In the earliest games, in which you controlled your character from third-person vantage points, horror stemmed from the awkwardness of the controls. Chief among these is a new and unprecedented focus on the ‘horror’ component of the ‘survival horror’ genre, a label of Resident Evil’s invention.
There are additions and tweaks too, which contemporise the formula. There’s a familiar shift in pace and location near the end. There’s the inventory management, which requires you to meticulously choose what items to carry with you in those mad dashes between safe rooms, places where you record your progress via cassette answerphones. There are the virus-maddened monsters that grow in power and appendage over the course of the story. There’s the complicated house, its various wings and tiers segmented by implausibly contrived locking mechanisms, fed by increasingly ornate keys. In fact, it rigorously follows the template established by the formative games in the series. With a shift to a first-person perspective, Resident Evil 7 looks like a vivid reinvention. What else would you expect from a family that built a morgue in the basement? There’s a cascade of offal in the fridge.
Inside the home he finds the Bakers, a hick family who live in squalor. Protagonist Ethan Winters arrives at the gates of a derelict house on the edge of a fetid bayou on the trail of his presumed-dead wife, Mia. Swampy, buzzing Louisiana is the setting for this, the seventh game, which, thanks to the involvement of the Texan writer Richard Pearsey (Spec Ops: The Line 1979 Revolution) takes its cues not from Hammer Horror but from Truman Capote’s harrowing non-fiction novel In Cold Blood and the 1974 slasher film Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Since then both the locale and the locals have changed, from Resident Evil 4’s sojourn to a dejected Spanish forest to the fifth game’s contentious trip to sweltering African townships. There, behind creaking doors and sliding oak panels, the answer was a grotesque menagerie of ragged zombies, bloody Doberman hounds and terrifying Homeric snakes. W ho lives in a house like this? It’s a question the Japanese horror series Resident Evil has been asking of its players since 1996, when it first locked us inside an aristocratic mansion on the outskirts of Racoon City, somewhere in the American mid-west.
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