundance of ammunition and powerful weapons that could take care of most enemies in 2 or 3 shots.

Silent Hill 2 is  a great game, and its horror is mind horror, very psychological. The game leaves you exhausted and broken (but in a good way!). However, I was not scared as much after noticing most enemies were not very dangerous, some of them didn't even hurt you sometimes and your weapons and health items were also more than enough most of the time. The game is great, and part of the psychological effect was based on that too, but your personal safety of the character does not seem to be very threatened.

Third and fourth points are the same as in movies: You need to show little, and you need to have great atmosphere. For example, Resident Evil shows you the gory zombies, and they may jump-scare you, but looking at them is not threatening. Hunters are another topic related to the second point, but their looks are not scary, because you just see them hanging around. Silent Hill is much better at this: You can see the monsters more clearly, but it's hard to figure out what they are. Faces are covered, movements are erratic, the whole thing seems blurry. By the end of the game, some enemies are merely shadows, hardly visible but deadly.

As per the atmosphere, Resident Evil goes for the use of creepy music and sound effects, while Silent hill uses some jump-scares, noises in the background and really creepy scenery.

So, what about Alien Isolation?

Well, for a start, the game is beautiful, and its on 1st person, so you are quite immersed on it form the start.

Second, you have no effective weapons against the alien. Against some enemies you could be successful, but not like in a proper shooter, mowing down waves of critters. You need to sneak around, you need to keep your items, and you need to avoid encounters whenever possible. And you need to keep well away from the alien. It will kill you, period.

Third point, in this game, was masterfully done: In most situations, if you see the alien up and close is way too late for you. Just now we were playing, and we were running from the alien in plenty of places. But in all these places, we never saw it. We could hear it, crawling on the tubes above us. Walking on some floor. Bleeping on the motion detector, running around and advancing us using shortcuts. At one point we saw its slime pouring slowly from one conduct on the ceiling, while the motion sensor indicated us something was right around the corner, and we could hear it reacting to the bleeping noises, coming closer to us. And we never saw it, not even once. The first time we had a good look on it, in a cinematic, it was not a scary. It went down a tunnel, it killed some stupid humans that were making noise, and it left. and you could see it moving, like some kind of big cat, and from far away it was not especially scary. However, these last minutes where the bleeping and the steps kept following us were absolutely terrifying.

We hid in a closet for a moment, to gain some seconds of air, and when we checked the motion sensor to see if it was close, we could hear the bastard reacting to it and moving. When we left the closet I was sure it would jump on us from one side, but it was even worse...we never saw it. We had to wait for a car to arrive, and the alien was running around, and never saw it. But we were expecting it all this time....it was fucking terrifying.

Finally, the atmosphere. In this game, everything imitates the original ship from the movie, the Nostromo. The technology around you is from the eighties, and everything bleeps and makes modem noises. The ship is dark, and is full of shadowy corridors, ventilation shafts and ceiling openings. You can hear steps, you can hear doors opening, under you, behind you, on top of you...you can hear the ventilators of the air system, and the consoles, and the elevators.

You feel inside the ship. And you have no escape. And something is hunting you.

It's awesome.