Resident Evil 1 IS Scary
There is always something to be said for a radical idea. A thought which subverts expectations and strikes out on land untapped, a space for images and designs outside of our contemporary meta– these types of ideas can bear a lot of meaning to people. Appreciation comes naturally from the innovativeness of the concept and the skillfulness of its execution. There is something to be said too, for an old concept executed well. Not every great idea can, or should, be new.
A zombie survival horror game, in the big year of 2024, sounds redundant to the point of parody. 28 years ago, in 1996, I can only assume it was still somewhat played out. Zombies were certainly nothing new to the mainstream audience. Yet within the confines of a well-used set of genre tropes; a spooky mansion, shambling ghouls, a mysterious and influential corporation, the original Resident Evil (1996) manages to craft an unforgettable experience which charted a new course for an entire wing of the video game ecosystem. It is, in large part, because of the familiarity of the setting and construction of this game, that nearly 30 years later, we hear of this concept and are flooded with reminders of the medium’s past and present. The subtleties of this game’s innovation can’t really be fully appreciated when they’ve been so thoroughly integrated into the mainstream that they feel like obvious givens, so what I’ve really come to appreciate as a first time player of this classic are the artful ways in which the game makes use of its limitations.
As much as I’d like to present my subjective observations as objectivity, I have to contextualize that I am not exactly a retro gamer. This is a game which, to me, has aged well in terms of visuals and punchy writing, but has some clear mechanical limitations which are very difficult for a more modern gamer to handle. These limitations ultimately become a strength, because they create the boundaries which define such a distinct and immersive play experience.
The player has the choice between two somewhat non-descript characters– the determined Chris Redfield, and the resourceful Jill Valentine. The first thing you’re greeted with when opening this game is a cinematic — real actors with shockingly dated haircuts appearing in semi-military/police gear, a style of cinematics which games don’t often try to make use of anymore.
The plot is simple; a group of elite police officers called the S.T.A.R.S. Alpha team has been called to investigate some grisly murders and rescue the previously dispatched Bravo unit in the fictional Arklay mountains. Chris Redfield, Jill Valentine, Brad Vickers, Barry Burton, Joseph Frost and Albert Wesker touch down in a dark, grassy field where they look to investigate Bravo team’s downed helicopter. While investigating, Joseph finds a severed hand, and is brutalized by a very realistic-looking dog. The rest of Alpha team runs, firing their guns wildly at the pursuing pack, until they find safety inside the mansion where the majority of the game takes place. The screen fades to black, and we are told that their assumptions of safety were misguided.
I should point out, the cutscenes in this scene are quite legendary. The dialogue and voice acting are of a truly bygone era. The comedy achieved in just about an hour of cutscenes is quite impressive, the vast majority of it seemingly unintentional. Resident Evil has gone down as one of the most infamous bad English dubs in the Western canon, yet it’s hard to say the game would be nearly as well-renowned without this distinguishing trait. Mediocre voice acting is everywhere, but truly bad voice acting deserves to be cherished.
What’s even more impressive, is that despite all of this, the game still manages to create dread and suspense. Indeed, these goofy cutscenes and line reads serve as warm, comfortable moments of respite from the overwhelming darkness of the Spencer Mansion.
The atmosphere is heavy from the very first room you enter– a quiet, spacious dining room with a loud grandfather clock ticking in the centre. No music plays in this room, just that steady, unnerving tick. As you go to open the door to another room, you are greeted by a first person perspective of your character approaching and stepping through it. The effect this can have on a player, particularly on a first go-about, is tremendous, imposing the character’s limited view and apprehension onto you. While it may be easy to distance yourself from the perspective and feelings of the character, these door sections do a lot to impose their feelings of dread onto you.
Jill’s playthrough is generally seen as the easier of the two, as she has access to better weapons, lockpicks and more inventory slots, with 8 to Chris’ 6. The inventory size may sound like a somewhat minor advantage, but it has an outsized impact in the way you play the game. Inventory management is a core aspect of the game, because almost all objectives are tied directly to having key items on hand. Opening access to new wings of the mansion requires not only a specific set of keys, but often crests, emblems, cranks and all manner of junk which will take up one of your few slots. Weapons, too, can take up significant chunks of your space as you manage between the weapon itself, and its ammunition in two separate spaces. Healing items, too, can hold critical space in your inventory depending on how cautiously you choose to proceed between objectives and the precious few save points throughout the game. Indeed, even saving is made into a resource management problem with the addition of an item which allows you to use save points, the Ink Ribbon. If you run out of Ink Ribbons, you’d better be ready to finish the game out.
