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 5: We're not racists, we have a black friend

After the bad experience of RE4, the saga lost plenty of my interest. However, when the fifth game appeared for my console I did give it a try after some time had passed from its release.

RE5 surprised me at the time. It's still very similar to RE4, but it did streamline some parts of the game, trying to get rid of some unnecessary things in the process. The end result was...not bad. Better than RE4 definitely. 

It's still pretty ridiculous, mind you, but the way it plays out has some improvements. 

First, graphics are better and more colorful. Not everything is brown and this makes the game prettier. The graphics are even more realistic and well, it's fun to see so much detail, I cannot deny that. Technologically speaking it's clear there has been improvements and the game is using the new consoles and looks. 

Second, the gameplay is almost the same, although movement is easier this time. You still need to aim and shoot, trying to get certain points of the enemies. The enemies themselves are again parasite-based, which means they're highly mobile, strong, smart, and sometimes they have parasites inside them that come out when killed. The inventory has been revamped and reduced, but every item occupies one slot only. An important difference now is that using the inventory doesn't pause the game, and you need to be fast using health items or changing weapons. This is definitely more realistic and adds to the action, you cannot just pause and heal, you need to run away far enough and then lose some time to heal yourself. Also, this time there are two characters, you control only one but you're not escorting the other, the other also has weapons and shoots enemies and defend themselves. If you're hurt, or they're hurt you can revive each other, with a bit less life than before but still better than outright dying. 

In general the game is trying quite hard to enforce multiplayer where you play with somebody else. This is not bad per se as long as you're left with a single-player mode that is strong enough that you can play and not be penalized, but I do prefer games that are designed around single-player and expanded with multiplayer and not the opposite. In this case playing alone is perfectly possible, but your partner doesn't help as much as they could, and you need to be careful because if left alone they may, for example, use all the ammo of the good weapon for a mere mook instead of the final boss. Its AI could be better, that's what I'm saying, but at least you're not left with a permanent escort mission, that's true, and it is useful that when you "die" your partner automatically comes to save you before really dying for real.

The game is divided in chapters, like in RE4 (I forgot to mention this), but one streamlined aspect is that you save the game only at the end of a chapter (before that there's automatic saves and checkpoints too), and that at the end of a chapter is when you can spend money, sell or buy things. What's more, your saved game saves the status and progress, but you're free to repeat a chapter as much as you want to get extra money for example and then buy improvements for your weapons that will help you in the next one, before continuing. This makes the game more "agile". IF you feel stuck, you can revisit a previous one, get better equipment and then continue. You know you won't get stuck because you were playing the game wrong and you need to restart the whole thing, you can just play some sections again and gather resources and train. This is not bad with such an action.oriented game, where all pretense of survival horror has been lost. 

That's the thing with RE4 and RE5, though. They're action games, they're not scary, really. At max, some areas are dark and some enemies feel more creepy than others, but that's about it. The game continues to be very very linear, and also doesn't have difficult puzzles, although there's a bit more complexity in some areas sometimes, having to solve simple tasks, a bit more than what RE4 had.The game is also shorter than RE4, but in a nice way. RE4 felt outstretched, with some chapters taking forever, and some areas feeling more like a chore or fake padding that having real substance. It's hard to tell fake padding from just nice game content sometimes, but in general if a section brings no originality, no new enemies, no new puzzles, and it just prolongs a certain area unnecessarily without advancing plot, that is there so they can claim the game is long but without giving new stuff in that area. RE4 had such things, RE5 has a lot less of them and this makes it better. 

Ok, after mentioning the good parts, let's have some fun with the bad ones. 

Let's start with the setting: A fictional country in Africa. This should tell you a lot already, but to elaborate, yes, this game feels racist as fuck. This fictional area is poor and violent. Of course this is explained as in RE4, because the people are infected, but still. Then, the main character is Chris Redfield, again, a very very white and typical action guy. Seeing a white guy mowing down black enemies in the first images that were released of the game? Not great, nope. So, developers rapidly said they did have white enemies too, it was just a representation of the general population of the (fictional) area, and when the game was released you could see that not all enemies where black, yes, some of them were white too, but still feels quite wrong, really. Also in the first half you see black people dressed normally, but soon enough you find an area where they say "the parasite made them more primitive and regress to ancient traditions" or some bullshit like this and they're living in mud huts, wearing leopard-printed little cloths and handling spears and shields. VERY racist indeed. To try and counter this a bit more, Chris partner is a local woman, Sheva Alomar. Sheva is black, but just a bit black, not like the black enemies. You know, not like dark black, that would be probably not beautiful enough for the developers of the game and is just reserved for enemies, as I said. But like this they can claim that, hey, we're not racist! This is our token black friend! 

