Serious Sam Sucks. Seriously.

Serious Sam hails from 2001 and alleges to be a no-nonsense, to-the-point action shooter that's simply about mowing down hordes of enemies with a full arsenal of machine guns, shotguns, and explosives while frantically running around spacious ancient Egyptian levels collecting armor, health, and ammo drops and searching for hidden secrets for extra powerups. The series is often mentioned on message boards as being one of the best 90s-style arena-shooters ever made, with people absolutely loving it for its frenetic, over-the-top action. I have a fondness for these types of games, with Doom, Painkiller, and Ziggurat ranking among my favorite FPS games. I also remember enjoying Duke Nukem 3D and Shadow Warrior back in the day, though I never finished them and haven't played either one in almost 20 years.

I went into Serious Sam: The First Encounter (as part of the Classics: Revolution version, available on Steam Early Access) fully expecting to enjoy it, based on a combination of its esteemed reputation and my appreciation for this style of game. I started out thinking "this is pretty good," but as I got further into the game it started to annoy me, and after a while I started to actively dislike it. After completing nine of its thirteen levels, I just have no desire to continue playing it any longer. The game is too tedious and repetitive to be fun, for me, and there's nothing inspiring about its weaponry or level design. Despite the promise of bombastic, over-the-top action and all-around whimsical silliness, the game feels bland to me, and it doesn't feel worth the hassle for me to push forward just to finish it.

Each level in Serious Sam is basically a series of closed arenas where enemies spawn in waves from all directions, and you have to kill every last enemy before the doors will open and allow you to advance to the next area to do it all over again. Sometimes these are huge, spacious areas with a hundred or more enemies pouring in towards you; other times you're going through much smaller rooms and corridors in a temple where enemies ambush you from around every corner. There are about a dozen different types of enemy, and each one has its own unique movement and attack patterns. The variety from fight to fight stems from going up against unique compositions of enemy waves where you have to be aware of all different things going on around you and prioritize your targets while balancing offense and defense.

Getting bumped into the air by a werebull. 

This type of gameplay can be a lot of fun because of the high demand it puts on the player; Serious Sam is a tough, challenging game that demands a high skill level to beat. There's a lot of constant running around, changing directions, weaving in and out of enemies, jumping, rapidly switching between attacking and assessing your surroundings, switching targets -- you're always doing two or three things every single second, and so there are hundreds of opportunities to make mistakes in every single fight, and the game doesn't leave a lot of room for error. Beating Serious Sam, especially on its higher difficulties, is not just about being good at first person shooters; it involves developing a skill at this particular game, learning the intricacies of how all the different enemies work together so you can figure out what to do in each situation to survive as efficiently as possible.

But really, it's mostly a matter of trial-and-error, playing through a section enough times so that you can know what's going to spawn when and where so that you can be in the right position with the right weapon equipped, and strategically quick-saving between critical spawns. It's also a game of inches, with enemy spawns triggering as you cross certain thresholds in a level, like walking through a door, turning a corner, or picking up a health drop. Every single step you take causes enemies to ambush you from multiple directions, usually from behind; if you start running around too frantically you're liable to wander into multiple spawn triggers and get yourself overwhelmed, so you're generally better off slowly inching forward until you trigger a spawn and then retreating to fight everything in safe territory.

There could be an enemy in every one of those alcoves. 

Serious Sam begs to be played like a fast-paced run-and-gun arena shooter, and indeed it delivers on this promise -- about half the time. When you're in those huge wide-open arenas like the Dunes, for instance, there's a lot of fun to be had frantically running around dodging enemy attacks and timing everything just right, and it feels like such a satisfying accomplishment when you finally make it through the encounter. But when you're in those smaller, more linear sections of the game, the pacing slows way down because of the tight quarters limiting your movement and the monsters ambushing you from every little nook and cranny. You kind of have to take it slowly so that they don't get the jump on you as easily, in addition to having to slow down to examine the environments in more detail to find hidden items and secret areas. It starts feeling less like Serious Sam and more like Doom 3, except without the horror tension and you can actually see where you're going.

I know the point of the game is for there to be non-stop action with stuff constantly around to kill, but it gets really annoying having enemies constantly materializing out of thin air to ambush you and shoot you in the back before you can even react. You walk into a room and a mini-boss spawns, so you kill it and then dozens of kleer start spawning into the room. You kill them, then go to pick up some health and ammo, and as soon as you do another mini-boss spawns out of thin air right on top of you. You kill that, then go into a side room and a horde of marsh hoppers spawn in front of you while more kleers spawn behind you. You kill that stuff and come to a dead end, so you turn around then even more stuff spawns as you return to the main room. And every single fight is long and drawn-out because you have to fight so many things, every single time, that the constant spawns start to make it feel like there's a fly buzzing around your face that you just can't get rid of.

Or in this case, a bunch of harpies. 

It doesn't help that you spend the whole game fighting the same dozen enemies over and over again. There's variation in the ways different types of enemies are combined with the level design to form unique scenarios, yes, but you're still fighting the same enemies every single level. When you're fighting a horde of kleer for the umpteenth time, you're not thinking "oh, this fight is different from the last one because there are these pillars in the way, and there are reptiloids standing on top of those pillars shooting homing orbs at me." No, you're thinking "man I'm getting sick of fighting kleer all the time." After a while they stop feeling like fun, challenging new scenarios, and more like endless variations of a one-trick pony.

