Resident Evil 7: The game fans want?

One of the greatest (and downright terrifying) surprises from E3 2016 was, for me, the unexpected return of one of the granddaddies of horror gaming, Resident Evil. A seventh title in the classic franchise is shambling onto current-gen in early 2017, and promises to take a fresh new direction. Subtitled Biohazard, Resident Evil 7 will move away from exaggerated action, instead offering a first person horror experience where spine-chilling tension and disturbing atmosphere are prioritised over blockbuster set pieces.

To give us a taste of what horrors to expect, Beginning Hour, a playable demo, was released free for PS Plus members, right after the Sony conference. If that feels familiar to you, it’s definitely a carefully calculated effort to bring back memories of P.T, Konami’s playable prototype for a new (and infamously cancelled) Silent Hill title, released after E3 2014. You can almost hear Sony bosses exclaiming “Yeah Konami, we can revamp classic Playstation horror franchises too!”  Throughout my nighttime play through of Beginning Hour, the P.T influence was obvious throughout, and made the demo all the more exciting. It marks the biggest stylistic change for the series since Resident Evil 4 pioneered the “over-the-shoulder action” look back in 2005.

And holy crap, is it scary. Now, I’m a pretty desensitised chap when it comes to horror. I watched every single banned “video nasty” movie as “research” my university dissertation. For better or worse, I’ve sat through every Friday the 13^th, Evil Dead, and Nightmare on Elm Street movie.  The Shining and The Exorcist are two of my all time favourite films. On the gaming front, I’ve played every Silent Hill, Resident Evil, and Dead Space game. I even got halfway through the tough-as -nails PS2 J-horror Forbidden Siren 2 before my heart gave out. So you’ll forgive me if I thought that P.T wouldn’t really give me the creeps. Oh, how wrong I was. It gave me, (a then 21-year-old “adult”) my first real nightmare since I was a child. Thanks, icky ghost woman! (Shudder). Two years later, I thought it couldn’t possibly happen again.

Well, how wrong I was. In retrospect, maybe playing Beginning Hour on my own, in the dark, with headphones on, was a bad mistake. The only real way to play a horror game, of course, but still a mistake.  The demo gives you one simple task: ESCAPE THE HOUSE. In true horror tradition, it’s a dark, decrepit, and ramshackle place, evoking recent memories of the looping, shadowy hallways of P.T, and the dank, gore smeared dirtiness of Outlasts’ Mount Massive Asylum.  As you scour the house for useful objects, the demo uses every trick in the book to try and creep you out.

Inanimate objects moving when your back is turned. Creaking floorboards. Footsteps echoing just around the corner. Faded, disturbing old photographs. A TV set crackling with static. A ceiling dangling with voodoo dolls. A mysterious wardrobe, chained shut. Moldy bags of something in the rusted fridge. Dismembered animal corpses, spilled innards and broken bones. The clichés just keep on coming, but, even though we’ve seen it all before, Beginning Hour still manages to produce scares. Enough to make me turn off the PS4 halfway through, and retreat to the warm safety of my bed.

The standout moment of the demo is the flashback sequence. It’s smartly accessed through an old video cassette, and places you in the shoes of the cameraman protagonist as he arrives at the house with two companions, ready to film another episode of their “Ghost Hunter” like reality show. I won’t go into details, but it’s a terrific playable sequence that cleverly imitates the “found footage” sub genre. A truly disturbing moment comes towards the end of the flashback, borrowed wholesale from the final shot of a 1999 “found footage” classic. It made the film geek in me smile and scream simultaneously.

Beginning Hour is a promising sign of things to come. It throws what we thought we knew about Resident Evil out of the window, and gives it a smart, contemporary update that takes inspiration from the best modern horror games. Although its creation of an unsettling ambience isn’t quite as sophisticated as P.T, it’s still a great little horror experience. My appetite for the series had waned since I slogged my way through the exhausting Resident Evil 6, and I knew nothing about Resident Evil 7 before E3 2016. However, after playing Beginning Hour, I’m really looking forward to giving RE7 a go on a dark, cold night next January. Even if my heart isn’t up to it.