The game doesn't let you play like Sheva on the first time you play, another thing I believe to be quite nasty, it forces Chris on you. And once you complete it, you can play again as her, which shows that they could have allowed you to do that from the start and just didn't want to for Reasons (a.k.a. sexism).  Sheva is also the one that is more "nimble" and therefore gets thrown or jumps in certain sections where you need to do so. It's now worth mentioning too how Chris has been modeled in this game. In previous games he looked like a buff strong guy, but here he's like deformed. His biceps is the size of his head. Let that sink in. I mean, it could be he has a very small head, sure, because his intelligence seems to have downgraded since the first games (especially in RE6 where he also appears and he has the same big muscles/small head and serious intelligence issues), but still. Sheva is more proportionate, although of course girly-style with less muscles (buff women are too scary for the developers, probably), but one of the evil guys, an evil female CEO, does have the breasts with the same proportion of Chris biceps and head, so maybe they used the same ball model for all three of them? Probably. 

The plot of the game is...a bit of a mess. You're investigating something in that area, because you are working for some organization against bioweapons. There's a company that is supposed to be good, but you find out they allied with Umbrella actually, and there's some old virus found in some caverns where some investigation happened, and this virus can make a new type of enemies, Uroboros, that are like black slime/tentacles that tend to consume everything and is hard to eliminate. You find 4 enemies successfully infected with this in all the game, and it's true they're pretty tough to defeat. Another thing is that this virus can infect and consume or, if you're "worthy" enough, you gain control of it (only the last one has control of it). The parasite-infected enemies (called Majini now) are just a by-product of bad guys operating in the area it seems, like their foot soldiers basically. Also, the final goal of the "bad guys" this time is to directly infect the whole world, so only the strong will live and it will create a new type of humanity or some crap like that from the wet dreams of eugenicists and incels about alpha men and all that. As I said, a mess. 

In the game, they say that Jill Valentine died in a mission Chris and her did, where they visited the umbrella founder, and found Albert Wesker, now with superpowers, had already visited him and killed him. Then Wesker seems to kill Jill by cliff-jumping together, which clearly means she's still alive. You find Jill again, being mind-controlled by Wesker and being all fast and cool as if she also had superpowers, and discover she's controlled by some conveniently-placed gem that you can then remove to make her feel better. Jill has turned blonde in this game for some reason, smaller and more in distress than previous games in the natural trend starting in RE4 of making everything a lot more sexist than what was needed. At least you save her, that's true. The game is full of over-the-top action and nonsense scenes where everybody involved should end up very very dead but they don't.

And as I said, the big bad in this one is Albert Wesker, who's turned into megalomaniac evil by wanting to change the world and all this crap. He's still a superhuman, he betrays everyone just because, it seems, and moves (and dresses) like Neo in The Matrix, dodging bullets if you shoot him. The final fight with him is pretty hard because of these reasons, but somehow you end up managing to kill him for good this time, in an active volcano surrounded by lava (because of course this game exaggerates everything plus lava is only deadly if you step on it, everyone knows that). He's the final guy that infects himself with the virus and takes control of it, but before that you do have some other fights with giant animal/monster hybrids, Uroboros-infected people, and the aforementioned possessed Jill Valentine. Special mention too to the lickers, that reappear and are fun to fight although you get to fight a bit too many of them for comfort, and also special mention to the incredibly racist big black guys with heavy weapons. 

