It has been four years since Resident Evil 7 came out. I remember watching the E3 2016 trailer for this game with my cousin. It looked like a regular first-person horror game. We got a demo for the game that same night. My cousin and I downloaded it, and we beat it twice. In the Beginning Hour demo, you have to explore the house and basically find a way out of it while solving puzzles. What my cousin and I played was wonderful and scary. The atmosphere of the game was perfect, and the best part was that you could replay the demo multiple times to get different outcomes. Also the new (at the time) photorealistic RE Engine made the game look amazing, but things did not improve with the Beginning Hour demo. The demo featured a lot of elements that were just misdirection. Some stuff that did not make it in the game was the ghost girls popping up in the hallways, the teleporting mannequins, and the notes appearing in front of you. Honestly, I forgot about this game until recently and only checked it out because Resident Evil 3 Remake came out last year and in two months, Resident Evil VILLage comes out. So I booted up my PS4,bit the bullet, and bought the game (and Resident Evil Zero – Resident Evil 6). For this review, I am only going to be talking about the opening hour of the game because I want you to play the game, and I also do not want to talk about an almost ten hour long game.

Resident Evil 7’s intro is amazing, and it hooks you in from the start. The main character, Ethan Winters, travels to Dulvey, LA to find his wife who has been missing for three years. Ethan gets an email from Mia (his wife) telling him to find her at the Baker farm. Once you get there, you can easily tell that it has been abandoned for a while. The gate is locked, so you check around the house and find some disturbing acts of violence, so what do you do? You do what any normal person would  and explore the house. It is the same house from the demo, but with some changes. You can enter the basement and find the body from a VHS tape. You then find Mia, but she is locked in a cell. When you wake her up she is obviously scared and frightened to see you. When leaving the cell, she keeps explaining how “daddy” is coming. Ethan lets Mia rest while you explore the rest of the basement, and then you hear Mia screaming while being dragged away. You chase them upstairs and find nothing. You start to hear banging from the basement door that you just came from, so you check it out just to see Mia crawling up the stairs clearly not herself. She throws you through the door and starts hacking at you with a knife, after which she snaps out of it and changes back to herself. Seeing what she did to us, she bangs her head against the wall, knocking herself out. We can now see why she was locked in that cell. You are probably thinking while playing “what in the world is wrong with my wife?,” but before you can ask yourself that, she is back up. She throws you through a wall, you find an axe, and she comes back with that knife so you have to defend yourself. After searching for your missing wife for the past three years, this is how it ends? You taking the axe and killing your wife? It is amazing. Thirty minutes ago we saw a video of this happy Mia, and now she is all mutated and crazy. 

After you kill your wife, a phone starts ringing. Once you pick up the phone, you hear a voice telling you that you should not have come here and that the only way out is through the attic. While walking to the attic, you notice that Mia’s body is gone. You have to explore the house while knowing that your wife who you thought you killed is roaming around, and she can jump out anytime. At this point when I was playing, my heart was racing, and I had feelings that I did not know I had. Your wife takes a screwdriver and stabs your hand through a wall, and then comes at you with a chainsaw. She proceeds to saw your hand off. I was sitting there thinking that it is one of those stories where the victim dies, and the main character is introduced later. But nope, you pick up your severed hand and walk to the attic. Then, bam, it hit me. That demo was so misleading that it was genius. Once in the attic, you find a weapon, ammo, and healing items. You climb the ladder to leave the house, and then Mia appears with her chainsaw once again. It is your time to put her down, this time after a while of shooting her, she finally goes down muttering “I love you.”There is no way to leave now since the ladder is broken. You are left there with a destroyed wife, a missing hand, and no hope. How can this get any worse? Well, you will have to play it. The only complaint with the game is that it could have been scarier. I cannot wait until May for the new Resident Evil: VILLage to come out to continue Ethan’s story.