Resident Evil (1996)

A game originally released in 1996, the first to ever use the term “survival horror” to refer to itself. This is was the entryway for a whole generation into a genre that has continued to be relevant to this day, thanks to the franchise’s return to its roots, from RE7 to the remakes, and its latest title, Resident Evil Requiem.

When I played RE2, I thought going to the original may be kind of a drag, that I would have more difficulty getting used to it, that it would be clumsier, unfair, and outdated.

I heard everywhere that Resident Evil for the PS1 was not worth playing when the Remake for it—originally released on the Game Cube—exists. Most people said it was too archaic and not as fun in comparison.

That was not my experience at all.

You should be aware though, that I’m someone who—thanks to the sequel—is completely on board with prerrendered backgrounds, fixed camera angles and tank controls. I completed RE2 and have never even touched RE4 or anything after it. So, giving this game a try for the first time, I have to say I had a great time, so, here’s my review for it!

Everyone is aware of the Zombie-apocalypse trope by now, popularized in the late 60s by Romero’s Night of the Living Dead—a fantastic film that holds up well even today—which became a franchise of its own, and explored different facets of the idea.

Those films inspired and changed the landscape in the industry. The film took itself seriously, and it showed. Watching the original, during that news report explaining the situation with that monotonous news presenter voice so common at the time, the challenge the characters faced was made clear. When the story continued and that ending sequence happened, I could only watch as history was made in cinema.

However, not every horror movie gets to be Night of the Living Dead. Even the good ones still had plenty of caveats, and even some of the later entries in Romero’s franchise, as great as they were, would inevitably contain a certain element that is always present in those old horror films: they are campy.

My native language is Spanish, words like “camp” weren’t really in my vocabulary for most of my youth. But once you learn what they mean, you just know it when you see it.

This game pretty much let’s you live through an 80s horror movie, and it delivers. Although it’s relevant due to its unique setting and memorable characters, it’s the bad writing and the absolutely horrendous yet charming voice acting what has made it a culture icon, and source of memes and references that have stayed with us to this day.

You control either Jill Valentine (my beloved) or Chris Redfield, members of S.T.A.R.S, a special team of Raccoon City’s Police Department, investigating some mysterious murders and dissapearances in a nearby forest where a previous team had already been sent and lost contact with. However, you and your team is suddenly attacked by wild beasts, who chase after you, until you come across a strange building and manage to get in, with only a few other members of your team, trapped by the dangers outside.

Not an infested city, a scary cabin or an abandoned mall. You are in a mansion, a huge place that felt lived on until recently. Here’s where the horror begins as these characters start to speak, and the writing and voice acting make their appearance. Truly horrifying stuff, they didn’t even try! But even so, I love it.

After you are sent to investigate and look around, you will encounter your first enemy. You see a bald headed creature eating something, you hear the sounds of bones and flesh tearing, a dead body with its head chopped off—one of your teammates. The creature turns, its pale face looks at you, its eye popping out, no consciousness to be seen, and now, it is walking towards you…

The introduction of the first zombie remains in the memory of anyone who got this back in the day. I looked it up, and the instruction manual doesn’t even feature the word. The original game cover features some distressed guy with a military uniform in a room with strange shapes and some giant spiders.

As an aside, the game cover gets weirder the more time you see it. half of the guy’s face and body language is ready for action, while the other half shows him absolutely terrified, it seems like the cover was meant to emphasize that. Even the gun held by each hand is different, but merged in a weird way. It ended up looking rough, but it was definitely eye-catching. Still, there was a real chance that someone picked up this game and didn’t even know it would be about zombies (fine, the back of the game makes it very clear, but anyway).

The very early CGI of the FMV may not be that scary today, but the audio design is still more than great. And the scene itself is well done.

However, Resident Evil is Resident Evil.

Right after the horror, the stressful music, the creepy atmosphere; it is time for the campiness and bad voice acting of the game to take over. Jill runs away back to Barry—one of your teammates—who quickly deals with the zombie—“Let me handle this”, he says—voice lines performed by people who clearly were not in the same room, probably not even directed, simply read aloud. And after such a traumatic experience, what does Jill have to say? “Anyway, let’s report this to Wesker!”