The whole thing as I said continues with the ridiculous trend of RE4, but at least it's shorter, you defeat a big guy from the saga and not some random weirdos in a cult, and the gameplay has been adjusted and made better overall. While RE4 felt long and a chore sometimes, I have to recognize that RE5 is fun enough that I did play through it several times. The saga continues with its ridiculous and action-based trend though, plus their usual total lack of research, which is still very shameful. New plot points are introduced, new companies, new world situations, and there's really little sense of continuity between the games like this. In a way the game is trying to go globally, but that's a lot to take and in general the plot has become very messy. I believe around this time some movies were produced in the same style as these games, which explains maybe that there are unexplained concepts and things between these games. This sucks, I don't want to have to see a movie to understand what has happened in a game.

Anyway, it seems there's hope at the end of the tunnel with some clear improvements done in RE6 and specially, RE7. We'll talk about RE6 next in detail, because it does some things good again. Some other things, it does even worse than RE4, that's also true, but there's a clear intention of evolving and trying to go a bit back to better roots than action-based ridiculousness, even if RE6 is still very very VERY guilty of that.

Resident Evil 4: The Shame

 So. It's time for the controversy. 

As I said, in this period I finally played through all of Resident Evil 4. Before that, I played together with university friends, but I missed sections and things. The game has been ported to other consoles by now, but it launched in the GameCube, which again was a strange move since Nintendo seems to focus on child games, and RE4 seems to be for an older audience. I did play through most of it in the past, but I wanted a 100% proper playthrough done by myself (and without the infinite rocket launcher I had last time I played sections) to see what was my real opinion of the game.

After having done that, I've confirmed what I already knew, but now can properly say: I think RE4 is one of the worst RE games by far. This is in direct conflict with the public opinion, that praised this game as a great reinvention of RE, with high technical quality, great gameplay, reinvention of the characters, etc. 

So let's compare its different aspects, and let's start with something that is good:The game indeed has much better graphics than previous ones, it's a big step up from Code Veronica (the latest before this one). It's a lot more detailed, with bigger maps, longer sections, and overall more modern look. By its time, it was indeed revolutionary. This, however, was a bit wasted by making everything brownish/grayish, which was a tendency of that time when making "realistically-looking" games, making them all quite boring to look at by using these tones that made all scenarios look similar, brown/black/grayish. The game didn't introduce this fashion and was just a victim of it, so we can excuse this, and recognize that technically is quite advanced. 

Then, the gameplay: RE4 introduces the 3rd-person view where you aim and shoot enemies and the camera follows you. This makes it more similar to a shooter, with the advantages this has: Combat becomes more personal and immediate, more tense, where you move from location to another, aim at different enemies, keep moving...Also I have to recognize this is a lot more fun than the previous gameplay, although more difficult too. The way they implemented the movement doesn't make it easy and it takes a bit of adaptation time, but once you understand it it's fine and it's enjoyable. The enemies this time are more mobile (we'll get back to this) and sometimes they launch things at you, so you need to keep moving and changing position and it's interesting.

Regarding puzzles, this game reduced the complexity quite a lot. Because of the gameplay, they put emphasis in the action and puzzles do stop the action, so they left some very basic ones, and then for the rest it felt totally linear: You find a key and immediately after you find a door that requires that key. Inventory space is limited, but only for weapons and health items, so anything puzzle or plot related is stored apart, which simplifies things of course but adds a lot of linearity, no backtracking to open a door that had something hidden or to unlock some box that had a secret code, you move from area to area and there's no need to ever go back, usually. I think that's clearly a downgrade from previous games where you had to think a bit about these things, and being in an area that has a door and making you grab two emblems from some box and just put them there and continue feels....cheap. I guess this is because of the previously mentioned linearity: If your map feels more like a maze or a real building or area, even if where to use the key is evident it still feels different, you go through same areas and feel a certain familiarity. 

Let's talk about the items. The scarcity of previous games is gone, and usually you keep finding plenty of ammo and resources as you advance. What's more, enemies drop items now when you kill them, and there's usually money or money related items, or ammo and health recovery items. Ammo and health occupy the real inventory space, that you have limited and need to reorganize to fit everything. The new inventory in this case feels nice and it's a bit of fun to reorganize everything so it's properly ordered and looks good. Money is then used to buy certain new weapons or upgrade them. There's a merchant now, a guy that offers to buy and sell you things, and that's how you can spend the money for these upgrades. Apart from the pistol, the magnum, the shotgun and the machine gun, this game introduces the rifle and the sniper rifle, a favorite of mine I have to say, which I have to admit is fun to use. There's a few options of each weapon, but sometimes the newest model may not be as good as the previous one in gun and shotgun cases, you need to look at the max values after a full upgrade that you can reach with the weapon to understand if, after upgrading it, you'll end up with a better or worse one. All weapons have laser sights that facilitate shooting a lot. Then, about the money objects, in the game you can find gems and art artifacts. You can sell those for plenty of money, and big enemies tend to drop big jewels and such. This way you can help finance the weapon upgrades.

