Resident Evil 7 (2017) (PC) (Capcom)
0As one of the few people on this planet who genuinely relished the over-the-top anime shenanigans of that brain cell-consuming stupidity called Resident Evil 6, I wasn't necessarily interested in Capcom going back to their roots and trying to recapture the mood and atmosphere of earlier entries. One of my more philosophical objections to this approach is that the series - despite its historical importance in establishing certain key gameplay mechanics - always seemed to have a somewhat tenuous connection to the survival horror genre as a whole. Indeed, even the very first game in the series was defined by larger-than-life characters and silly dialogue which weren't merely a product of its time or the result of something supposedly edgy and dark being lost in translation. To put it simply, Resident Evil was never Silent Hill - and, significantly, never really tried to be even after Keiichiro Toyama's rival franchise became a worldwide hit. For Capcom to backpedal at this late stage and suddenly try to squeeze itself into that increasingly crowded space (nowadays occupied by slick indie titles like Outlast or Amnesia) just came off as rather lame and desperate to me.
That being said, my first impressions of RE7 are largely positive. While there's nothing particularly original about the game's basic setup or mechanics, Capcom does bring high-end production values and tightness of design to a subgenre which may have resurfaced years ago but still hasn't been paid much attention by AAA developers (with the partial exception of P.T., which was of course abruptly cancelled before its development really got off the ground). I'm not sold on the main antagonists so far (perhaps unsurprisingly, they seem more comical than menacing), but the richly detailed environments are rewarding to explore and as predictable as some of the story elements seem there's just enough of an actual mystery here to make me want to see how the plot unfolds.