From there, the demo presents players with a collection of clichés and design features lifted directly from other modern horror games. Like Amnesia: The Dark Descent and Outlast, players have no means of defense other than to keep out of sight. Instead, they must make sense of their surroundings and creep through the environment, looking for clues and tools in order to make progress. The aforementioned games made great use of these mechanics, but the Resident Evil 7 demo doesn’t pull them off nearly as well. In fact, it seems to be going through the motions rather than refining the gameplay of those that came before.
Despite the emphasis on horror, veterans familiar with Amnesia, PT or Outlast in particular are not going to find this demo scary, as the jump scares are advertised well before they occur and nothing feels as threatening as it should. The second you meet the two supporting characters, you know exactly what’s in store for them. It adds up to an underwhelming fifteen minutes. Worse of all, this demo shows none of the ‘roots’ of the series as promised.
That being said, we now know that the demo will not be part of the full game. This is great news, since there’s still hope that Capcom will fix these errors. Director Koushi Nakanishi has stated that the demo is an introduction to the tone of the game and doesn’t contain the full breadth of the “key pillars” of the gameplay. While fear and exploration are adequately displayed, puzzle solving and combat will not be introduced until the final product goes on sale.
Furthermore, Resident Evil 7 will star a different protagonist, will take place in a plantation mansion and introduce supernatural elements. It’s a lot to digest, and what few details Nakanishi has given us are tantalizing, but there are certain marks that Capcom needs to hit in order to make this not just a good horror game, but a good Resident Evil title.
Focusing on horror rather than action is a good first step, but the series has a specific style that sets it apart from other games. The best Resident Evil outings have managed to make their settings feel alive. The puzzles and design of the Spencer Estate and Raccoon City made them as much a character as Leon Kennedy or Jill Valentine ever were, and often with a lot more personality.
With the exception of the zombies, the creatures and enemies were creative and grotesque while managing to be unique. None of those characteristics seem to have been translated into this demo. We were instead given an all too familiar house full of all too familiar killers. If you were to call the game by any other name, you wouldn’t know the difference, and that doesn’t bode well. For Resident Evil 7 to work, we’re going to need that plantation to be dripping with its own atmosphere, not one that’s borrowed from other games. We need enemies that frighten us, but they must be more than the generic murderous freaks we’ve seen so far.
As much as combat needs to be scaled back from Resident Evil 6, shooting and bullet rationing are as much a part of Resident Evil as bio-organic weapons and oddly shaped keys. The first person perspective is a good idea, but Capcom needs to simultaneously implement some aspect of combat in the game while keeping it from delving into FPS territory. The story should still be somewhat tied to the past, even if only tangentially. Series high mark Resident Evil 4 managed to build off what came before without getting lost in the minutia of the Umbrella Corporations’ conspiracies, and it was better for it.
Aside from that, hints at ‘supernatural elements’ are disconcerting. Thematically, Resident Evil has been about man playing God and the consequences of tooling with nature for financial gain. The series has always centered around the aftermath of viral contaminant leaks and illegal biological weapons programs. The villains have been members of various evil pharmaceutical corporations. Even the most outrageous tentacle monsters were the result of science run amok. In Japan, the game is known as Biohazard; there’s no place for ghosts and spirits. It makes us wonder how this game is going to fit into the series as a whole, because as of right now it seems so far away from the its predecessors that we wonder if it would have been better suited as an entirely new IP.
The demo may have scared us, but certainly not in the way we might have liked. VR may enhance the game, but considering only one console will feature VR functionality, it will need to stand on its own. Knowing that the demo was meant to be more of a proof of concept that Resident Evil can function in first person and to give us an idea of its tone is comforting. But as of right now, we’ve more questions than answers and no true idea of what to expect come January.
Illustrating how they plan to innovate is fine, but Capcom should have made sure the game was truly Resident Evil. It will do them no good to alienate longtime fans. As of now, there’s still much more to be seen of what the game will offer, and it will certainly be a while before we can definitively agree that Resident Evil 7 will be a return to form for the series.