Then, let's talk about monsters: In this game, zombies disappear. Instead, we have what they call "Las Plagas", which are parasites that turn people into monsters, slowly, from inside. At first they just control the people, but as they progress people turn more stupid, more violent, and big parasites start appearing inside them. It seems some of the infected have better control of the parasites and are able to command others, resulting in a situation where a town has been converted into some weird cult. These parasites resemble normal people and move quite faster than zombies, although some look ill. Since they're normal people, they can hold weapons and throw them to you or shoot you with them in the later stages of the game, which again means the game is more action.oriented because you need to evade more, run away, change positions, etc. More advanced forms, when killed, spawn these big parasites from their bodies. And some extreme examples mutate their bodies into huge monster/parasite kind of hybrid. There's infected people, infected dogs of course, or this giant "Ogre" that basically is a Harry Potter/ Lord of the rings movies' troll, which was a very popular design at that time and has no real explanation as to how it got produced apart from having more than one parasite inside. A new type of disgusting monster called regenerator also appears, which is immortal unless you use a heat vision and kill the parasites inside its body with a sniper rifle, and those turn out to be quite scary. Overall, you feel you're fighting humans mostly and therefore I think it's less scary, with a few exceptions where parasites emerge from the body or when the weirdest/more mutated ones appear.

From what I've explained you can see that this is a totally different experience than in previous games, although with some similarities (mutated eyes appearing in random areas of the body that indicate weak points, for example, or giant mutated monsters), but so far I've mentioned aspects that are fun and others that are more boring but not dramatic. My main concerns so far that I mentioned are that it's less scary, more linear and puzzles are easier, but the gameplay is nicer too, the new inventory is fun and the weapon upgrades and such things feel quite good. So, what's so bad?

The fucking plot and setting and characters. That's what so bad. That's what's unforgivable. This and quick-time events, but we'll get to them after discussing these elements first.

Let's start by the introductory situation: Umbrella has been denounced as a terrorist organization that governments of the world are fighting, including the, of course, glorious government of the US of A. Like, what? Umbrella was always a corrupt organization because they corrupted the government! The government was totally onboard with them! On RE3 they fucking nuked a city to hide the outbreak and all the shady crap that was happening in there! That was one of the main points of the series, that you were like a small rebel group trying to bring them down, David vs Goliath situation! I mean, yes, RE4 reinvents the game, but by making the corrupt governments as the "good guys" totally undermines a basic pillar of the saga, plus its a horrible, horrible way to defend the horrible governments we have around the word, including USA! 

Following this up, the main character is Leon from RE2. But now he's been assigned directly to protect, of course, the fucking president of USA/do his instructions. And now he's all tough and serious and snarky, like a bad boy/boring typical antihero macho-man. He reacts to everything in a bored, condescending tone most of the time, being confrontational with every character, even the ones that are supposed to be allies. In RE2 he was serious but caring and gentle, a rookie, just going through a crisis situation. Here they destroyed his personality and make him totally unlikeable. They fixed him a bit on RE6, which we will discuss later, but the damage done here is really bad. 

More horrible things: The game takes place "somewhere in the south of Europe". Except it's Spain. Clearly spain. They talk Spanish. All enemies have Spanish names, like "Las Plagas" as I mentioned. However, they fucked it up like a lot. I'm not a fan of Spain, but for fuck's sake, do some research. For starters, the people talk in a weird accent, clearly a mix of South-American accents, using some words and expressions that are not really used in Spain. I mean, was it so hard to hire a real Spanish person to do the voices and the lines? Then, the money used is "Pesetas", the old currency, not used by then (we already had euros by then). The place they show is like a horrible small town with grey skies (Spain is sunny as shit! And even rural areas do not look so horrible as the areas shown in there! Poor towns do not look at all like they look in the game!). Finally there's the names: Everywhere, they translated names adding Spanish articles and then using English articles. So, for example, the enemies are "Las Plagas". Not Plagas. "Las Plagas". Therefore, they talk about "the Las Plagas", basically like saying "The the plagues". They do this for EVERYTHING. I mean, Spanish is used in plenty of places, it's not an obscure secret language that you cannot find information about it. How can you mess all these things so badly?