For context, Playstation One games generally did not have checkpoint systems as we’ve come to know and expect in games today. Rather than the game automatically making an unlisted save which it would access if you died, the game simply returns you to the main menu. There is no continue or retry function, only a Save Loader. In effect, this means that the game has what we might now refer to as a “permadeath” mechanic; death will end the game full stop. This is where saves become particularly important– you are required to save the game if you want to maintain any semblance of progress in a first playthrough. This is a nasty vestige of the available memory on Playstation One consoles which, for many people including myself, was an instant turn-off. For a game which can be quite demanding, the punishment for a mess-up being a complete reset of the game, cutscenes unabridged, is a massive roadblock to progress. Even if you do manage to save the game before a difficult section, you will have to re-watch any cutscenes that hadn’t yet been triggered as there’s no way to skip them. Not to mention, those super immersive door animations, upon a second or third playthrough, begin to feel more irritating than suspenseful. A death in the eleventh hour can set you back hours of progress, with your only comfort being that knowledge of what you’re actually supposed to be doing cuts down on unnecessary backtracking and saves a lot of time. But there is nothing that will speed up those repeated cutscenes of doors opening.
The infamous “tank controls” on which RE operates are perhaps the first thing a post Y2k gamer might really take umbrage with, though. The analog sticks were only introduced to PlayStation controllers with the introduction of DualShock in 1997, so the game was built to accommodate D-pad movement primarily. This means that instead of controlling 360º movement, your character must move either forwards or backwards, with the ability to rotate left or right on a pivot point. This takes a ton of getting used to, especially if you are used to playing with a modern controller where you may be tempted to rely on the analog sticks. In my experience, this is more troublesome than it is helpful. The character’s movement is always relative to the way they are facing, so the analog stick is constantly re-orienting, resulting in spiraling movement.
The very unique presentation style of the game cleverly takes advantage of this control scheme. Instead of having the camera oriented behind the shoulder of the protagonists, the entire game is mapped out with predetermined camera angles, which snap back and forth depending on where the player character is standing in any given room. Most rooms are given at least two different camera angles, allowing potential enemies or obstacles to remain hidden to the player, though they may have been in plain view if we could’ve tracked the character’s perspective. This introduces an element of uncertainty into any room, which can get very frustrating at times on a first playthrough. Even a seemingly peaceful room can hold a zombie which wasn’t immediately visible, the winding hallways can obscure enemies lying in wait, and zombies you can hear are sometimes able to get the drop on you anyway by waiting just outside of view. The cognitive dissonance between your player character having a clear line of sight to something that was kept hidden from you, the player, can be difficult to get used to. This, taken into account with the controls, can create an unsavory blend of difficulty which feels cheap & dated, at first.
Once you understand the basic mechanics, the systems blend together in a very simple and elegant fashion. If the camera was designed to change dynamically, the controls would likely be burdensome to the point of complete non-function. If the controls were not made to be oriented to character direction, static camera angles would be a massive problem as your controller would change orientation with every jump switch. It’s not hard to imagine that for every frustrating death at the hands of the character relative control system, a system where your controller switched orientation suddenly and without warning could produce two or three more. Together, camera and controller create a gameplay experience I would equate to a piece of durian– initially very hard to stomach, but an acquired taste which can really stick with you. Personally, I am still very mixed on it. The barrier to entry they create for the modern gamer is hard to sweep under the rug, as I suspect that all but the most seasoned video game appreciators would be willing to look past the internal contradictions of this type of system. That said, the game’s camera angles are often very artful, and lend a lot of personality to the setting.