It also doesn't help that the game's arsenal consists entirely of bog-standard FPS weaponry: pistols, pump shotgun, double barrel shotgun, machine gun, minigun, rocket launcher, and grenade launcher. The only weapons that are somewhat unique are the laser gun, which has been done in other games before and is basically just a high-powered machine gun with slower projectiles, and the cannon, which I have to admit actually looks pretty cool. It shoots a giant cannonball that splats through hordes of enemies. Sadly, I didn't play far enough to unlock it. So the weapons themselves aren't that fun to use, and there's also a problem with weapons quickly becoming obsolete as you unlock new ones. The knife and pistols are pretty much worthless unless you're just completely out of ammo; the shotguns fire so slowly, with zero penetration and pretty weak pellet spread, that they're practically worthless against a horde of enemies; and the machine gun is completely outclassed by the minigun and laser gun.

Pretty sure I let an exploding kamikaze dude get too close.

That means only half of the weapons are actually worth using, because the other half feel so woefully underpowered. Different weapons are better suited for different situations, however the weapon swap speed is so aggravatingly slow (especially if you're firing a shotgun, and have to pump or reload it before even triggering the slow swap animation) that swapping weapons feels like more of a nuisance than an advantage, and you're even forced to use those weaker weapons in order to conserve ammo for your stronger ones. There is some fun gameplay involved there, however, with managing your ammunition so that you always have ammo available when you need it, since you can completely screw yourself by blowing through all the ammo for your stronger weapons and get stuck fighting a boss or a tougher challenge later in the level with less firepower.

Exploration is a key element in keeping your health, armor, and ammo supplies properly maintained, and Serious Sam has a lot of secrets hidden in the level design that can give you a strong boost if you're clever or observant enough to find them. The great thing about the secrets is that, in most cases, they're teased before you can get to them; you're walking through a level and you see a powerup sitting in an obvious location just out of reach, which entices you to figure out how to get to it, and makes it really satisfying when you figure out how. Other secrets are so well-hidden you don't even realize you've miss them until you beat the level and it gives you the rundown on your stats.

Finding a health powerup in a discreet alcove. 

Unfortunately, collecting drops and finding secrets isn't always that rewarding, because the game has a tendency to punish you just for playing it, even when you do something good like find a secret area. It's not uncommon to find a hidden area with 100 machine gun bullets, only to have a horde of enemies spawn on top of you that take 150 bullets to kill, leaving you worse off than if you'd never found the area at all. Everything is just an excuse to make more enemies spawn, and I get that killing enemies is the main point of this game, but it kind of gets enervating having the game essentially reward you with more enemies.

The game looks pretty good for its time, though the version I'm playing may have been updated with slightly higher-resolution textures and better shaders. The insane draw distance and huge number of enemies on screen is technically impressive, and I certainly enjoy the change of place involved with playing a shooter in an exotic location like Egypt. The soundtrack has an appropriately Egyptian-sounding vibe to it, but it's so mellow and subdued that I barely even noticed it playing most of the time -- it never really added to the atmosphere or the intensity of the action. The enemy sound design, however, is outstanding, with each enemy having its own unique sound-effect for moving and attacking, with their volume getting louder the closer they get to you, which helps to keep track of where enemies are at all times. Even if you can't see an enemy, you know it's there, and depending on the sound you might need to change your priorities and turn to focus on it.

I can certainly see the appeal in Serious Sam, but I just don't find it very fun. To me it's tedious and repetitive. I get so annoyed with enemies popping out of nowhere right in my face and spawning behind me for cheap shots all the time. I get annoyed walking into a room and having a horde of enemies spawn on top of me, only to kill them and have another horde of enemies spawn on top of me when I take another two steps forward. There's nothing unique about the weapons, and it gets tiring fighting the same enemies over and over again in every single level. It's a challenging game and it is pretty satisfying to beat its tough encounters, but it relies too much on trial-and-error quick-save abuse, which I just don't have the patience or desire to deal with. After playing nine of its thirteen levels, I just don't care to finish it because I'd simply rather be playing something else. I guess it's time I finally give Quake a shot.

SOMA Review: Somewhere Beyond the Sea

"From the creators of Amnesia: The Dark Descent comes SOMA, a sci-fi horror game set below the waves of the Atlantic ocean. Struggle to survive a hostile world that will make you question your very existence." That's the product description on Steam, which labels SOMA specifically as a horror game, and even goes so far as to imply that it's not just horror -- it's survival-horror. That's kind of misleading, I feel, because SOMA really feels more like an adventure game first and foremost. The story is clearly the main point of emphasis, with you spending the bulk of the game learning about what happened to the doomed crew of the futuristic underwater research station, Pathos-II, and solving light puzzles to progress. The horror elements are definitely there -- a few monsters show up to impede your progress, and there are some good scripted scares and moments of genuine tension -- but the horror in SOMA is really more of a theme than a core gameplay mechanism.