Even more horror: The main plot point is that the bad guys have kidnapped the President's 20-year-old daughter, Ashley. First of all...How?? How security messes up this badly? Secondly, why send only Leon to investigate? And why the hell did they go to some remote location where a weird cult lives? Who found out she's there? They claim "a girl that resembles her was seen in the area". Again, how was she seen if she's been captured and everybody in the almost-deserted area is a cultist/infected person? Then, this means that a big part of the game is an escort mission. Luckily, she gets re-captured several times and during these periods you don't need to worry about protecting her, but the fact that you do need to protect her sometimes and she keeps getting kidnapped is quite annoying. Plus you can kill her by mistake. Plus she's slow and she keeps being typically "girly", in a very sexist way. Plus she's modeled to be "sexy", with a small skirt that prevents her from jumping or something....another character even comments on her big breasts, and she hits on you quite soon at the end (Leon rejects her at least). The whole thing is quite ridiculous.

More stuff: The evil guys are cartoonishly evil,  with evil laugh and evil talk and all that. One of them is especially annoying, keeps appearing and taunting you and then running away and leaving weaker enemies in your presence, so you can conveniently kill them one by one. Their plot apparently is to infect you and the girl so you can "rescue" her and then go to the president and infect him as well or just kill him to destabilize the government or something.And you know? They succeed! They infect both of you, quite early in the game actually! So, what goes wrong? Well, they...just don't keep you locked up. They keep Ashley locked up, but in your case they infect you and let you totally free. The infection takes time to get hold of you, so meanwhile you're just killing people, that they send to kill you? But why are they trying to kill you if they infected you? Or why not kill you the moment you fainted in front of them? It's like, a total mess, there's contradiction after contradiction after contradiction. By the end of the game, of course, you manage to cure yourself and her and kill everyone. And they could have prevented this by simply capturing you properly and locking you up, or well, just killing you, that would have worked too. While waiting for you to be infected they even sacrifice henchmen, that are discarded as "not worthy" or something. Like, why would you do that?? 

More ridiculous stuff:There's a character that helps you for a bit, that dies soon after, in another moment where the evil guy just appears out of nowhere from behind a door and just impales him. Why not do that with you too and solve the issue? Or capture you or something. Then, there's another henchmen, some type of soldier, that appears out of nowhere, talks with you as if you know each other, and you answer as if he was some old enemy or some old comrade or something. The thing is, this guy hasn't been shown anywhere else before that, so I have no idea of who he is, and this apparent rivalry has to be taken at face value. This is of course strange, and you don't feel that invested in defeating him as Leon seems to be, because well, you haven't really interacted with him before that, have you? Maybe there's some comic or some book or something before RE4 where the character appears, but just using the games as reference you're left wondering, which is never a good thing. And it's not like he reappears, you kill him in this game and that's that.

Related to this character, let's talk about the quick-time events. Quick-time events are moments where something happens in the game and you need to react fast and press something, like "press A!" to avoid some scripted danger. Like, pressing "A" usually makes you run, but in this it makes you jump two meters away from a falling rock. Stuff like that. Games that have them by surprise can be nasty, because e if you don't expect it you can just die. This happens in RE4, there are moments like this. If this happens while walking around, that's ok more or less. When you die you don't restart from the latest save but from the latest checkpoint, which tends to be you just entering the room. It's still annoying a bit, but well, it can be excused. However, RE4 does another thing hat is just...wrong: They put quick-time events in cutscenes, and in the worst example they put them in the middle of a conversation between you and the soldier bad guy. This means that you cannot really pay attention properly, because you need to be focused to press the right buttons at the right time. If you fail, you die and need to repeat the cutscene. This gets annoying fast. And it's not the only cutscene where this happens, but it's the worst one by far because there's like 5 of them at different times. They could have done exposition, fight-break with events, and then more exposition, but no, they mix both things and it ends up being messy. 