Combat feels like a bit of an afterthought when other systems are taken into consideration, and a real weak spot in the experience. As a PS1 game, the combat and shooting principles learned in the Gamecube/PS2/Xbox generation which have shaped the way almost every action character uses a gun do not apply. That is to say, you don’t have an analog stick to aim your gun or orient the character with. Instead, the game suffers from an extremely rudimentary point and shoot system. You press a button to ready your gun (which auto-aims it at.. just about any zombie in the room), point it up, down or straight, and then you press the fire button. Over and over again. Combat never really evolves past this basic loop either. Readying the gun automatically points it at an enemy within your sightline, so you don’t need to worry about aiming most of the time. Some enemies will ask you to point the gun up, some will ask you to point down. Unfortunately, downward & upward aiming are fixed at 45º & 135º degrees respectively, which causes many issues when trying to fire at range. The leveled aiming can be quite a hindrance at times when it should not be taking up so much of the player’s attention. The game starts you with a knife, which is virtually useless unless the game’s systems are exploited. The handgun which you soon gain access to is also quite underwhelming. It will generally take between 4–5 shots to put down a single zombie, and potentially even more if it falls to the ground but does not die. Despite the fact that this is rarely fun, it introduces the player to the game’s ammo and health economy, which lets the game play more to its ultimate strength, the inventory management system.
The ammo and health resources that the game’s moment-to-moment gameplay is based upon are very plentiful, but are finite. If you use up all of your ammo, or reach a boss fight without enough healing items to manage, you have effectively lost on your playthrough. Zombies being the most prevalent enemy in the game, it’s not advisable to spend time and ammo trying to dispose of all of them. You could, theoretically, spend the rest of a playthrough dipping and dodging your way through rooms of enemies and boss fights, but that would probably be more troublesome than enjoyable. Instead, you’re best off to save your bullets and other weapons for boss fights and enemies in places where you will need to visit more often, like hallways containing multiple key rooms or areas where you will need to spend time thinking about a puzzle. Most of the time elsewise, you’re better off learning how to time out your sprints past them. While it may seem a bit counterintuitive to not kill all the enemies, it’s sort of a “gamer 101” commandment to keep shooting until everything dies, it creates a lot of interesting decision-making in terms of routing. The added uncertainty of not knowing whether or not you will need to return to particular hallways or areas on a first playthrough enhances the experience.
In many ways, this game is not “scary” in the way that a more modern horror game can afford to be. The mansion is pretty well-lit throughout, there are very few jumpscares, and the freaky factor of the enemies quickly becomes muted due to the absolute saturation of encounters you will have around the environment. By the time you’ve finished even the first act, zombies and dogs just don’t have that same kind of freaky quality to them. You may have even realized how broken their path-finding AI is and found out it’s quite easy to evade them once you know what you’re doing. But the game is never without ways to send a chill of dread down your spine. The absolute scariest moment of the game, to me, is undoubtedly the first encounter with a hunter, the game’s more advanced enemy type. As you leave a secondary location to return to the mansion, you are suddenly shown another perspective– something that was behind you. In mere seconds, it runs through and scales up the terrain which may have taken you much longer to follow you into a narrow hallway. You see the unknown thing’s mangled claw opening the door, and see its massive body stalk you down the claustrophobic curve of the hall. With a modern eye, this thing looks extremely goofy, but the introduction sells the terror perfectly.
This scene really typifies the unique balance of cheesy pulp fiction and primal fear this game effortlessly employs. Despite the many laughs, this is somehow one of the most harrowing games I’ve ever played in my life. Every hallway and camera transition could hide a game-ending danger and the player is naturally going to feel that tension. In a way, the saving system creates a sort of meta-horror. You do not get to maintain your comfortable veil of safety on the other side of the screen, your time is on the line just as much as the character’s life is. Ironically, the death-defying appeal of a game like this is something which we’ve created a whole genre just to emulate, the Rogue-like. Resident Evil was also instrumental in creating the market for Survival Horror as a distinct genre. Certainly, this game did not single-handedly invent these concepts in gaming, but like I said, the strength of Resident Evil has never been originality. Instead, by utilizing the mechanics and conventions of the genre with a fully realized setting, Capcom was able to create an iconic and foundational text upon which many new genre conventions could be based.
And there’s something to be said for that, isn’t there? If you wanted to pick out all the individual aspects of what this game is doing and grade them on their own terms, I would say that there’s not many areas the game excels in. Setting and atmosphere are pluses, but some of the gameplay mechanics and writing choices wear their age on their sleeve. Resident Evil stands right at the curved edges of the ever-shifting uncanny valley of video game oldness, but its charm has kept it from falling headlong for a very long time. While the game has shortcomings, the full package is a symphony of strong level design, an addictive gameplay loop and a level of satisfaction to be found which goes far beyond what you would usually find in a modern game. If you take the time to muscle through its antiquities, you may find that next unique experience which contemporary gaming has left you craving.
