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We’re regaining
consciousness
at a dinner table,
bound to a chair as
a haggard family
of four watches us
with a discomfiting
mixture of curiosity and maniacal joy.
There’s Marguerite on the right,
rictus-grinning and proud of the rancid
human-offal feast she’s prepared.
On the left is Lucas, leaning
towards you eager and wild-eyed,
like a maladjusted child eager to
dismember some hapless insect. Of
course there’s Jack, the stolid family
patriarch centre-image, intent that
this momentous occasion – whatever
the hell it is – goes through without
incident. And then there’s gran‘ma,
lolling her head and looking through
you with milky eyes.
It’s one of the most iconic, perfectly
framed scenes of this videogame
generation. With its dirty amber hues
and furrowed faces it could almost be
a Rembrandt work, assuming that at
the time of painting, the great Dutch
artist was febrile with food poisoning.
It’s a scene that oozes menace,
and raises questions that you spend
the rest of the game answering. In a
series that by this point was all but a
glorified B-movie saga with a carousel
of one-dimensional characters,
this was the first time it became an
intriguing, personality-heavy tale. That
dinner scene sends a message, too:
that Resident Evil 7 stands up on its
own, shedding the familiarity that’s
kept millions of fans standing by the
series through the good and bad.
You could say that RE7 was a Petri
dish for the series, where splodges
and dabs of one element or another
are chucked into the mix to see if it
forms into something fun, new and
sustainable; Ground Zero for a new
manifestation of old-school horror.
With that in mind, Capcom’s
decision to set it in a marooned
location far from anywhere that could
interfere with mainline Resident Evil
lore looks like a tactical move; just
as Resident Evil 4’s remote Spanish
setting offered a platform for Capcomto move the series in a new direction,
so too did Dulvey, Louisiana.Breaking the mold
Even the game’s new enemies, The
Molded, feel like prototypes both
within the game lore and the context
of the series’ development.
These semi-morphous black goo
monsters – spawned from a mould
that feeds on dead bodies – didn’t
get too much love from gamers when
Resident Evil 7 first came out. They’re
visually homogeneous, and can
pretty much appear from nowhere as
they coagulate out of the slimmest
cracks and sluices. They take a lot
of damage, and cause plenty of
frustration without the accompanyingcharm and B-movie bombast we
associate with other enemies
throughout the series.
But a couple of years on, the
Molded’s purpose looks clear: they’re
the precursor to the reinvented
zombies of the Resi 2 remake,
designed to rediscover the horror of
slow enemies in tight confines.
Like Resident Evil 2’s zombies,
the Molded shamble towards you
deceptively fast, and their heads bob
awkwardly and arrhythmically from
side to side, making them difficult to
hit. Then, once you do, they have a
nasty habit of stumbling back before
retaliating and reaching out for you
with overextending fungal arms; a
move paralleled by RE2 zombies’extra
Everyone’s feasting on the Resident Evil 2 remake right now,
but it was Resident Evil 7 that set the table ROBERT ZAK
PUBLISHER CAPCOM / DEVELOPER CAPCOM / FORMAT XBOX ONE / RELEASE DATE JANUARY 2017098 THE OFFICIAL XBOX MAGAZINE