resident evil (1996) - 7/10
the spencer mansion is my gaff
(full disclosure; i played through using my GOG copy of the game. this won't really divulge on any PC port differences or oddities, as i kinda don't really know 'em! this is a first-time perspective, and as of writing, i have only reached the end as jill. i may come back and do a chris playthrough if i put my big girl pants on some day.)
wow! genuinely stunningly awesome! i completely get how this took the horror gaming world by storm and forged the survival horror into a more popularised thing. whilst the influence of earlier influences such as alone in the dark and, of course, sweet home are nigh-inescapable, they certainly aren't required reading, and do a fair bit off of that beaten path too; it acts more as a compounding and remixing of what worked best from those titles, namely their sprawling maps with sparse, yet difficult encounters, resource management and an atmosphere that makes you shit yourself if you hear a pin drop.
on the face of it, resident evil is a deeply silly game; the acting, both in the FMV intro and the voice acting of the game proper, are laughably cheesy to a point where it had a huge smile slapped across my face the whole time i would hear any dialogue by the finish - it is so very far from anything that you'd expect of the far more hammy performances of the following games, and yet some of the soul is already still here, such as the incredibly campy quips! it'd be a hell of a drinking game to take a shot each time you heard a line that's been since parroted by fans for decades strong, now, least of all because you'd cheer whenever barry showed up on screen. so many bangers. "jill sandwich." "master of unlocking." "i hope this is not. CHRIS'S blood." and he's just super helpful and a good companion, frankly. what a fucking don.
but then, the character interactions, the deep cheesiness, the unserious atmosphere that the truly heinous acting brings to the table - that makes the atmosphere all the more dissonant, and personally, it heightens the scares factor for me. if i hadn't have been so deeply disarmed by the fucking master of unlocking, i wouldn't have then actually honest-to-god yelped when those dogs jumped through the window with that 500DB brawl on your wii at 4am-ass loud-ass noise as that chase track kicked in. i wouldn't have been set off-kilter by the oddly haunting shitty fmv animated sequence into being jumpscared by a hunter. i'm not one to be gotten by jumpscares in the typical horror setting! i have historically bounced off of things like, say, five nights at freddys because unless i am first lulled into a false sense of security, by, say, dumbass dialogue, then they don't scare me, they're simply Jumps. and they don't even make me jump, so they're just S.
what the fuck am i on about?
either way, point is, the atmosphere in resident evil is so integral to the experience, and it's one that's deeply unique amongst it's peers; silent hill has historically had off-kilter dialogue, yes, but not to quite the same comedic dissonance as is on display here.
gameplay wise, i was expecting a lurch when i came in, knowing what it had in store but... wait, this actually feels kind of awesome? i really like the tank controls, actually, i feel like they add a great degree of tension in the scariest moments. sure, if you die and you haven't saved in a bit, it's a pain in the tits and kind of shoots the pacing in the foot, but when you do get away from those moments, when you bumble your way into victory, it feels like a struggle, it feels like a fight; it's surviving, baby. and that is an element of the greater resident evil series that i feel becomes increasingly diluted with each game, at this point to where very little of this base remains, drowned by the action elements. that's not to say that's for better or for worse, at least not at this moment in time, but it's certainly a marked difference that makes these first few fixed camera games a whole different beast to play and experience. that said, i do believe deeply that this game (i shall comment further whenever i get around to playing resident evil 2 and 3) is definitely built around the fixed camera angles and the tank controls, and that the floundering with its controls are very much intentional to the experience, integral to it even.
the surreal disconnect provided from these controls echoes that of the environment that you explore them with; confusing and nonsensical. it often wraps around itself in ways that made me, yes, in the big 2026, break out a pen and paper and got me to draw my own map. i am aware that the game has a map feature, however, it is sort of shit and i don't really get how to read it properly, and it's sort of more cumbersome to get to than it should be; i really wish that i could have mapped it to the select button or something. but sitting there, drawing out my map, i realised - i hadn't been this properly connected with a game, this willing to make my own materials to aid me, in quite some time. that experience alone, paired with the game arguably rewarding me for it by allowing you to breeze through it if you know where you are and what's up from down, felt so deeply amazing to me, like i was tapping back in to an experience from yesteryear in its entirety. the aesthetics, the shit dialogue, the almost jarringly scary bits, me making my own maps, it felt evocative of an era long since passed. dare i say, i felt nostalgic for a game i hadn't even played.
that was in my first half of the game - if it stuck to that sort of tension and atmosphere all throughout of a sort of uncharacteristic degree of chill, i would be more than up on this game, it would even have been refreshing to have gotten something so stuck to being strictly the horror that i feel, as previously stated, starts to wane over time in this franchise. well, we've all gotta start somewhere!
i think that this game is genuinely really damn good until you get back from the guardhouse. it goes from you being able to reasonably skirt around all the encounters (i.e. what i believe to be a pivotal hallmark of good survival horror) to all of the encounters being against big fuckers who you can't really just elbow past, which makes me have to come to terms with the one part of the gameplay that really did elude me: the combat. i desperately wish that i had better things to say about it, because as previously mentioned, i really do enjoy the tank controls, and i went into my combat thinking "oh, it really isn't as bad as people say! this is all cool!" and i bounced right the fuck off of it. it feels really awkward to aim and shoot your gun in a way that feels at odds with our characters. it feels akin to something that i'd expect out of a silent hill game; where in that setting, it works, due to there being overall lesser emphasis on action, moreso leaning into the foreboding and psychological horror elements rather than forcing you into combat, doubled up with the character(s) you play as largely just being random people off the street, in resident evil, it feels unwieldy in the same way, yes, but uncharacteristically for our protagonists. these are supposed to be trained professionals who are seen as intimidating enough to be worthy fodder for the goings-on of the spencer mansion, right? so why does it feel like i'm having to bend wet spaghetti into pointing at where i want my shots to go?
on top of that, i understood decently quickly that the predominant way to dispatch enemies quickly was with one swift headshot with a shotgun. it feels great! the headshots feel truly wonderful! they feel empowering, crunchy and weighty. but then, likewise, there's just as many enemies that i simply could not pin weak spots down for, which made them consume resources out the wazoo - my response, in those situations, then, is surely intended to be running away? but when it's those aforementioned particularly big blokes crowding a hallway, two or three spread in a tight corridor, it gets to be nigh-impossible, forcing you to confront your attackers, and even then, they'll still easily chew through your ammo. i, of course, understand that the whole point of the survival horror genre is to make you feel powerless and scared and tense, but at the same time, it really does feel quite bad in practice. i save my shots for powerful, unavoidable enemies, and they hoover up everything i've got. and with bosses, that's cool! there's a tension to expending all of your firepower on one big fella and then knowing that you'll have to run away on your route back, such as just after yawn or the brief hopeful section just after plant-42 but before you get back to the mansion fully. it's great fun evading enemies in open spaces, or even the tighter rooms of the mansion, running circles around them and weaving, but then the hallways... it just really makes me sore. my prior issues with dying putting a dampener on the pace get elevated from being shot in the foot to taking a double-barrel to your lower torso in these spaces. skill issue? absolutely. still didn't like it!
despite that last stretch of the game kinda leaving me a little glum on it, i'm still deeply appreciative of my time with resident evil. from its aesthetic that i deeply adore, each inch of the spencer mansion deeply crawling with history, intrigue and sometimes just outright immaculate vibes, to the reconnection to a time that i had forgotten, to the laughs and startles, regardless of my qualms, this game was still quite a fun time. enjoyed my time with this one. i have high hopes for the rest of the series whenever i get around to trickling through them all!