You play as Simon Jarrett, a man suffering from a traumatic brain injury as the result of a car crash. The game begins with you agreeing to meet a researcher to take part in an experimental brain scan for a developing technology that he thinks might be able to help. You sit down to perform the brain scan, your vision goes black, and then suddenly you find yourself in another place, surrounded by metal walls and high tech computer terminals. It's dark, and there's blood on the floor. A few dive suits hang in the nearby corner. No one else seems to be around. You stumble upon a call log, in which two people talk about sealing the doors to keep "them" out and making sure everything is set to run on standby for when they evacuate. The rest of the game is a matter of finding out what this place is, what happened to it, how you got there, and how you can get back home -- if you even can at all.

SOMA plays a lot like a typical adventure game; most of what you do in the game consists of exploring different environments trying to figure out where to go or what to do next, while solving light puzzles and piecing the story together from clues found in the environment. You read journals, data entries, personal notes, and system messages; you listen to audio logs, phone conversations, and black box-style recordings of the moments before people die; you see signs, posters, and video clips on the walls and video screens; you see the corpses of people who died mid-action and the monsters created by the artificial intelligence that's now running the station. This is environmental storytelling done right, with a variety of different ways to parse the history of Pathos-II, with every important detail and reveal set up by some type of visual or verbal clue before you encounter it.

What the hell is this place? How did I get here?

The story in SOMA deals with a lot philosophical science fiction subjects like identity, consciousness, existence, artificial intelligence, and what it means to be human. Playing SOMA kept making me feel like I was inside a classic science fiction novel, which may have been exactly what the designers were going for considering they open the game with a quote from Philip K Dick: "Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." There's a lot of stuff to wrap your brain around, but most of it's hidden away in computer logs and such, and so the game requires effort on your part to both find and interpret all of its details. That can make the story really engaging if you're into those sorts of subjects, or if you find yourself sucked into the game's world and just want to learn more about it, but that also means it can be a little dense and difficult to play sometimes. I, for instance, ended up playing SOMA alongside three other games and sometimes struggled to get back into it after playing something else for a while.

A lot of the game's philosophy and science fiction come into play by making you think about typical science fiction questions. For example, if you clone someone's consciousness to a new body and then kill one of them, does that count as murder? If you put a human brain into a robot body -- humanoid or not --  is that person still human? If you could scan someone's brain and create a perfect computer simulation of that person in a virtual world, would that person be human? The game never asks these questions directly; rather, you ask yourself these kinds of questions when the game puts you in difficult situations where you have to make decisions about what to do in order to progress, or when it gives you the choice to do things for the sake of others or what you think is right. It's one of the best implementations of moral choice I've seen in a video game; although every major decision is a binary choice, there's a valid reason for choosing every option, which really makes you think.

Early on while you're exploring Pathos-II, you start to encounter talking robots, many of which are in a state of disrepair. The robots seem like utility workers that the staff would pilot remotely to do work outside, in the water, but the first one you meet insists that he's human, lying on the floor right in front of you, but that he's injured and needs a doctor. Immediately, the game presents you with a situation where you have very little idea of what's going on, and no idea what to believe. Soon after, you discover that you need to redirect power in the area to get somewhere you need to go, and you have two options: one will send the power through a conduit that Carl "The Human Robot" Semkin is currently hooked up to and will put him through constant, excruciating pain, and the other will disable all power in the area, permanently, effectively killing him. What do you do?

Meeting Carl "The Human Robot" Semkin.

Is it better that Carl be kept "alive" even if he's in pain and miserable, to also keep the other systems in the area running, or do you take the more merciful route that will let him "die" in peace, but shut the entire system down? I initially opted for the first route, figuring he's just a robot and he's in denial, that it wouldn't matter if I put some more electricity through a robot. But when I pulled the lever and heard Carl start screaming, I freaked out. "Holy crap, that sounds like a real person in real pain," I thought. Whether Carl was a real person or merely a robot who thinks he's human, I couldn't put him through that kind of pain. I flipped the lever back, and chose to sacrifice the entire area, Carl included, just so he wouldn't have to suffer.

Later on, you reach a point when you realize the only way forward is to transfer your consciousness into a new body. It's not until after the process is complete and you "wake up" in the new body that you realize you didn't transfer your consciousness -- you cloned your consciousness. The old you is sitting there in the other chair, still unconscious, and will have to be left behind. The game gives you a choice: do you kill your old self, or let him live? The old you didn't realize you were cloning your consciousness, so if you leave him alive, he's going to wake up several days later and be trapped there all by himself, wondering why the procedure failed and why your friend (who's been helping you get around Pathos-II) has disappeared. Do you leave him there to go insane and die a slow, rotting death by himself, on the chance that maybe he'll be able to survive, or let him die in his sleep and save him from that torment? Besides that, how do you feel about there being two of you running around in the same universe? It was such a hard decision for me, and I appreciated how it got me thinking about things from multiple perspectives.

Configuring a communications antenna. 

When you're not grappling with moral dilemmas or digging around for information on the story, you're typically solving puzzles to progress. Every now and then these take the form of actual abstract puzzles in computer interfaces -- the type of deal where you have to find the right pattern, or connect the dots in the right sequence -- but for the most part you're doing things in the environment to get different sections of the different stations working so that you can get to other areas. You might need a special tool to operate a certain piece of machinery, which requires you to find the tool, then repair the machine yourself, then operate it correctly, with each of those steps involving its own sub-series of puzzles. Sometimes the puzzles are as simple as smashing a window with a fire extinguisher and climbing through it when you realize the door's broken, or realizing that, when a computer terminal won't turn on, it's because it's unplugged and you just need to plug it back in.

