Resident Evil 7: Biohazard

Man, I feel like this game got shat on a lot for its second half but I loved pretty much the whole thing.

Now when it starts it's incredibly scary and intense. This is early Resident Evil survival horror at its best. You have no weapon and have to slink around avoiding Jack Baker. After some intense avoiding him you eventually get a knife and then a gun while at the same time you face off against him for the first time. It's a very cool boss fight where if you do the wrong thing he ends up driving a car around the garage you're trapped inside him with and he kills you inevitably. And then the molded show up. Or lord the molded. They're basically the main zombies of the game and they're pretty terrifying. In general they do such a good job setting up a terrifying atmosphere for the game.

Now I was so intimidated I actually restarted at this point to put it on Easy mode. Honestly maybe before I even met the first molded lol. The gameplay carries on in this fashion but you slowly get more and more well equipped with a shotgun and then a flamethrower and then a grenade launcher. At this point you're pretty well equipped for most fights though you're still scrounging for ammo to some extent.

The second half of the game throws you on a ship where you get access to a machine gun with plenty of ammo. For some people this is where they hated the game because it removes the tension of the earlier portions where you're much more powerless. But for me I loved it. This was my chance for revenge to just ravage these fucking molded. I ended the game with something like 500 rounds for the machine gun. It felt great to just lay waste to shit with a machine gun and bombs.

All along the way it's got a pretty batshit Resident Evil story. There's a girl who's created by some corporation (revealed to be Umbrella corp at the very end) who is able to control peoples minds by infecting them with some sort of spores (hence Molded). The family you end up massacring are basically victims of this psycho little girl. There's a cool twist at the end where there's this old woman you keep seeing in a wheelchair a part of the Baker family. Every time you see her she'll teleport somewhere else if you go into another room. And she's eerily never mentioned. Turns out THAT'S the girl. It's a cheap twist but I liked it.

And a lot of lore is found through little news clippings and diaries or through the dialogue that is spouted off by the family members as they hunt you.

One notable thing is that this is first person, a departure for the Resident Evil series. I think they did a great job using this perspective. From slinking around and hiding to when you're shimmying through the walls and a bunch of centipedes start crawling on you. The shooting also feels a lot easier as a result (even though I opted to use a controller).

While playing 2 only slightly made me interested in the series again because it REALLY focused on the tension, this one let up pretty quickly and went back to the action I enjoy so much. In the end it's reinvigorated me for the series. I really want to play Village and I'm currently replaying Resident Evil 4 and I have a strong feeling this will be the first time I finish it. What a great series!