I'm making this an entry into the Revisited Series, with a caveat: I never played Resident Evil upon it's initial release. It's my first experience with the original game, albeit the GameCube remake version - being played via Xbox Series S. My first Resident Evil game was Resident Evil 5, and my most recent one being Resident Evil: Biohazard. (*Addendum - After playing this Resident Evil 1 remake in 2021, I have since played the Resident Evil 2 and 3 remakes as well) Resident Evil 5 was an action packed romp with little substance overall that ended in a volcano. Biohazard is more in touch with the original, but couldn't resist adding long, tedious action sequences. The Resident Evil remaster maintains its allure almost 20 years later.
My initial impression with this game was pure joy, and it stuck with me throughout. It's got a sort-of campy, B-Movie feel to it, but it pulls it off extraordinarily. It takes itself seriously during the gameplay and it makes me love it even more. The haunted mansion vibe is spectacular, and even though the controls and the inventory are old, they don't feel too dated or too stunted. The inhibitions that came with older consoles actually help it achieve its goals. The limitations breed creativity, and the structure of the game inherently lends to its setting and nature. This haunted mansion vibe provides a setting, which I adore, that doesn't really exist in games at all. It is a complete shame that this entry is basically the only type of game in the genre. It is a wonderful formula that is begging for proper innovation.
I was genuinely scared playing this game. The environment that the game sets up and puts you in is an amalgam of factors that lead to a frightening experience. The ambient music: ominous and foreboding. The sickly and guttural sounds of the zombies, and the baying of the hounds. The weakness of my options in combating them. The scarcity of resources. The unfamiliarity of the spooky, trapped, mysterious mansion. The solitude of your character throughout. It was compelling, interesting, and diverse. The setting is wonderful, and this style of game stands alone in its execution of its themes. It is difficult, though, and a lot of my trouble with the game comes from my reliance on modernity. The save system is archaic. It worked wonderfully at the time, and I think it still works well if you have knowledge of the game, but I ended up getting caught in a tough spot. I didn't realize you would have such a limited supply of typewriter ribbon, and I was playing the game in short spurts - 20 to 40 minutes at a time. This was making me spend a lot of my saves early, and then I ran out entirely, and had to slog through a section of the game about 90 minutes long without saving and hoping I didn't mess up too badly and lose a ton of progress. This is definitely a trait of older games, and while not a terrible design choice on its own, I wasn't prepared for it and ended up hurting my enjoyment slightly. It reminds me of similar games I used to play at the time. Before the widespread gaming knowledge available on the internet, we would have to brute force our way through games until we figured it out. The entire playstyle of struggling until you became well versed doesn't really exist today. I imagine it would be a hurdle to many people coming to the series for the first time, but for me it was a breath of fresh air. It helped to fully immerse me in the world of Resident Evil.
There are certain quirks of this game that are seemingly minor, but I associate not only with the game, but with the entire time period. There is a loading screen each time you go through a door, and it is the animation of what that door looks like on a black background. It stuck out to me because it was a loading zone, but it also built anticipation slightly. I enjoy how little information you are given. You are suddenly handed control and then it is gameplay from then on. There is a puzzle to find a map in one of the first rooms you enter. I went through a large portion of the early game thinking there was no map at all, and applauding the game for making it so you have to learn the layout of the mansion. It turns out I was not as adept as I needed to be to unlock the game's secrets just yet, and after that I adjusted my mindset. If I had simply searched around this room more thoroughly, I would have had less trouble starting off. I liked that I was allowed to make this error, and gained the knowledge that I would have been better off had I tried harder and spent more time on an earlier section.
The campiness is undesired, but I accepted it for what it is and moved on. After long sections of fighting zombies and solving puzzles around the house in truly supernatural surroundings, you find one of your teammates from S.T.A.R.S, Barry, and they speak briefly. Then he just says "Let's continue our investigation," and leaves you again. It's laughable in a silly way. Your character sees corpses of their recently deceased and often disemboweled or grotesquely injured teammates, and your other coworker tells you they want to separate and investigate the house. It is quite jarring, considering earlier it shows a zombie climb out of a bathtub, and after defeating it, Jill vomits into a toilet. The juxtaposition of her being visibly shaken and disturbed, with her team member so uncaring and job-focused was disharmonious at best. It doesn't truly hamper the game, but it does feel out of place. I enjoy it for the nostalgia and for how it's used to drive the story, and that's enough. It also serves as a break to moderate the long, dire sections of the game.
It has a lot of old-school style game themes and design devices. You choose one of two playable characters, and this impacts your inventory and the equipment you can get. There are six different endings to unlock per character depending on actions that you take throughout the game, and how you handle certain in-game situations. There is some mystery and intrigue throughout, and you can forget or fail to fulfill certain criteria entirely. Each of the six end scenes is roughly a 40 second cutscene, but there are stark differences between the good and bad endings. It adds slight replayability, and some fulfillment knowing you checked all the boxes for a proper ending. This is something not often repeated in modern games, if at all, but I love it as a narrative and gameplay mechanic. Reloading a save in Resident Evil can erase a lot more progress, and you might not even know you made a "wrong" choice, necessarily. I enjoy that the end scenes are different, but they don't strive to create vastly different story arcs. You can either achieve the right ending, which they pursue in the sequel, or you can fail.
