Review: Resident Evil 7 - Biohazard

The Following HAS SPOILERS and is a giant rant I felt compelled to write. I watched the impressions video and I just hate what I saw. The constant over the top gratuitous violence prevents me from having any emotional reaction to 99% of what's happening. Having everything constantly dialed up to 10 means there is no way to scale things up. I’m reminded of the joke in the Cleveland Show when Jr says “I don’t like Firefly. If everyone is Han Solo then no one is Han Solo.” Its mildly creepy the first time the girl goes from nice and normal to crazy and attacking you out of nowhere but that is the 1%. Even that overstays its welcome by having her go from crazy to nice like 3 times. Then the 99% kicks in. Starting at 14:50 into the impressions video you are stabbed right through your left hand. Then you are repeatedly stabbed in the shoulder and hands before knocking the girl out. After knocking her out she wakes up and stabs you a bunch more before you put a hatchet in her head. Then when she wakes up…..again….she puts a screwdriver through your hand before just cutting it off entirely with a chainsaw. An event that is robbed of any meaning by the fact that in the following scene it's been reattached. But that's ok because right after you see your arm is back you witness an npc get his hand cut off. Sure that scene also had a Temple of Doom style disgusting meal that the family is eating, but creepy food is like a 3 on the scale and we are at 10!!!!! Everything is so extreme son!!!!!! Everything I just mentioned was from 14:50 to 26:05 in the impressions video. So 11:15 is the duration for all that. This all leaves me numb. After maybe the first stabbing none of this violence has any impact on me, let alone trivial things like the tone set by the game’s backgrounds, music, or as mentioned above the rancid things we see. I’m also left feeling that there are no stakes. I just had my arm cut off and it had no long term effect to me. Oh and right after your arm is put back on your stabbed in the neck, which again has no lasting effect on your character. Now i’m supposed to be scared because i’m playing hide and seek with an npc?! Please. Even if he found me and cut off all my arms and legs they would just be reattached in the next scene. Why should I give a damn about anything that is happening? At this point Mario falling down a pit would have a greater emotional impact on me then anything this game could possibly do. Mario only has so many lives! What if I gets game over?! The entire experience in resident evil is just farcical to me. Jim in the review, says the game isn’t afraid to be silly or campy when it needs to. I don’t think these way over the top scenes are silly or campy. I think they completely undermine every other aspect of the game. The complete lack of subtlety means that nothing that happens can be scaled up at all. So nothing that happens has any impact. Finally, I know healing items are common in video games but Resident Evil’s over the top blood and gore combined with instant healing through the magic of of splashing water on your hand causes me to completely lose any suspension of disbelief. I would rather there be no visual effect for healing items then "I've been stabbed! Better pour some water on it!" I feel it's important to point out the difference between this game and Doom. In Doom there are over the top death scenes to be sure, but they are death scenes. They only occur when there is an actual death. This keeps up the suspense because there are stakes. If I don’t kill this demon it's gonna kill me. From what I have seen in Resident Evil though it doesn’t matter what happens nobody actually dies. Both you and the npcs in the game repeatedly do fatalities on each other yet the result is not death. Everything just progresses like nothing happened. This is an important difference. This is why nothing that happens actually matter at all. TL:DR: Luke getting his hand cut off in Empire Strikes Back would not at all be memorable if the entire movie had that level of violence. Having everything so constantly ramped up all the time ruins this game. l know I didn’t actually play the game but I hate everything that I saw.