It's not always clear what you're supposed to be doing in a given situation, however, when you're not solving an obvious puzzle. There's an awful lot of wandering along the only available path until you find a button with a glowing light and pressing it. You don't always know what the button does or why you should press it -- there's no context, no reason for it -- you just press it because you know you're in a video game and you need to do something to advance the game. When the game tells you to find a wrecked ship nearby, you don't have any idea where you're going or what you're doing, you just set out and walk the only direction the game will let you, until you eventually stumble into it and wonder "Oh, is this the ship? I think I'm supposed to go over here? Maybe?" And you just go places and do things until you find the one thing that will let the game advance.

I'm just trying to look at this map. Please don't murder me. 

Unlike its predecessor, Amnesia: The Dark Descent, SOMA doesn't feature a true inventory system, resource management, healing items, or sanity meters. As such, it doesn't really qualify as a survival-horror game because the act of surviving is barely present in the actual gameplay. Monsters show up at various points of the game, and they can possibly kill you if you're not careful, but they feel more like obstacles there simply to impede your progress. With a few exceptions, they're not really scary; in many cases, they just feel annoying.

There's no combat system in SOMA, so when an enemy appears you need to avoid it. Different types of monsters behave a little differently; one is blind but has really good hearing, so you need to be careful about making noise, and throw objects to distract it away from you, while another becomes more alert and aggressive if you look at it. But for the most part, you mainly just have to crouch and stay behind cover to avoid most enemies; if you get caught, run away and try to close a door behind you or break line of sight and find a hiding spot. Horror games have been doing this for years, and it worked fine in Amnesia, but I find the stealth gameplay in SOMA more of a nuisance than a fun, engaging, or tense challenge.

There's no real consequence for getting caught, for instance, except that the game becomes literally unpleasant to play. If a monster catches you it damages you and then wanders off a short distance; the damage causes you to move more slowly with an exaggerated head-bobbing limp, and also blurs and doubles your vision, which puts a heavy strain on your eyes in real life. You can get caught another one or two times before dying, at which point the game just restarts you from the autosave right before the monster encounter -- no big loss. You can heal by finding what basically amounts to a first aid station; these are usually present before and after every monster encounter, and at random other intervals when you couldn't possibly need one, so there's never any risk of being low on health and low on resources, struggling to survive and hoping you can make it to the end, because the tension only exists during the encounters themselves.

Creeping through the corridors of the wrecked ship.

The actual gameplay involved in avoiding enemies is usually pretty boring, too, with you often sitting there with your hands off the controls doing absolutely nothing, just waiting for the monster to give up looking for you or to wander off in some other direction so that you can get where you need to go. As I played, I found myself far more interested in the story -- learning what happened to Pathos-II and exploring the game's philosophical subject matter -- which made the monster encounters feel like they were just getting in-between me and the fun, interesting part of the game.

That's not to say the game isn't tense or scary -- it's just more subtle than a lot of other horror games. The horror in SOMA stems more from the implications of the story and the immersive atmosphere it creates than it does from traditional survival-horror resource management or jump-scares (although there are a few well-executed instances of the latter). As others have written before, SOMA is arguably scarier when the monsters aren't around because the story and atmosphere create such a strong feeling of dread and anticipation of what could happen that you get nervous venturing into uncharted territory and panic when things start to happen around you. When the monsters show up, it starts to feel a little too "video gamey," with a lot of encounters calling their design mechanics to attention as you notice things in the level design obviously intended to service the stealth system, and think about the enemies in terms of their AI and how to exploit their parameters.

The scariest part of the game has nothing to do with the monsters (of which there are extremely few), but rather the environment itself. In the game's climax, you descend into the abyss, the deepest part of the ocean floor bathed in complete darkness. The atmosphere there is hellishly oppressive with your vision so limited and what feels like a storm raging all around you from the currents rushing past you and the distant booming of underwater seismic activity. You know from computer logs that there's aggressive, mutated sea life down there, and you start to worry about what horrors lie in wait just beyond the range of the lampposts that are guiding you to the next outpost. There's a genuine sense of dread as you go deeper and further into the abyss, as the lights become dimmer and further apart and you start to feel more and more vulnerable. Some of the game's best scripted moments occur during this sequence, and they're among the most terrifying, effective scares I've ever experienced in a horror game.

Heading for Tau station in the abyss. 

That puts SOMA in kind of a weird position where it's not very scary most of the time, but knows how to be really effective when it wants to be, while occasionally missing the mark by perhaps trying to be a little too much like Amnesia with its patrolling monster encounters. Although the monsters have a strong thematic link to the story, I'm not sure their gameplay execution fits with the rest of the game design. Perhaps if SOMA played more like a survival-horror game instead of the horror-adventure game that it really is, they would work, but as it is I felt like they detracted from the overall gameplay experience and didn't add good enough horror elements to make up for getting in the way of the story progression.

