An old mansion in the mountains during a thunderstorm. A once-vibrant city now virtually deserted. The home of a loving family left to rot and decay.
The original Resident Evil released on the Playstation in 1996, the progenitor of the survival horror genre. Despite not having played all of the games that are available - some of them, like Code: Veronica, have been at least temporarily lost to time - I would count myself a big fan of the series. While I’m something of a Capcom apologist, the game studio behind the franchise has placed it in some precarious positions over the years, but much like the zombies it features it keeps pressing onward.
To celebrate the 25th anniversary of the franchise, I wanted to share what makes these titles so unique, compelling, and unlike anything else out there.
Survival
As the standard bearer for survival horror, Resident Evil games are designed to be limiting and restrictive, making players struggle for every bit of progress. Perhaps the best example of these restrictions are the infamous “tank controls” of earlier titles, which prevented players from moving and shooting at the same time. Befitting the genre, these controls make combat feel desperate and uncertain. Has an enemy been shot enough to defeat them, or will they just get back up and continue to close in? Is there enough space to get away? Is leaving risker than staying and fighting?
Another restriction is in the amount of items players can carry at once. Due to this, effective resource management is essential to survival. Weapons, ammunition, health items, keys and other progression items, even ink ribbons necessary to save your game - these all take up space in the player’s inventory, and they need to be very thoughtful about what they can take with them and what they can leave for later. Item scarcity is only further compounded by the inability to pick items back up after they’ve been discarded.
It’s often a better idea to weave around enemies and escape danger than it is to face them head-on. While not explicitly stated, this ethos is etched throughout the series. If you kill a zombie in the first game without destroying their head or legs and don’t burn the body with kerosene, they will later revive as a more powerful Crimson Head, costing the player even more resources. The Tyrant from Resident Evil 2 and Nemesis from Resident Evil 3 continually stalk the player, forcing them to keep on the move. Resident Evil 4 introduces the iconic Chainsaw Ganado, an extremely strong enemy that can instantly kill the player. Resident Evil 5 has a sequence where if players don’t carefully walk as opposed to running, they’ll be made to fight enclosures full of monstrous Lickers.
In the more action-oriented titles, avoiding enemies isn’t particularly consequential, as once the player leaves an area they’re not going to be returning to it. Resident Evil 5, for example, is chapter-based, and so while it retains the sense of progression in moving from one area to the next in an overarching sense, it doesn’t make use of safe rooms like most other series titles. However, in more traditional Resident Evil titles, players are forced to frequently backtrack across labyrinthine maps. Leaving enemies alive makes every hallway, every room just as dangerous as it was the first time the player entered it.
There is even further risk-reward gameplay in certain entries, where defeated enemies can drop items or resources. Is it worth engaging with an enemy and spending precious ammunition when the player doesn’t know what, if anything, can be gained?
Horror
What does it mean to be a horror game? Some of the best horror films ever made, John Carpenter’s Halloween and Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, don’t rely on cheap jumpscares or excessive gore to shock the audience. It’s all about atmosphere and tension, an oppressive tone slowly ramping up over the minutes and hours until the cathartic climax.
Despite being a franchise full of hideous monsters and human experimentation, these are not the things that make Resident Evil scary. The horror comes from the far more primal fear of the unknown. When a floorboard creaks, is it simply ambient audio to add realism, or is it a clue to the player that there are enemies nearby?
Earlier Resident Evil titles further created dissonance between what was heard and what was actually seen through their use of fixed camera angles. As opposed to the camera tracking the player, every room consists of multiple vantage points that the player has to move through. There were technical benefits to this approach - since areas were essentially collections of static images, Capcom was able to create very realistic environments with little processing power - but the developers could also curate exactly what it is players see at any given time. This means that enemies can be lurking almost anywhere, through doors and around corners, even in the space between one camera angle and the next.
Twitch streamer Patrick “PatStaresAt” Boivin, previously of the (critically underappreciated) YouTube collective Super Best Friends Play, once said:
If you have a horror game in which you have literally zero options to deal with an enemy, it actually becomes less scary, because it removes the ability to fight off the enemy and lose.
As the Resident Evil games have moved away from having a fixed camera, they’ve also had to change how they can create moments of tension within the gameplay. One of the most iconic moments of Resident Evil 4 is the player’s arrival to the village, where they are suddenly and inexplicably mobbed by enemies, and have to quickly find a better way to arm themselves so they stand a fighting chance. Where once the series relied on its narrow corridors to create a sense of claustrophobia, it has been able to do so just as effectively by sending large groups of enemies at the player, restricting their ability to escape.
Action
While titles in the series are survival horror games, they are by no means bleak and depressing slogs to the next puzzle or combat instance. Rather, they are able to temper how serious they are with moments of levity and absurd, bombastic spectacle.
The original game, of course, has its share of bad one-liners, “master of unlocking” and “Jill sandwich” having arguably reached general meme status. In the Resident Evil 2 Remake, dialogue between protagonists Leon Kennedy and Claire Redfield is flirty and awkward. In Resident Evil 5, Claire’s brother Chris fights series antagonist Albert Wesker inside a volcano after a plane crash, and infamously punches a gigantic boulder to clear a path for his partner Sheva Alomar.
While the games themselves can be nerve-wracking, harrowing experiences, the systems in place around them - completion time and ranking goals - suggest that these are arcade games, where the goal is not only to survive, but to attain mastery. On every new playthrough, the player has more knowledge about which items are needed and when, how to defeat bosses more easily, and how to most effectively progress. To replay a Resident Evil game multiple times is to dissect it, and use that information to overcome increasingly difficult challenges.
Completing these challenges can offer rewards that completely subvert the game’s dynamic. For example, the reward for completing the Resident Evil 2 Remake on Hardcore, the game’s highest difficulty, with an S+ rank - clearing the game in under two hours, with no more than three saves - unlocks infinite ammo versions of the game’s most powerful weapons, the rocket launcher for Leon and the minigun for Claire.
Normally, I’m of the opinion that franchises shouldn’t overstay their welcome - especially horror franchises, which can quickly become shadows of their former selves. However, Capcom’s willingness to evolve with every title has made the franchise so incredibly dynamic that every title is a fresh experience.
Not everything about Resident Evil has been gold - despite your feelings on the Paul W.S. Anderson films or Resident Evil 6, they were at least commercially successful - but it’s hard to argue that between Biohazard, the Remakes, and now Village, the franchise has gotten a second life.
What’s your favourite Resident Evil game? Let me know! You can always find me on Twitch.