As a side note, the action of the cutscenes is also ridiculous now, you pull stunts from bad action movies where you seem to be a superhero, no normal person would be able to do this. Ada Wong reappears, by the way, and she also pulls stuff like that She, as usual, helps you but not always but having her own agenda at the same time, ending up being more help than nuisance of course. Her character is pretty similar as before, just cooler, so not as many complains there, but the general tone is still very exaggerated.

So, the game has all this crap. And people loved the game. They said it was an original reinvention of the saga, that it was revolutionary, that it modernized it and abandoned a semi-serious tone to really let itself go, turning into an autocritic, being silly on purpose and not taking itself seriously. And people loved the new interpretations of the character, and thought the plot was decent enough, etc. To that, I say what was said in IT Crowd: "People, what a bunch of bastards". The game "parodies" stupid action so well that it's indistinguishable from real stupid action, and therefore for me it makes no difference even if they did it "on purpose" as some sort of statement on the silliness of the premise. The game follows horrible tropes, stereotypes, sexism, racism, general plot stupidity and its only saving grace is the revamped gameplay, which I will admit is pretty good, but that's about it.  

I played it fully so I could say it with cause, and I can confirm it now: This is the biggest shame of the RE saga, even if it gave it extra life by being successful. This game damaged the next ones and tarnished the experience so much that made me lose interest a lot. 

RE5 and RE6 are heirs of this mess, and as heirs they share lots of issues with RE4. RE7 is different. But we'll get to all that in the following posts.

Resident Evil 3, Code Veronica and 0.

 After talking about the first and second game I will talk about the last "classic" Resident Evils together, with more focus on the 3rd one and its remake. 

 

"Classic" Resident Evil games are those done in the old style, more focused on horror, where items are scarce, atmosphere is creepy and scary, gameplay is based on fixed cameras in each area, where you aim and shoot in straight lines on front of the character and graphics tend to be squared and old fashioned, with low detail still. You have the herbs and sprays to heal, you have similar enemies although some new ones every time, and in general gameplay-wise they're exactly the same, just changing the plot and scenarios.

Resident evil 0 follows this model. This one is a prequel, and I haven't finished it. Prequels for some reason interest me less, maybe because we know more or less what will happen. Also in this case it was weird, because they introduced zombies already ,which would have been reported, and then a new type of monster based in slugs which is pretty disgusting. The game is nice, but it's a bit tiresome, a big chunk of it revolves around limited Inventory and having to share things between two characters back and forth. One character, a girl that appears weak and needing rescues, appeared in Resident Evil 1 in Chris' playthrough, which I haven't done, and the other is a typical macho-man and therefore boring. The game has this strange mode where you have two characters that you alternatively control, and it seems they have eliminated the storage, something I miss quite a lot because it's hard to organize and prepare and you always end up with extra items that you need to get rid of or something. At least in this one you can just drop them on the floor, but still feels bad not being able to store them somewhere safe. The game doesn't seem to add much to the saga to be honest, and feels a bit dated and not as interesting as others for some reason. I guess my main complaint is that it tries to show you something before the mansion incident...but well, before the mansion incident there were no interesting questions left unresolved or anything. If I finish it I may comment more about it. 

Code Veronica, by order,  should be played after Resident Evil 3, but we can discuss it first because it's very independent. I finished it long time ago with university friends, and it still follows the classic model. The game came out only for Dreamcast, in a bold move to promote the console, but that made it more obscure and no remakes have been made for any other platform. You play first as Claire (from RE2) and then as Chris (from RE1), the two siblings. Another virus outbreak happens in an island, and you meet two crazy villains that are controlling the place. While still being a classic RE, the tone is more action-based in general, with the start of the trend of some ridiculous cutscenes. The villains are also more cartoonish and extreme: While in previous games we had some people with self-interests or that had gone mad, here they're directly crazy and flamboyant. It's also the game where Albert Wesker reappears after being left for dead, and showing superhuman speed and strength, although you don't fight him directly and he escapes after this. In summary, while being still the classic style, the game starts to resemble what will become the style for RE4 and RE5 a bit.

Finally let's talk about RE3. 