There are times where it felt overwhelming, but I enjoyed it. This is an older game design choice as well, where there were sometimes obtuse or difficult segments to the point of having to use a guide. I wanted an authentic experience, and I was completely immersed, so I went without a guide entirely, and didn't look up anything online. There were times though, when I didn't know what to do, and I would suddenly find way more items than I could hold. I could see where it might bother some people, but it was fun to have a difficult and specific experience intended by the developers. Modern games tend to hold your hand or guide you, or give you simple puzzles, but this was a type of difficulty for which I had been longing. You would find an item and had no idea of its use, and it was a great way of getting you to explore the whole house. It felt incredible when it finally clicked and you knew exactly what you had to do. Sometimes right off the bat and sometimes after some trial and error. It is punishing for trial and error because you have limited saves due to the typewriter ribbon, and I saved often because I played in small sessions, leading to my earlier stated issue. Still, the feeling of figuring out a section or series of sections was an especially rewarding experience. When the puzzles are tough and the game punishing, the feeling you get from getting better at it and overcoming these obstacles is supreme. After playing for a while and feeling like I understood the game more, I was really invested in figuring out the mystery of the house.
Items did feel scarce, but at the same time, balanced. Every time I would run out of bullets, it seemed I would find a few more shortly after. Each time my health got low, I would stumble upon some plants. There were times when I had an abundance of healing and didn't need it, and times when I had 3 bullets left and three times that many rooms to go through, but I mostly felt that the longer I played, the better I got at the game. This knowledge that I might run out of ammo, and that there was most certainly more enemies on the way, made me understand that I had to play efficiently to manage my items and survive.
The puzzles were fun and intricate. The supernatural-mansion type of environment was so fun and inventive, and quite substantially more engaging than a Tower of Hanoi style unremarkable schlock. Poison gas traps for incorrect solutions. Triggering a spike death trap and having to figure out how to stop it. Getting locked in a room and needing a special key to leave or find a way out. Searching the mansion for a clue or item to a puzzle you saw earlier. It went hand-in-hand with the exploration and setting and overall feel of the game. I was completely mesmerized in the spirit of the house, and trying to navigate it. Exploring led to finding clues and items, which would recall places you have been and need to revisit. The fear and danger of opening every door was palpable, as you could enter a safe, small, empty room, or an ominous, zombie-filled chamber. I can't stress enough how deeply I enjoyed the feeling of being afraid to enter each room, the joy of finding a puzzle instead of a zombie dog, the satisfaction gained from finding a key that let you explore more; the progress of finding notes and small stories of what happened and what was currently happening in this creepy place. That part is done expertly. Before even finishing the game I already knew I wanted to complete it because I was craving more. I want to see where the story goes in Resident Evil 2, if they change the style up entirely before we get to Resident Evil 5. The first entry has me excited and yearning to play through the whole series. Who knows, maybe I will appreciate the sequels more after having experienced the initial game firsthand.
As the game progresses, you end up in a creepy laboratory, and I didn't enjoy this section as much. It leans a little bit too much into the B-movie, campy feel. There is a giant shark in a tank that can kill you. The explanation of the virus and getting a peak "behind the veil" is a thematic choice I didn't love. It's still eerie and ghoulish, but it's like the revealing scenes in a monster flick. It's scarier when you don't know. The less I feel like I'm in a video game checking boxes to get to the finish line, the better, and this section was just corny enough to make me question the immersion and ruin the illusion a bit.
The game is long, and sometimes exhausting. There are long segments that you need to be quite efficient with your items before you get a break or safe zone, and you will burn through your resources if you don't know what to do, like I didn't. I'd take the left fork, clear out some rooms, and then meet a dead end. After I went back and took the right fork, I realized that if I went right first, I would have got the item I needed first. I would argue that it's better this way. I learned about the mansion as I went, and I would not have known what this item was for if I didn't explore the other areas first. The problem is it is easy to mess up and take a ton of damage along the way, or use too many bullets on a zombie or trap you could have skipped. This is not a problem at all, but a feature of a game, that it requires your complete attention and dedication. Overall I like the idea. If you have the time, inclination, and are fortuitous, or you come into the game knowing what you are getting, it is a wonderful experience. If you are used to the more fluid controls of modern games, or dislike running out of bullets or heals, you will have a much harder time, and it might scare some people away. Going through without using a guide is the paramount experience. Get lost in the mansion. Die to some zombies. Learn how to move through it and when to take fights or when to run. Resident Evil is in a genre all on its own, and delivers a feeling that very few other games do. I loved Resident Evil, even when I didn't. For the love of the game, it stands the test of time.
Comments
Post a Comment