The horror theme and atmosphere are present throughout the entire game, mind you, but the story and the underwater atmosphere are the two main reasons SOMA is worth playing. The environmental storytelling is top notch, the philosophical sci-fi premise is truly thought-provoking, and the atmosphere is incredibly immersive. It's a fairly decent horror game with some really good moments in it, but some of the horror elements feel tacked-on, which is somewhat ironic for a developer known exclusively for making good horror games. That's partly a knock on the game design itself, but it's mainly a knock on the advertising, which hyped up SOMA based largely on the esteem of Amnesia: The Dark Descent, when really, Frictional were trying to do something a little bit different with SOMA. It's a solid game and it's definitely worth playing; just don't go in expecting another Amnesia.

Resident Evil 7: "Survival-Horror's Back, Baby!"

I used to consider myself a fan of the Resident Evil series, from the slow-paced adventure-style gameplay of the originals to the stronger action focus of the fourth main installment. But ever since Resident Evil 5, which I found to be an underwhelming letdown, I've found myself cynically jaded by the barrage of sequels and spin-offs to have been churned out by the grand corporate machine. Revelations seemed promising, but ended up subtly disappointing me on every front. I never even bothered with Resident Evil 6, and I was super skeptical of Resident Evil 7 at first. Claiming that it was taking heavy inspiration from the series' roots while adding a modernized twist on the classic formula (in the form of the first-person perspective, a series first), I was a little worried that it was going to be just another haunted house jump-scare simulator with little in the way of actual gameplay.

It certainly seemed that way for the first 30 minutes, but once I got past that introduction sequence and starting exploring the main part of the game, it really started to shine, and I realized: this is the most Resident Evil-feeling game I've played in a long, long time. It really does capture that old-school vibe of exploring a spooky house, searching for convoluted keys to ridiculously locked doors and solving puzzles to progress, while managing a limited supply of ammunition and healing items, and occasionally fighting or running away from enemies. A handful of boss battles cause the intensity to spike periodically, but Resident Evil 7 is much more of a true survival-horror game than an action shooter, despite the "innovative" first-person shooter perspective, which I might add actually does a lot for the game's atmosphere and immersion.

Resident Evil 7 begins with its protagonist, Ethan Thomas Winters, driving deep into the Louisiana bayou after receiving an email from his wife, Mia, who's been missing and presumed dead for three years. The message reads simply: "Dulvey, Lousiana. Baker farm. Come get me." Upon arriving at the Baker estate, Ethan finds the main gate locked, and has to make a trek around the swamp to enter the guest house through the backdoor, where he finds Mia locked in a cell in the basement. After rescuing her, Mia turns on him, seemingly possessed by some malevolent entity, and attacks him, first with a knife and then with a chainsaw. Ethan is forced to kill Mia -- twice, apparently -- but gets his hand sawed off in the process. He's then knocked out by the head of the household, Jack Baker, who welcomes him to the family as Ethan passes out. During fleeting moments of consciousness, he sees his hand reattached to his arm, and then wakes up tied to a chair having a grotesque, cannibalistic dinner with the Baker family. The rest of the game is about Ethan trying to escape from the Baker estate while finding a way to cure Mia.

Being attacked by Psycho-Mia in the Guest House.

The story is one of the main things that sets Resident Evil 7 apart from other recent entries in the series. This isn't a typical Resident Evil plot about saving the world from a viral outbreak, or stopping a villainous shadow corporation's nefarious plans. It's a very simple, down-to-earth scenario about a guy trying to meet up with his presumed-dead wife and getting trapped in a creepy house by a murderous family. Even though you should intuitively know right off the bat that there's more going on in the Baker household than what's readily apparent, the main setup is a much more personal story that's grounded in reality, which makes it easier to become immersed in the story and setting, and also easier to care about the main character and what he's trying to accomplish, even if his portrayal sometimes misses the mark.

Ethan has elements of being a silent protagonist -- you spend most of the game exploring the house by yourself, and so Ethan rarely talks or reacts to anything happening around him, thus allowing you to inject your own emotion into the majority of scenarios without clashing with the player character -- but he also talks whenever another character interacts with him. Capcom strikes a good balance between talking and silence, but I never grew to appreciate Ethan as a character. He has no personality and we never learn anything about his background or his relationship with Mia, so he's essentially just Protagonist-Man the entire game. Which is totally fine -- again, that makes it easier to put yourself in his shoes and become the main character yourself -- but it took me a little while to gel with him, because Ethan's behavior during the heavily-scripted 30-minute introduction sequence kept feeling totally at odds with what he should be doing or what I would be doing.

When you're forced to kill Mia that first time, it's meant to be emotionally shocking; you plunge a hatchet into her neck, her face turns back to normal, and then she gives you a sad look before collapsing on the floor. And Ethan makes no reaction whatsoever to the fact that he just (apparently) killed his own wife. I felt enough emotion as the player in that scenario that he didn't need to say anything to convey the emotional impact of the scene, but if you're going to give the protagonist a voice and let his desire to reunite with his wife be the motivating factor in getting into this game, then he really needs to say something in that moment. Soon after, a sheriff's deputy shows up outside the house, and while asking for help Ethan does everything in his power to sound as suspicious as possible. Not once does he say "these people kidnapped my wife and are now holding me hostage here too, and oh by the way they might be murderous psychopathic cannibals."

Dinner with the Baker family; Granny's off-camera to the left.

