‘Resident Evil VII’ is scary in first person and scarier in VR

It’s just a game.

This is what I told myself, repeatedly, as I experienced the Resident Evil series in virtual reality for the first time. It was just a game, it couldn’t hurt me. I wasn’t really in a creepy, decrepit old farmhouse—just in a press demo room that happened to be modeled after the rooms in said creepy house. I knew it was just a game. I knew I was safe.

So why was I gripped with fear every time I looked over my shoulder?

Resident Evil VII is both a return to the series’ roots and a new chapter in its history. For the first time ever, the entire game is in first-person, eschewing the traditional third-person view the Resident Evil games have generally used for two decades. It takes place within the series' canon a few years after the events of Resident Evil VI, so it’s not a reboot or reimagining. The focus on survival horror rather than action and shooting, however, is throwing it way back to the earliest RE games, back when they took place in contained locations around Raccoon City.

The E3 demo, which is also available now for PlayStation Plus users in non-VR mode, took me a similar, spooky house. I didn’t know anything about the character I was embodying or why I was there, but the prompt to get out of the house seemed like a solid course of action. 

Having the PlayStation VR headset on gave everything a new level of scariness, since the setting was literally all around me. Every time I heard a noise, I very slowly moved my head left and right, and a few times worked up the nerve to look over my shoulder to make sure nothing was following behind me.

Most of the gameplay was a matter of exploration and puzzle-solving, but that didn’t make it less terrifying. The house appeared to have been abandoned, as it was still furnished but crawling with bugs and littered with cobwebs. Downstairs was a TV room, a kitchen, some hallways and the exit—locked, of course. Upstairs was an open space with a few mannequins, and despite being inanimate, they made me even more uneasy.

A VHS tape found in a locked cabinet provided some clues about the location. The original occupants vanished under mysterious circumstances, and a Ghost Hunters-type reality show called Derelict House had brought a crew there to film at one point. My control switched to one of the Derelict House crew members, still in first person, and within minutes a producer had gone missing.

After finding a secret passage, I was urged by the show’s host to climb down a ladder into a darkened basement area, and with every fiber of my being I did not want to do that. But, since I knew it was the only way to get on with the demo, I climbed down. What followed was a moment reminiscent of The Blair Witch Project: I found the missing producer facing a wall, blood streaming down his face, before being attacked myself.

Back in the present, I now knew how to access the secret passage (a lever in the fireplace, naturally), and thankfully I did not have to go down to the basement again. Instead, I found the door key — finally, I could get out of there! Except when I turned around, an imposing figure crept past the door of the TV room.

Original image has been replaced. Credit: Mashable

I had a feeling this was not going to come to a happy end.

There was no sign of the figure when I slowly crept into the hallway, so I retraced my steps to the locked door. The entire time, I was just waiting for something to reach out and startle me. I kept looking all around me, behind me, flinching at shadows and sounds. But nothing came.

I stuck the key in the lock.

The figure from before — which didn’t look quite human, but also didn’t look like Resident Evil’s typical zombie, either —grabbed me from behind and provided a violent thrashing to end the demo. I was back in the Los Angeles Convention Center, safely in the Capcom booth, in which they’d built a replica of this creepy house. From the looks on the Capcom reps’ faces, my yelps and mutters of “Nope” hadn’t been as quiet as I’d hoped.

Resident Evil VII in VR is scary. There have been reports from the show floor of the demo causing nausea in virtual reality, but thankfully I wasn’t plagued with any disorientation -- just a distinct feeling that I needed to get back to the bright lights and safety of the show floor. It wasn’t until I was walking away that I realized that while the demo had perfectly embodied survival horror, it didn’t necessarily feel like a Resident Evil game.

Capcom is keeping quiet about just how Resident Evil VII ties into the rest of the series and whether we’ll see the return of any familiar characters. Expect to find out more when it launches next January.  

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