Last night I gathered up enough courage to try the new Resident Evil VII Biohazard demo on PlayStation 4. I used to be a Resident Evil fan until the series took a sharp turn away from the whole zombie thing but after seeing the trailer from E3 2016, I knew I had to at least try this game out once, no matter how disturbing it looked.
Spoiler Alert: If you haven’t played the demo yet and don’t want to ruin the experience, turn back now. Do not watch the video and do not read below this point. The rest of you can continue though.
I’ll start this off by saying that Resident Evil VII Biohazard is incredibly creepy and not for the faint of heart. If you don’t do well with horror movies or games, I also suggest not playing this at night or with the lights off and definitely do not play this with surround sound headphones. You may also want the kids to leave the room.
Most of the creep factor comes from how realistic everything looks in the game. Usually with some of the horror games, you still have that feeling that it’s just a game but with this, it’s just feels too real. Your surroundings are dark and you’re only bit of lighting comes from a rather weak flashlight. Your field of view is very narrow while your surrounds are very tight, almost claustrophobic.
Not only that, the audio in this game is fantastic. Meaning there is no background music to set the mood. Other than the ambient noises and the realistic sounds from your environment that you interact with, it is almost completely silent. This really sets the mood for a realistic horror game and again, it just all seems too real.
Which brings me to this. Resident Evil VII Biohazard was promo’d during the PlayStation VR segment. After playing the demo on a regular TV, I can see how this would work on PS VR. I can also see that there would be NO WAY IN HELL that I would even play this on PS VR. This is just too reaslistic of an experience and one that would seriously mess with me physiologically if I played this in VR.
So with that said, Resident Evil VII Biohazard is an incredible achievement and a rather interesting reboot of the whole Resident Evil franchise. This is the scariest Resident Evil game Capsom has ever made and I can’t wait to check it out. Just not in VR.
