Hey everyone! It’s your favorite sporadic internet bloggsman ArbitraryWater here with another hot club banger of an internet blog. I know you were wondering, deep in your heart of hearts when I would emerge from my dark hole and start 2017 for real with an overly-long internet blog, but wonder no longer!
What I’ve been playing
For whatever reason, I spent a decent chunk of my break playing two different visual novels (both of which I was semi-troll gifted as a birthday present from some friends), likely as a counterweight to Total War: Warhammer. Va11-Hall-A: Cyberpunk Bartender Simulator is… pretty much exactly what you’d expect from a game with that title. It’s a visual novel where your only real interaction is mixing drinks in a bar. A bar that just so happens to be in a little corner of what is implied to be an anime cyberpunk dystopia, all set with an art style and an interface meant to evoke old Japanese PC games. Va11-Hall-A works deliberately small-scale, in a very “slice of life” kinda way. Most of the game consists of reading conversations between Jill, the bartender, and various clientele, usually talking about their problems, their lives, or revealing small snippets of lore about the world. It definitely seems like something you’d hear Austin Walker waxing poetic about and wishing he had more time to play or something, though I personally found the writing a tad hit or miss. When it works, it manages to be interesting and heartfelt without coming off as overtly expository or ingenuine. When it doesn’t… it’s a little amateurish and sophomoric. Aside from some characters who I thought didn’t work all that well and some occasionally awkward lines, it also borrows from the bag of “bad anime cliches” a couple of times in a way I thought was a little lame. If you’re interested, don’t let that dissuade you. I finished the entire thing, and while I totally ended up getting the worst ending and don’t have a ton of motivation to play through the entire thing again just to see a couple snippets of dialogue, it’s worth taking a look at if the premise intrigues you. The soundtrack might be worth the price of admission alone. Just don’t expect compelling gameplay.
I also played through Steins;Gate, which also does not have compelling gameplay and is also worth the price of admission. It cannot be remarked enough that I really, really like Steins;Gate. For those who don’t know, it’s basically a VN about the metaphysical implications of time travel, otaku culture, and soul-crushing despair, all because of Japanese teens ruining the future with cell phones. To say any more would spoil the point, but it has a great plot with some great characters, even if main protagonist Okabe Rintaro’s delusional manchild antics are sort of exhausting during the early parts of the story. While I might honestly recommend the anime adaption over the original visual novel for the sake of pacing and brevity (A 25 episode series vs a 25+ hour text dump), the VN does come with the advantage of being able to stew over all of its concepts and characterization in more detail. But yeah, it’s good. The artwork has an unique style to it, the Japanese voice acting is excellent (as far as I can tell) and I definitely didn’t tear up a little at the ending. Nope.
Resident Evil 7: biohazard/Biohazard 7: resident evil
I think it’s fair to say that Resident Evil has not been in a great place over the last 8 years. While I’m sure other people are willing to debate a different number (12 years, for example) I think most of us can agree that Resident Evil 6 was some variety of trainwreck and the series hasn’t had any sort of core identity since then. Admittedly, I’m a weirdo who actually sort of enjoyed RE6 because of how much of a bombastic “swing for the fences” kind of trainwreck that game is, to the point where I’d rather play it than the gruelingly mediocre (and otherwise competent) Dead Space 3, but I cannot under any circumstances defend it as legitimately good. It has some very interesting ideas, and probably deserves a little more credit than all of the critical dogpiling would suggest, but at its core it’s still a fundamentally flawed game brought down by QTE instadeath bullshit, a failure to explain its own mechanics, and some truly wretched set-pieces that exemplified the worst of “AAA” games circa 2012.
But here we are, almost 5 years later. Capcom, after a depressing period of doing seemingly nothing but re-releasing a bunch of their old stuff for HD consoles and PC, has finally started to make big new games. Sure, Street Fighter V seems like it’s had a rough first year and Dragon’s Dogma 2 is still not a thing that exists, but baby steps, right? Well, I have good news for all of you, and it’s that Capcom has not only managed to make a good new game, they’ve managed to make a good new Resident Evil game. As a long-suffering fan of the series, this was something I was increasingly unconvinced was ever going to be possible. Revelations 2, with its direct-to-DVD budget and Last of Us-lite gameplay, didn’t really impress me, and I think it’s probably worth mentioning that Umbrella Corps was a thing that actually happened and then was immediately forgotten about. I guess there was The Evil Within, if you want to count that. I honestly liked a lot of what that game had going for it, even if I also found certain parts of it utterly infuriating. For a while, I was afraid the only good thing coming out of this once-great series was going to be that fan-restoration of the so-called Resident Evil 1.5 (which is apparently still happening and making good progress.)