The Baker family, meanwhile, serve as really strong antagonists who also add a lot to the story as it progresses. Instead of sitting somewhere off-screen the whole game as theoretical threats that have to be stopped, they're constantly showing up to try to kill your or block your progress. You have recurring encounters with them and interact with them directly through actual gameplay, which makes their presence in the game feel genuinely threatening any time they show up, and lets you develop that personal, antagonistic relationship with them. I also like the fact that they're just regular, ordinary people (who happen to have been infected by something that gives them regenerative powers while perhaps also driving them slightly mad), as opposed to the cartoon-ish super villains the series has been known for. They feel more like real people you can actually relate to when they tell you they like being immortal and don't want to go back to the way things were.

The game seems to take a lot of influences from other horror media -- the premise of receiving a message from your long-dead wife about meeting somewhere is straight out of Silent Hill 2, the dinner scene is straight out of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (complete with a vegetative, elderly relative seated at the table), the slow movement speed and first-person melee combat reminded me a bit of Condemned: Criminal Origins, the setting (an old mansion, owned by a mysterious family in the Louisiana bayou, with story elements relating to possession) kept giving me flashbacks to The Skeleton Key, your wife being randomly possessed (and coming back to life) is reminiscent of the "deadites" from The Evil Dead, and driving up to a building and being led down a linear path through scripted jump-scares felt too much like Outlast for my taste) -- all of which is much more prominent up front than the classic Resident Evil influence, which doesn't manifest itself until an hour or more into the game when you finally start getting some freedom to explore the mansion.

Resident Evil 7 really does feel a lot like the original Resident Evil, but of course with the brand new first-person perspective and some modern streamlining. A lot of it has to do with the level design, with the Baker estate branching out in all directions as you find keys and solve puzzles to unlock new areas. The main house lies at the center of the map, and through the yard you can connect to the rotting old house, the green house, the barn, and the boat house. With the exception of the guest house, which you only access during the intro sequence, you have permanent access to all areas of the Baker estate as you unlock them, meaning it's always possible (and sometimes necessary) to backtrack to previous areas, at virtually any time. You might, for instance, need an item from the green house to unlock the second floor of the old house, or an item from the basement of the main house to reach the attic. As you gain keys, you might also remember that you can backtrack to unlock optional areas for extra rewards before pressing forward in the game.

Fighting a molded in the main hall of the Baker house.

You're constantly running into usable things in the environment that you just can't use yet, which creates a pretty engaging desire to figure out how to use those things, and it becomes really satisfying when you finally get a key to a door that's been locked and inaccessible for the last several hours, or when you find a weird figurine and realize that it's the missing piece to the shadow puzzle in the main hall. One of my favorite moments was when I found a repair kit in a hidden area of the house, and remembered that I had used a broken shotgun to weigh down the pressure plate to get the regular shotgun out of the locked chamber, and that if I was willing to go back and swap the regular shotgun for the broken one, I could repair it and presumably get a stronger shotgun. These sort of things aren't really puzzles -- for the most part, you're just bringing an item from one location to another to gain another item or to unlock a door -- but you still have to make the connection between what items go where and also remember where everything is, which requires at least some logic and thus feels sufficiently rewarding most of the time.

Despite the close resemblance to the original Resident Evil, there aren't a lot of actual puzzles in Resident Evil 7, and the few that exist can barely be called puzzles. If my memory is correct, I count seven puzzles that aren't just "bring item here," that require you to actually do something to solve the puzzle. Four of these are shadow puzzles, where you have to rotate an object in a beam of light to form the right shadow on the wall. A neat idea, but there's an outline on the wall that shows exactly what you're aiming for; I would've preferred some sort of riddle and for the player to figure out what the shape is supposed to be on their own. Another puzzle involves setting the hands on a clock to the right time, but the solution is written on a piece of paper literally right next to it, so there's absolutely no deduction or logic involved. Again, it would've been nice to solve a riddle or find some pattern in the environment. Then there's a puzzle where you have to rotate paintings on one wall so that they match the orientation of matching paintings on another wall, which again is really shallow and takes zero effort or thought to solve.

Not sure I can make a swooping hawk shape with this herb.

So in the entire game, there's only one actual puzzle, which takes the form of an Escape Room in an almost Saw-esque torture chamber. The premise is that you're locked in an area with a couple of small rooms and have to figure out how to light the candles on a birthday cake. The solution involves an entire series of actions that have to be done (mostly) in a certain order, and for once the game doesn't offer you any hints -- it's entirely on you to solve the puzzle. Like other "puzzles" in the game, this one suffers a bit from typical adventure game logic (there's only one way to sever the rope sealing the one door shut, when in reality there should be several valid options just based on what's lying around the room), but I thought it was a really good moment that challenged me to think outside the box, and it stood out as one of the most memorable sequences of the game.

That's a real accomplishment, because every single area in this game is full of memorable setpieces. Each area has its own unique theming and tends to introduce some kind of new gameplay mechanism, whether it be a new type of enemy, a new weapon, special encounters with different family members, or a complete shift in tone. The old house features a bunch of giant bugs and insect swarms, and requires you to assemble the flamethrower to destroy their nests so that you can navigate the lower floor more easily. The second floor of the old house is a straight up haunted house with weird, creepy stuff going on and the occasional jump scare. The testing area and barn are like an obstacle course filled with traps that make you nervous with every step you take. And each room within these areas has something unique and interesting going on; when I replayed the game, I found myself vividly remembering each and every room as I stepped into it: "an enemy is going to spawn right there; the item I need is in over there; I need to do this to unlock the thing."

