Every night for the past week, after my wife and child were sound asleep, I've been placing a PlayStation VR headset over my face and turning on Resident Evil 7. Roughly 90 minutes later, I have to take the headset off—it's too much. Inevitably, my heart starts pounding, my muscles tense up, and I'm short of breath. Resident Evil 7 is not just a bold reinvention of a franchise that's long needed a shakeup, but it's one of the best horror games I've played in years, an interactive Texas Chainsaw Massacre that simultaneously serves as the best reason to buy a VR headset yet.
The only game poster in my house is one I've had since 1996. I found it buried in my parents' basement a few months back. I've loved a lot of video games in my lifetime, but few of them really meant something to me. Resident Evil, though, was one of them. The hallways of the Spencer Mansion are burned into my psyche, and the moment a ravenous dog jumped through a window still gives me chills.
I've been waiting for Resident Evil to feel like that again, and Resident Evil 7is damn close. In terms of mythology and spectacle, each Resident Evil game has become more ridiculous than the last. And though Resident Evil 7 technically takes place after Resident Evil 6, a 20-hour slog where players fought a kaiju-sized insect thing on the top of a building, it's essentially a reboot. While the game nods at the games that have come before it, it's not built on the overwrought storylines the franchise lost control over years ago.
If you've been wondering if Capcom could make Resident Evil scary again, worry no longer. Switching the perspective from third- to first-person, Resident Evil 7 reestablishes the simmering tension of the original game by isolating the player and making them feel alone. Resident Evil was "survival horror" because you were barely scraping by, never having enough bullets to feel truly safe. The series lost that feeling as it went along, trading horror for action, but it's back. Once again, every bullet counts, and you might want to think about running away instead of fighting. You're going to be muttering fuckfuckfuckas you turn the corner, not knowing what might be around the bend. Whatever's over there, it's not good.
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