Resident Evil 7 brings back the horror

Not to take anything away from Resident Evil 4, which is one of the best and most influential action games of all time, but there’s a case to be made that it set the series on a path to irrelevance. Subsequent entries learned all the wrong lessons, unsuccessfully attempting to go toe-to-toe with action genre heavyweights while forgetting what made the series what it was back in the day: a relentless, foreboding sense of horror.

If a playable teaser released on the PlayStation Network shortly after Sony’s E3 press conference last night is anything to go by, Resident Evil 7: Biohazard represents a major course correction. Although it is set in a spooky house, the demo, titled Beginning Hour, is nothing like any previous game in the series. In fact, the two games it has most in common with are both games you can’t even play today.



The first of these is Kitchen, an intense PlayStation VR demo that Capcom has been showing off by appointment since last year’s E3; I played it at Tokyo Game Show. The vibe is very Saw, placing you in a chair with your hands tied (which conveniently lets you use a regular DualShock 4 as a motion controller) as all manner of clichéd depravity surrounds you. But VR makes the experience incredibly immersive — at one point your character gets stabbed in the leg, and hell if it didn’t make my actual leg physically twitch in response.


I’ve heard a few times that Kitchen was developed as a way to explore a possible new direction for the Resident Evil franchise, and it’s clear that the experiment was deemed a success. Beginning Hour is set within the same house as Kitchen, uses the same first-person perspective, and opens and closes with scenes from the VR demo. More pertinently, Resident Evil 7 will be entirely (and optionally) playable with PlayStation VR.

I have my doubts as to how well this will work out. Much of Kitchen’s effectiveness came from the way it restricted your movement, and no-one’s kracked the formula for traditional first-person motion in VR yet. Resident Evil 7 is also coming to PC and Xbox One, meaning it probably won’t feel like a made-for-VR experience — Polygon’s Mike McWhertor says "controlling the camera through head-tracking and the right analog stick wound up being disorienting," and that it’s unlikely he’d play the whole game this way. But if nothing else, Kitchen has spurred Capcom into creating a radically new Resident Evil, and it’s enough to make this the most intriguing entry in the series for at least a decade.


The second influence it’s impossible to ignore is PT, because the parallels are just too apparent. PT was also a teaser for a total reboot of a PlayStation-era Japanese horror franchise — in this case Silent Hill — released immediately after a trade show press conference. Konami’s subsequent cancelation and collaborators Hideo Kojima and Norman Reedus’ new, apparently unrelated game Death Stranding suggest we’re less likely to see it as a finished product, however.

The more substantive parallel is that both Beginning Hour and PT are slow-paced first-person horror experiences that aim to return their respective series back to the business of scaring you. PT was more esoteric and ambitious, with an unsettling ambience and abstract looping structure compared to Beginning Hour’s more straightforward found-footage story. But both games take similar approaches to the question of how to make a modern horror title for an audience that may well have given up on the genre.

There’s nothing truly spectacular in Beginning Hour, and it’s too short to really pass comment at this point. But PT and Kitchen are two of the most original, effective horror games I’ve played in recent years, and I can’t think of a better way for the Resident Evil series to return to its former glory than to take inspiration from the pair. We don’t have to wait too long to find out how well the experiment works out, either — Resident Evil 7: Biohazard is coming out for PS4, Xbox One, and PC on January 24th, 2017.

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Resident Evil 7's demo content won't be in the main game, but a new hero will

The demo for Resident Evil 7 biohazard that's now playable on the PlayStation 4 is a unique piece of content that won't be included as part of the final release, Capcom's Koshi Nakanishi told Polygon in an interview at E3 today. The teaser, Nakanishi said through a translator, is intended to give Resident Evil fans a taste of what next year's survival horror game will be. Just don't expect it to be in the main game.

Resident Evil 7's teaser is "fully representative" of the kind of experience players will get when the game hits PlayStation 4, Windows PC and Xbox One in January. But the developers say they didn't want to spoil the game's content, so they created the one-off demo.

And unlike other horror games with playable teasers, Resident Evil 7's creators say they don't intend to pull their demo from the PlayStation Store.

"Although, you never know," Nakanishi said. "You might as well get it while you can."

When Resident Evil 7 does arrive next year, it will do so without much of the series' baggage. Its main playable character won't be of the "macho superhero" type — think Resident Evil 5's buffed up Chris Redfield or Resident Evil 6's Leon Kennedy. Instead, it will be someone "totally new," producer Masachika Kawata said. But it won't be someone helpless.

When asked how Resident Evil 7 compares to its horror game contemporaries, like first-person horror games Amnesia and Outlast, Nakanishi said both are great experiences, but they left him feeling frustrated. He wanted to have a weapon, to feel powerful enough to strike back, he said. Resident Evil 7's playable character will have the means to fend off his or her foes.

"While we don't show that aspect of Resident Evil 7 in the teaser demo, that's something that's in the full game," he said.

Resident Evil 7, which takes place after 6 in the series timeline, is set in the same universe as other titles in the franchise, Kawata confirmed. It will feature some familiar Resident Evil mainstays, like healing herbs. It will also include elements of the series' Japanese and Western titles — a biohazard event and the presence of evil — hence, the unusual name.

But Capcom is getting back to the franchise's horror roots, and it really means it this time.

"We had a lot of internal discussion about where to take this series [after Resident Evil 6]," Kawata said. "My boss, Jun Takeuchi, requested that we strip it down to its core — and the best way to express the horror directly is in first-person view."

Despite the game's stripped-down presentation, Resident Evil 7's team size hasn't shrunk. Kawata said about 120 developers at Capcom are working on the game

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