If I have one complaint about the level design, it's that the areas in the second half of the game aren't as interesting as those in the first half. Lucas's section in the testing area and barn felt particularly underwhelming; you see the area from outside for several hours before gaining access to it, and you see all these red and blue strobe lights, day-glo paint splattered everywhere, and hear loud, pounding dance music. It seems like you're going to be entering a rave where the loud music and flashing lights will make it hard to hear and see enemies coming for you, but then you get in there and it's just a bunch of drab, boring storage rooms. Then you get to the barn and it doesn't really feel like a barn. The abandoned ship (which comes after the game's Point of No Return, when you leave the Baker estate) has a lot of really cool gameplay elements going on, but it's kind of hard to get excited about walking around metal hallways and bulkheads, and the subsequent salt mine is just a bunch of gray tunnels with occasional mining equipment lying around.

The catwalks behind the old house up against the swamp.

If I have two complaints about the level design, it's that there's really only one route through the entire game. The game allows for plenty of possibilities for backtracking to do things in optional rooms for extra rewards, but the main things you have to do to advance in the game all have to be done in a very specific order, every time you play the game. You have to get the keys and crawl under the house, then you have to do the garage fight, then you have to go upstairs and get the shadow puzzle piece, then you have to go through the secret tunnel to reach the basement, and so on. It would've been cool, I feel, if there had been a few moments when the main route forked in two or three directions, and you could choose what order to complete the different forks. It's not a knock against the game, but it does feel like Capcom missed an opportunity to make exploration even better than it already is.

The atmosphere, though, is so strong in this game. The lighting, shadows, focus, everything does such a good job of bringing that first-person perspective to life. The range of the flashlight, the way it casts the screen in a sort of vignette, and the way enemies and pieces of the environment move into the light and into focus as you move around is really eerie; I can only imagine how immersive that opening sequence with Mia coming straight at you with the knife would be in virtual reality. In terms of textures and art style, the Baker house feels genuinely grimy and rotten just by the way everything looks. There's a lot of top-notch ambient sound as well; leaves rustling, crickets chirping, grass compressing under your footsteps, brushing up against vegetation, the wind picking up for a moment and howling through the trees, the occasional shutter slamming against the house in the wind, thunder in the distance, trash rustling, wind chimes, then the occasional shriek or something weird off in the distance. This is all stuff you hear just walking around the back yard. You're always buried under a constant layer of ambient noises, which creates this sensation that there's always something going on around you.

Any other requests while we're at it?

I wouldn't say the game is overtly scary, but then again nothing ever really scares me in video games anymore. That being said, it definitely sets up good moods where spooky stuff is going on, which instilled a feeling of dread in me that something bad was going to happen. You're about to play a piano and the cover slides down on its own; later on there's another piano and you hear someone plinking random notes on it, but when you go to check it out there's no one there. Grandma keeps randomly showing up places, silently staring at you as you walk around. A ball comes randomly bouncing into the kid's room from off camera, or toy dolls fall out of the ceiling. This stuff is all weird and creepy in its own right, but coupled with the survival mechanics of conserving health and supplies with the constant threat of enemies around possibly every corner, or even having them ambush you suddenly, really makes you fear for your well-being in the game.

Instead of a zombie virus or a parasitic plague, the enemies in Resident Evil 7 are the result of a fungus-like bacteria that spreads through the body eating cells. The enemies you fight, called molded, are people whose bodies have been completely taken over by the mold, or are separate manifestations created by the mold itself. They behave like zombies, however; they're all mindless drones that slowly lumber toward you and try to slash at you. Some of them are basic versions, others have a big spiky arm with special, extra-devastating attacks, others run on all fours and leap long distances, others are taller fatsos that spew bile at you. These enemies, in proper survival-horror fashion, are used sparingly; in the span of an hour, you might only fight 6-10 molded, which is enough for you to feel threatened by every enemy you encounter without shifting the focus away from exploration and puzzle-solving.

I see a little silhouetto of some mold.

The combat is functional, but surprisingly difficult for how slow and methodical it is. You basically need to aim for headshots at all times, and although the enemies don't move very fast, they move just unpredictably enough by wobbling awkwardly, attacking unexpectedly, lurching forward when you think they're not going to, and so on, that you can feel like you've got a perfect headshot lined up and quickly miss two or three shots and fall into a panic as an enemy's suddenly in your face clawing at you. When that happens, you can press a button to block enemy attacks (if you time the block correctly, you'll negate a ton damage) and/or whip out your trusty knife and slash at the molded's face. Over the course of the game you get access to a couple of 9mm pistols, a couple of shotguns, a flamethrower, a grenade launcher, a sub machine gun, remote bombs, and a 44 magnum.