You may think that such a contrast ruins the atmosphere and tarnishes the story and characters. The bad voices, the terrible script, not even giving some time for the characters to grieve the loss of a teammate or just be silent for a bit.

So what do we do instead? We go back to the dead body of our friend and pick up a couple of clips for our hand gun out of him, we backtrack a bit to see another cutscene, and then we learn how to save the game, yay!

Resident Evil as a series is not afraid to say something that a lot of modern videogames fear more than a zombie: It’s a videogame.

This game is absolutely focused on its gameplay, so much so the formula barely changed from here in the first three games. Go from room to room in some labyrinthical space, unlock doors with keys hidden all over the place, solve puzzles that nobody would conceive in real life—except the paintings one, that one is masterful—avoid enemies by taunting them to attack where you are not, get a couple of jump scares and even some FMV cutscenes out of nowhere. Have fun!

The mechanics of this game would only be minimally revamped on RE2—they control virtually the same. You have eight inventory slots, you get different weapons as the game goes one. I only played as Jill, and she can use a lockpick, letting you unlock many rooms that aren’t available to Chris without a key.

The way you save the game is a game mechanic in itself, this game introduced the Ink Ribbon, an item that let’s you use a typewriter to save your progress. This is a limited resource, it should be used sparingly and takes up a slot of your inventory.

The mansion is an huge place, with a lot of rooms, and I am truly amazed by how easy it became for me to know where I was in most cases. Every room in the game is pretty different, and besides the main building, we also explore a courtyard, an underground area, a guardhouse and—beginning of a long-standing tradition in the franchise: an underground laboratory.

There’s a map, but it does lack a couple of features that RE2 would implement. You don’t see an arrow pointing to where you are facing, the doors aren’t marked with the color of the key that opens it, you have to select the map that you want to see, instead of opening the one of the area and floor you’re already on; switching between floors needs you to go back and select it, instead of pressing up/down. All of these are nice to have, but they are also not a must. Using the map pauses the game, so it didn’t really hinder my experience, it only took more time to do things.

The enemy variety is pretty good, but later entries would improve on the designs, as most of the zombies look exactly the same. The other enemies are fun though, there are zombie dogs, mutated plants, and zombie crows and a couple more as the story continues. such as the Hunters, which actually chase you, ramping up the difficulty once introduced, with one of the most scary but also campy FMVs in the game, showing they are smarter, faster, and can open doors—even if they never do it during the game itself.

The back and forth in this game is quite big, some puzzles take place across multiple rooms and even multiple areas. You will need to keep the inventory in check, or you’ll end up stuck. You can’t drop items, but you can combine herbs, and even waste ammo if you need an extra slot. Every choice matters here, as your survival and progress will be at play. One thing that is used very well in the inventory is item-checking. You can inspect and rotate items in 3D to see what they are and even find something inside it. In RE2 you can check an item, but they can’t be manipulated in 3D, although the mechanic has been implemented in plenty other games.

I really enjoyed the puzzle design, even more than the in the sequel—which focused on more action. There are some rooms in RE2 which will have four or five zombies in one passageway, but in RE1 there will only be one or two, and it’s likely that only one of them notices you, while the others are far away. I was able to save ammo better—but this is also thanks to my experience on the other game—and plan routes easier, which helped given how many puzzles or keys are used throughout the many areas.

The bosses aren’t very good, lackluster when it comes to battle design—you only need to move to some good location and shot away until it dies—however, due to the status of the game, they are memorable as set pieces, and often move the plot forward in interesting ways. For example, you can end up quite hurt, with some character taking you to another location to heal you; or the way to the boss can contain certain puzzle elements beforehand, to make the eventual battle easier.

As the story continues, there will be plenty of encounters with different characters of the game, depending on who you play as. These are in-game cutscenes, and I need to say, as cringe and badly acted as they are, I always found them rather charming, and it was nice to always get a new sense of direction, or a new useful weapon, or a plot twist here and there. Sometimes, the game atmosphere was rather tense, or I was low on health. Which makes getting to new rooms rather nerve-wracking at first, so I was always glad to see a cutscene that made things more chill.

