The core Resident Evil series has lost its way over the years, swapping out horror for an increased focus on chiseled action heroes with an endless supply of ammo and a “can-do” attitude.
Let’s face it: When you’re playing as a character that can boot a zombie in the face and smash its head like an old melon, you’re not gonna be in for too many scares.
Resident Evil 7’s producer and director have now shed a little more light on the new game’s protagonist over on the Capcom blog.
We still don’t know the character’s name or link to the series overall, but we do now know that it’s the kind of person who doesn’t charge into a room full of undead monsters with nothing more than a herb and a prayer.
Director Koushi Nakanishi said:
You can’t be looking through the perspective of a macho, hero character because that’s not you at home. Or maybe you are macho, I don’t know [laughs]. It’s sort of a powerless, ordinary person you’re playing as. We’re not really talking in too much detail about who they are right now, but they’re an ordinary person stuck in an extraordinary situation. I think that really brings the horror right to the fore.
Nakanishi makes a great point. One of the things that really made the first Resident Evil so terrifying (besides those awful controls) was the fact that you weren’t that big of a deal.
Ammo was scarce, you scrapped like a wounded deer, and the zombies rarely stayed dead – despite your best efforts.
But while Resident Evil 7 is a vastly different beast to anything we’ve seen before, it’s still a direct sequel to the action oriented Resi 6. Nakanishi simply teased that finding out how the games are connected is all “part of the mystery”.
Nakanishi ended things by reassuring fans (once again) that this is still a Resident Evil game, despite the demo’s lack of any classic gameplay elements from the franchise.
He said:
I want to give a reassuring message. I’ve seen from initial reactions of what we’ve put out that people are getting the impression that we’ve taken Resident Evil and turned it into some sort of supernatural, occult, ghost story. I think you can look at the trailer or the demo and get that impression, but don’t worry, we haven’t just thrown out Resident Evil as it exists and turned it into a ghost story. It will all make sense in the end.
The best thing to do is trust in Capcom and see what happens. Resident Evil 7 will be coming to PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC on January 24, 2017.
Ewan Moore is a journalist at UNILAD Gaming who still quite hasn’t gotten out of his mid 00’s emo phase. After graduating from the University of Portsmouth in 2015 with a BA in Journalism & Media Studies (thanks for asking), he went on to do some freelance words for various places, including Kotaku, Den of Geek, and TheSixthAxis, before landing a full time gig at UNILAD in 2016.