That may seem like a lot of firepower, but Resident Evil 7 brings back an emphasis on inventory management, meaning you can only carry so many weapons and so much ammunition (in addition to other things like healing items, keys, and puzzle items) at a time. Inventory space becomes even tighter if you decide to replay the game, because each upgrade that you unlock (walking shoes for faster movement, the secrets of survival guide that decreases damage received when you block, x-ray glasses that pinpoint where all the items are, and so on) all take up inventory space, so if you want to be super-powered Ethan you end up filling most of your inventory slots with those upgrades, which makes it harder to carry things like ammunition and healing items because you still need to fill inventory slots with keys and puzzle items. While the inventory system is not as much of a fun, elaborate puzzle as Resident Evil 4's, it gets the job done by forcing you to weigh pros and cons of what items and equipment you choose to take with you, and what you leave behind.

Curses. Foiled again by carrying too many keys and puzzle items.

Scattered throughout the game are hidden antique coins, which function like a currency for buying upgrades from bird cages at the central save point in the yard. By spending three coins you can buy a permanent upgrade to your maximum health; with five coins you can buy a permanent increase to your reload speed; and for nine coins you can buy the 44 magnum. These coins are sometimes found lying around in obvious places, but a lot of times they're hidden much more discreetly, like behind a picture frame leaning against a wall, or inside of a tall, narrow vase, so it behooves you to be thorough in your exploration. It's kind of disappointing, though, that there are are only three upgrades to buy with the coins; I feel like it would've been nice to have some more options. In addition to coins, you can find "Mr Everywhere" bobblehead dolls scattered throughout the game; these, by themselves, are worthless, but if you can find and destroy all 20 then you'll unlock bonus equipment for future playthroughs.

Although the game adheres pretty closely to the traditional "old school" survival-horror formula, I feel like supplies are a little too easy to come by. You're almost always free to avoid combat by running past an enemy (except for bosses, you must fight and kill bosses), which is a classic strategy for conserving ammunition and not risking damage by getting into a fight, but that can make it harder to explore and loot the area, and you have to remember that there's an enemy there if you ever return to that spot. But there's enough ammo plentifully available in Resident Evil 7 that you can kill every enemy in sight and still have plenty of ammo to spare. There's exactly one section of the game where you basically have to avoid enemies because you lose your entire inventory, and it's easily the scariest, most tense section of the game because you have to scrounge for weapons and ammo and can't afford to fight most enemies you come by. Basically, I miss that feeling of the original games, of having only four bullets to kill five zombies, of having to prioritize your targets and pick your battles while making every single shot count.

Then again, the bosses are such bullet-sponge tanks that you really do need all that ammo just to fight them. Each boss feels incredibly unique, tense, and exciting, but it can get repetitive spending 5-10 minutes pumping lead into their weak spots and feeling like you're making no progress whatsoever, because they just keep regenerating and coming back to fight you. This gave me false feedback in some of the earlier fights; I thought I was doing something wrong, which led me to waste a bunch of time and effort trying different things when I was apparently on the right track from the beginning, but had no way of knowing that I just needed to keep doing what I was doing another several dozens times to win. The bosses need to have a ton of health and soak up a ton of damage in order to feel like the powerful, massive threats that they are and to make the fights feel drawn-out and exasperating for both you and your character (they definitely succeed at all of that), but they sometimes got to feel more tedious or annoying than fun.

One of the bosses in the game, a hideous blob of fungal mass.

The campaign lasts roughly 9-12 hours, but it feels much longer than that because the game is so methodically-paced with that slow-mounting survival-horror tension. It took me closer to 20 hours to complete my first playthrough because I was being so thorough exploring every inch of every room for hidden loot, being super cautious when advancing to new areas, and having to replay some of the bosses and harder sequences multiple times. There's a ton of replay value, too; when you beat the game for the first time you unlock the Madhouse difficulty, which brings back the limited save system from the originals where you need to spend cassette tapes (instead of ink ribbons) every time you save your game, while also rearranging the item and enemy placement for a slightly different gameplay experience. Plus, you can unlock special upgrades and fun new weapons for beating the game on Madhouse, completing a speedrun in under four hours, and for finding and destroying all 20 of the hidden "Mr Everywhere" bobblehead dolls.

I had so much fun with Resident Evil 7 that I ended up playing through it five times in a row (once on Normal, once on Madhouse, once on an Easy mode speedrun, and once each on Easy and Madhouse to find all the antique coins in each mode) en route to completing 100% of the achievements. Any criticism I can offer would be somewhat nitpicky, but I do feel like Capcom could've done a lot more with the puzzles, and made the game a little bit harder by cutting down on the amount of ammo in the game and by not being quite so generous with the constant autosaves and unlimited manual saving. Besides that, the second half of the game isn't quite as good as the first -- it's not bad by any means, but the first half is so good that the second half just doesn't live up to expectation -- and so I wish they could've done something more interesting with Lucas's section and the salt mine.

Otherwise, everything else in this game is so on point, so masterfully executed that Resident Evil 7 is easily the best first-person survival-horror game that I've played since Amnesia: The Dark Descent, and it's one of the best horror games in general that I've played in the last ten years. I haven't had this much fun playing a Resident Evil game since Resident Evil 4, and I think Resident Evil 7 may, with time, surpass REmake as my favorite Resident Evil game. I had given up hope that Capcom would ever go back to the slower, more classic style of the original games, but they did, and they pulled it off pretty well with Resident Evil 7. I hope we get more games like this from them in the future, and I'm looking forward to playing the DLC when it comes out.