No longer! For now we finally have a so-called “Survival Horror” game that understands the spirit of the original games while adding an acceptable amount of modernization on top. Ammo conservation! Anachronistic puzzles! Doors with weird crests on them! While the skeleton of RE7 is definitely based on the Resident Evils of yore (most directly the Spencer Mansion of the first game) it aims more at recapturing the spirit of those old games than entirely replicating their scale, openness, or relative complexity. It understands how to produce a similar sense of tension and scarcity without feeling like an anachronism or throwback, which is probably a good thing even if I will still defend tank controls as "A thing that works fine, guys. Shut up." Aside from getting the broad strokes right, there were a couple of nods that I really appreciated, like the broken weapons that can be fixed with a weapon repair kit (echoing the way a lot of the older Resident Evil games would have weapon upgrade kits lying around as a way to keep your handgun from becoming entirely useless against stronger enemies), or the hidden optional puzzle just hanging out in a corner of the main yard. Even new concepts, like tying one of the hidden collectibles towards upgrades, is a smart idea that doubles down on the scrounging, scavenging mentality that the best “Survival Horror” evokes. I honestly wouldn’t have minded some slightly harder puzzles or more complicated level design, but I also acknowledge that I’m a crazy person who has played all of those old games more than once, somewhat obsessively, to the point where I can beat REmake in less than 3 hours on demand and could probably do the same for the rest of them with a little bit of warming up. That’s on me. I know that.
Instead, filling in the other side of RE7’s influences equation are the “modern” horror games of the last few years. Given this game’s more straightforward “Oh shit this dude with an axe is chasing you” tone rather than slow burning psychological terror, I think Outlast is probably a better point of comparison than something like Amnesia or P.T, though I guess you could probably point to earlier games like Clock Tower or Resident Evil 3 as examples too. What all of those games have in common is the concept of a nigh-unstoppable destructive force that chases you through the environment, one that you need to evade or hide from on a regular basis. Resident Evil 7 has that in the form of the Baker Family, though bringing it back to Nemesis of old, you can try and keep them off your back for a little bit if you’re willing to put a few of your precious bullets in them. The inclusion of firearms, which you acquire at a regular clip, is a pretty crucial difference between Resident Evil 7 and something like Outlast (part of the reason I like the former and not the latter), and the game also throws in regular “moulded” enemies as another incentive to shoot things you might just want to run away from.The shooting is appropriately clunky without being useless, and everything hits hard enough that playing defense or running away are viable choices as well. It’s worth commending that the game never gave me quite enough ammo or healing items to feel entirely comfortable with my situation, at least not until the end when I was suddenly drowning in the stuff; taking hits and blowing heads off with reckless abandon in true Resident Evil fashion. Actually, speaking of the end, it’s definitely worth noting that the back end of Resident Evil 7 is weaker than its front, which is a little disappointing for a game that I managed to finish in a brisk 7 hours my first time through. Without giving any spoilers, a bit of a detour is taken near the game’s conclusion, one that feels a little out of place even if the sequence itself isn’t bad by any means.There are also boss fights, all of which I beat on my first attempt, but most of which I will describe as “pretty good boss fights.” Like the puzzles and the layout, I wish there were slightly more of them, and that there was slightly more enemy variety on top of that, but I’ll take what I can get.
It’s also worth mentioning that Resident Evil 7 is pretty dang creepy. The whole game is dripping with an oppressive, genuinely uncomfortable atmosphere. Actually, comparisons to Texas Chainsaw Massacre aren’t far off, at least in terms of “Murderously insane, potentially cannibalistic rural people torment urbanites” and a good portion game is coated with an abundance of gore, black goo, and filth. While I jumped only a handful of times, I could see the entire thing being more than a little terrifying in VR. Being a bit of a soft reboot, it actively avoids trying too hard to tie back into series lore. It makes a handful of callbacks but is otherwise self-contained, which is probably for the best even though I have a bit of a soft spot for the labyrinthine nonsense that thing turned into.
But yeah, Resident Evil 7 was a pleasant surprise. Maybe not on the same level as Doom last year, but it’s a game I recommend with few caveats. Any series that lasts for 20 years is likely to go through some ups and downs, and it’s finally nice to see this one on the upside. Now if Capcom could get around to making other good new games, we'd be golden! Whatever happened to Deep Down anyway? Did that get unceremoniously cancelled at some point, or what? Hopefully that RE2 remake will be good, at least.
Random Endorsement:
Given the way I've assaulted your eyes with a wall of nonsense text, I think it only fair that I start directing anyone who actually finishes reading these blogs to something I found legitimately interesting and enjoyable. This time I'll direct you to the episode of @thatpinguino's podcast where he and @zombiepie talk about Jade Empire, a game I still might consider to be the worst non-Sonic the Hedgehog RPG Bioware has ever put out. It seems like the Deep Listens crew agrees with me! Here's a link.
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