This game dind't bring much originality to the saga, that is true. The main character is Jill Valentine, a choice I approve strongly but we have seen her in the past. She appears as a tough person that has experience in the outbreak, as it happens in the city, right before the events of RE2. Jill needs to go through the city trying to find escape routes. The setting therefore is the same as RE2, sharing locations with it and reusing maps, which while fun it does seem more repetitive at times. You meet other survivors and a group of mercenaries hired by Umbrella to help contain the outbreak and save citizens. One of them Carlos, is nice and helps you, but some of them are secretly working just to gather data and keep experimenting, betraying you. At the same time, a special bioweapon called Nemesis has been sent to eliminate all mebmers of S.T.A.R.S., raccoon city elite police officers, and sicne you're one of them soon enough this thing keeps appearing and following you. Nemesis is similar to Mr.T from RE2, but stronger, less robot-like and more organic. Defeating it is usually temporary, although you can see it deteriorates as you achieve more wins. Nemesis is different also in the fact that it can wield weapons, like a grenade-launcher that, of course, is used to fuck with helicopters that were about to rescue you.

There's a small section of the game where Jill becomes infected and you play as Carlos while finding a cure, but it's quite reduced and finishes fast. The general tone is that the mercenaries underestimate Jill and then she proves herself again and again to be much better than them at dealing with these things, except for this period after Nemesis infects you. The game has some hard logical puzzles and mysteries, and the feeling that you're in a city overrun by zombies is always quite present, at least during the first half of the game. Hunters reappear and ruin your day plenty of times, but monsters keep being not very original, just iterations of previous ones, including the zombies, mutated giant animals, lickers and so on. The original game also offered some branching at a certain moments, making you choose between two options. Your choice didn't affect much apart from sometimes avoiding being hurt, or exploring different areas, or making your life easier or harder, except in the end where one of the choices gives you an extra cutscene.

In the end you defeat nemesis quite awesomely, especially if you choose the extra cut-scene, and you discover that the US government, president included, has decided to nuke the city and fuck the possible survivors in there. You barely escape the blast together with Carlos, and thousands get killed while it's true that the outbreak gets contained, in an exercise that indicates some collaboration between Umbrella and the government and both of them not caring at all for the people.

The remake of RE3 plays very similar to the RE2 remake. Graphics have been upgraded to the modern level too, so they're pretty awesome, and there's some sections of 1st person that help create a certain tone, darker and scarier, which is nice. The game then plays like RE2, with the 3rd person perspective where you move the camera freely but have to be precise and point at the enemies correctly to do some damage. The game has more action than RE2, with zombies being a bit weaker and finding more ammo in general, and soon enough you also start being followed by Nemesis, although here it looks even bigger and as it receives damages turns into a  more animalistic and huge thing, to the point that the final versions occupy the whole room and you feel like you're an insect compared to it. The game makes puzzles a bit easier while introducing different areas and boss fights than in the original, and sometimes it's hard to tell if you're supposed to run or fight. There's also no choices in this one, although the ending is still pretty awesome. 

The change in this game that did bother me the most is that they made Jill more of a damsel in distress that Carlos had to save. She's still badass, but there's a stupid moment when she's infected that Carlos has to fend an army of zombies and hunters, and she becomes this delicate thing, giving more protagonism to him than in the first game. What also bothered me is that his weapons suck a lot more than her weapons: She could have dealt with the monsters sooo much better than him. What's more, right after this you get to play with her again and she breezes through the areas where Carlos was having issues. In the end it's still established that she's very good, but it feels they damage her more and make her "weaker" than in the original, and this frankly pissed me off a bit, because games have this tendency of abusing the "distressed damsel" trope and I thought we had finished with this.

All in all, I really loved RE3, and I'd say the remake of 3 was also really good and I liked it more than the other one.  

Having finished with the "classic" ones, I'll talk next about RE4, where they renewed the franchise completely and I have pleeeenty to say....

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)

The original: Resident Evil

As I mentioned, let's start talking about Resident Evil, the first game of the saga. 

 

I had this game when I was a teenager, for the original PlayStation, but I never played it long enough to finish it, I always got stuck at some point or died and had to redo a lot and abandoned it. The best run I had was when I played till the second snake combat.This game was one of the first popular survival horror games, and I remember seeing it with my cousins or talking about it with classmates, and it had lots of important new concepts. Maybe there's other games that also did the same, but this one for sure was the one that popularized them. 

