5) Resident Evil 7
Capcom finally managed to do what many had long since given up hope of ever happening earlier this year – they made Resident Evil scary again. In fact, I’d even wager that in creating the series’ seventh entry, the genre’s pioneer created the most haunting, authentically chilling survival horror entry in the series to date, but certainly not without several years of noticeable struggle. A strange, and perhaps totally avoidable dilemma, considering the steps it needed to take in order to ensure Resident Evil 7‘s formula recalculation worked had already been successfully achieved years prior to its release.
Like its younger sibling would do 13 years later (albeit to a far lesser degree), Resident Evil 4 forsook the pre-rendered backgrounds and tank controls of its forebears, undergoing a level of such forward-thinking evolution that made even its contemporaries look archaic in comparison. Take a moment to research just how many games released in the years following Leon’s crusade against the parasite-worshipping Los Illuminados cult adopted its over-the-shoulder perspective, for example, and it becomes immediately clear just how much of an impact 4 had on the industry as a whole.
The point of that digression, in case it wasn’t clear, is that Resident Evil 4, while it’s hard to believe now, considering its reputation, represented a monumental risk for Capcom that paid off tenfold. In comparison, Resident Evil 5 and 6 – the less said about the latter the better – fell into the trap of attempting to emulate the success of its predecessor, the result of which diverged further and further away from the series’ horror roots.
For all intents and purposes, Resident Evil 7 feels much like the end result of Capcom discovering the series’ source code on a dusty hard drive somewhere and subsequently stitching its best bits together onto a brand new, modern framework. The Spencer Mansion may be the GOAT, but the Baker’s humble home comes in a close second on the scale of scariness.