A cozy cutscene is nice, but there is nothing quite like finally hearing that sweet sweet melody that let’s you know that you just made it to a lovely, beautiful save room. Even better when it contains an item box, which allow you to store away items you don’t need, and recover them from any other item box in other rooms of the game—yet another unrealistic mechanic that Resident Evil shoves away because gameplay is more important.

Honestly though, all the music and ambiance in the game is stunning. There’s plenty of tracks for different rooms and sections, as well as action moments, reveals and similar, all of it is very well done and maintains the atmosphere perfectly. So long as you are not playing the Dual Shock’s Director Cut, or that there’s not some cheesy dialogue happening at the same time.

Things get real creepy with the audio design as well, every step, every grunt, the sounds of the water flowing and the dogs howling, I can’t praise it enough. Also the effects when moving on the game’s inventory/map/status screen is just as satisfying. The doors opening and closing, the screech of an old door, the elevator going up and down. The sound department of this game did wonders, and thanks to the PS1’s usage of CDs instead of cartridges, the quality is top notch. The sounds of the guns shooting and reloading is also a pleasure.

Animation work is also remarkable, even if it lacks some of the polish RE2 introduced, like character animations to indicate health status. It’s still pretty good and the models are awesome for the time. The way all the different items come with 3D renders you can inspect is also appreciated, every gun, herb, key and the like has a nice amount of detail to it.

There are other 3D models during game besides the characters, like interactable objects and items, making them easy to notice against prerrendered backgrounds (which are unfortunately pretty low-res for modern screens, but still charming). This is useful to solve block-style puzzles—like moving a shelf to reach something behind it, or finding green plants to restore health.

All in all, as cheesy as all the dialogue is, as arcane as tank controls may seem, as slow as it may be to aim guns as Jill. Everything is just part of the course. Every obstacle or hiccup, is only one more challenge for your survival inside this mansion. There are plenty of resources for Jill to take, the amount of enemies is more than manageable, and there aren’t that many bosses in the first place.

This game, like its successor, is pretty much a 3D Metroidvania game with zombies, and I am extremely amazed at how well it still runs. The gameplay from start to finish was a pleasure to experience. The utility of most items is made clear rather well, and my instincts started to develop soon enough. Judging when an item may make sense to keep or not, or when it was better to backtrack to an item box when I could feel that I was about to get a lot of items soon became second nature somehow.

Resident Evil gives you all the tools you need, the designers really want you to beat it, it is only a matter of understading its mechanics and everything will become clear. I am looking forward to a second playthrough of this one as Chris—even though I hear is much tougher—because the game has taught me all I need, and it trusts me so much. No tutorials, no GUI other than the status screen that gets out of the way when you don’t use it. It is a rather cinematic experience.

As someone who grew up with no nostalgia for these games, who wasn’t even aware they were games until 2015 or so and only knew of the franchise because of the Milla Jovovich movies—which I didn’t even get to watch because they were way too violent and my parents wouldn’t allow me to—I am really starting to love this series more than I thought, slowly taking on my top 3 alongside Halo and Metroid.

This is just gameplay and mechanics perfectly executed. A game meant to be played over and over, to be mastered. Learning techniques, optimizing routes, avoiding enemies, everything is so clear and the controls are so fluid when you get good at them. Once a run is done, you get your credits and a final screen showing you the time and the amount of saves you did. There’s a challenge and a goal there. How fast can you do it now? How well do you know your own skills? Not to mention unlockables!

There’s plenty of speedruns out there, but I found this particular walkthrough to be fascinating—great if you don’t plan to play the game even after all the praise I got for it—since the player simply walks most of the time, not running from enemies, and being as efficient as possible with the inputs. It’s such an interesting thing to watch, as you simply get into a state where you are aware of everything and no longer fear the creatures anymore.

If there’s a problem with starting with the first game instead of the other two from the original trilogy, is that it will train you very well to what’s next. The whole formula is already here, and it’s excellent. I am kind of looking forward to Nemesis now, and how that game will mix things up a bit. I played the game on my Anbernic RG35XX SP without any issues.

By the way, make sure to play the PS1’s Final Director’s Cut romhack to get the best version possible of the game in emulation. Of course, you can also acquire it via GOG or Steam—but the latter is DRM protected.

This somehow becamse my longest game review, so I’ll stop now. Play Resident Evil, it’s very good.

This is day 49 of #100DaysToOffload