 I played a remastered version, so it's the same game but with better graphics, and it seems some reshuffled puzzles, sometimes.

 The game starts after a very cheesy live-action video of some soldiers/police being hunted as they try to arrive to the house by strange monsters, which seem to be basically dogs. You can play as Chris Redfield or Jill Valentine, and depending on your choice you'll find different allies and the plot will vary slightly. Chris playthrough is harder plus I always like to play as the women in games, so of course I chose Jill. Jill starts with a gun and has more inventory space, which is important. 

The game starts in the house you arrived, which apparently is owned by Umbrella Corporation. As you navigate the place, you find your first zombie, followed by more zombies and other monsters, and you discover that they're this evil organization that creates bioweapons in the form of viruses and the associated monsters. 

You spend a lot of time in the initial house before moving to other areas, and the creepy music, changing camera angles and insane puzzles give it a very nice atmosphere. The voice-acting is quite exaggerated, but considering there's not much cutscenes, it's fine. You keep finding journals of Umbrella employees, some of them quite sadistic, others just workers that got slowly infected and turned into zombies. Plenty of them talk about the weird house that requires emblems to open doors and other such things. During the game you also find occasionally other members of your group, although most of the time they're dead or dying. As you progress you discover that you may have a mole in your team, and that not all is as it seems...since in the end is your own boss, Albert Wesker, one of the bad guys that secretly works for umbrella. He keeps appearing in the series, and keeps being an annoying antagonist, although in this first one you discover this just at the end, when he's apparently killed by the final boss, a humanoid monster with a big claw that you end up killing with a special grenade launcher after surviving some minutes of combat with it.

The gameplay is the original one: You point to raise your weapon, and then you can rotate the character, point higher or lower, and shoot. You run around with a fixed camera showing you the room you're in, and sometimes the camera changes and then you may not know anymore which direction you're moving, which is kind of funny. Also sometimes the angle makes you not see that there's a zombie coming your way, so you also need to pay attention to the sounds around you, since different monsters have different sounds. 

The puzzles are not very hard, you just need to apply some logic, although some of them may take a bit longer than others. There's not a lot of variety in enemies, although soon enough zombies give way to faster and deadlier foes. Once you leave the house the areas manage to still be creepy, with special mention to the section where you meet some type of zombie prototype that is immortal. Related to that, there's an occasional boss fight, although they're not very hard in general but feel more like draining you of resources. The difficulty of the game is based on scarcity, and killing every monster you encounter, while making it easier for you to move, can make you run out of ammo or health items. 

The inventory system where important quest items, weapons and ammo all share the same limited space is a bit of an annoyance, I have to say. Usually it causes you to either go unprepared sometimes or having to backtrack to grab an item, leave in the the storage, go back to grab another one and so on. This extends the game unnecessarily, but well, it's more realistic than carrying everything with you, that's true. This reminds me that the health system deserves a special mention: You use "herbs", the green one heals you, the blue one cures poison and the red one increases the green one potency (1 red + 1 green is the same as 3 greens). How do you use the herbs is never addressed, but when you combine them they look suspiciously...joint-like. You do have also healing sprays though, to heal fully.

The original graphics were quite primitive, although groundbreaking for their time. This remastered version has improved models, but still feels similar in how some elements of the background that you can interact with are clearly more visible because they're a 3d model and not a more realistically painted wall fixture. However the whole thing feels just charming and not bad. 

 The game has a few different endings based on your actions in key moments of the plot. While not very different exactly, I always think more games should have this philosophy, since it makes it more interesting to replay it and try to see what did you miss last time, with the best ones doing it in a way that you get the whole story after finding all the endings. This first resident evil doesn't quite achieve this, but it sure adds an extra layer of wanting to do all the correct steps to get the best one. While i've never played with Chris, the game is almost the same, changing only the companions you find along the way. I also have to say that Jill, even if the protagonist, gets some annoying damsel-in-distress moments where this other big guy has to come and save you, something that feels totally unnecessary.

Overall it's a great first game, a bit long I have to say, that starts in a great creepy tone while putting strong bases for the next ones.