Why I like Resident Evil 2

 

Why I like Resident Evil 2

1) I'm fairly certain that Resident Evil started the zombie renaissance. When I got into the horror genre in my tweens, the most recent major zombie story was the Return of the Living Dead franchise, which was several years old at the time. The genre was leaving the franchise slasher era of the 80s and entering the ironic slasher franchise era of the early 90s, with a handful of supernatural horror tales interspersed between. Nobody was doing anything with zombies at the time. While 28 Days Later probably brought the zombies into the mainstream audience, the Resident Evil franchise brought the subgenre back to horror fans my age. 

2) I started playing the series at the second game and I'll never forget the very first game screen:

It's an old trick that gets me every time: if you tell me I'm about to see SOMETHING HORRIBLE, I'm going to work myself into a tizzy worrying about whatever it could possibly be.

3) Both Resident Evil 2 and Metal Gear Solid were the first games that crossed the line between games and movies for me. Both used a lot of cut scenes to great effect. I remember the intro movie to RE2 very well. Having not played the original game, I came in to the story as the two lead characters did, alarmed as I found myself trapped in a city under siege.

4) I don't remember who I played as first. I usually play female characters if given the choice, but Leon Kennedy was a cop and had a gun. Either way, I remember the first nerve-wracking slog through Raccoon City's ruined streets. The characters are hard to control, the zombies are all over the place, and you were constantly under assault. Much has been made of the tank controls that early RE games used, but they definitely added to the vulnerability. I was used to playing agile characters, but now I was stuck in a clumsy shell. It amplified the horror, making my video game avatar an extension of myself.

5) The interesting thing about the Resident Evil games is that they took place in a Universal Horror reinterpretation of our world. The characters and the technology were all modern, but the spaces that the characters resided in had a Gothic architecture and sense of decay. Puzzles all involved clockwork architecture, the police department and mansion all concealed areas that looked like Dark Ages castles, and the crazy villains were operatically, House of Usher-crazy. Underneath all the modern trappings, the mad experiments that birthed the T-Virus came from Frankenstein's Castle.

6) Because I started the series at Resident Evil 2, I bypassed the worst of the bad voice acting that characterized Resident Evil 1. No master of unlocking cracks for me. Because of that, I took the series deadly serious. I wanted to know everything about the world, about the T-Virus, about the horrible Tyrant that relentlessly stalked you through the police station.

7) The game pulled me into the world so effectively. I found all the little clues in the police station, I read all the reports, I heard about the doomed efforts to keep the monsters out. It created a thoroughly engaging fictitious world. The longer I played, the more I accepted the quirks of the control scheme. I developed a particular strategy for moving through corridors and fighting different monsters, which I had to constantly reevaluate in the face of new threats.

8) The game has a palpable sense of loneliness. You spend so much time fighting alone for your life that it became a relief every time I ran into another human being, especially Claire/Leon.

Conclusion: Horror gaming has a different rhythm than most other media, in that it doesn't follow the same peaks-and-valleys structure that more passive media often follows. The games are relentless exercises in horror, and I loved slipping deeper into the madness of the Raccoon City's zombie infestation.    

The Suffering

The Suffering is easily my favorite action horror game.

I suppose a definition of terms is appropriate here: Most horror games fall into the Survival Horror mode, where the emphasis is on tension, puzzle solving, and features protagonists who are not necessarily the most capable combatants. The game's atmosphere takes center-stage and the player navigates through a dangerous environment with limited resources, doing their best to survive. Action horror, as the name suggest, involves direct conflict with the forces assaulting the player. The characters are more mobile, better armed, and infinitely more capable than their survival horror counterparts. Most of the time I prefer survival horror, as it becomes very difficult to be frightened of anything whose ass you can easily kick.

The Suffering is different. The craftsmanship and storytelling that went into the game is top-notch and it deserves a place in horror history for the intelligence of its storytelling, the sophistication of the scares, and the sheer unadulterated fun that can be found in the gameplay.



Players take on the role of the awkwardly-named Torque, a man sentenced to death for the murder of his family. Transferred to the maximum security Abbott Penitentiary located on Carnate Island, his arrival at the prison triggers a hellish conflagration to erupt on the island. Manifestations of the island's grisly history come alive and begin butchering guard and convict alike. Torque is forced to escape the chaos, the ghosts of his family following him through his bloody ordeal.

The horror in the game comes from two fronts. In the action angle, the monsters Torque must face are manifestations of the evils that had occurred on the island, from creatures based on methods of execution to the ghosts of little girls burned alive during Puritan-era witch trials. The monsters, designed by Stan Winston Studios, are an imaginative change of pace from the endless procession of zombies and demons and other generic monstrosities most action horror games dish out. Torque is more than capable at confronting them, as the game's controls are very smooth and intuitive, making dodging and counterattacking very natural.



The other aspect of the game's horror is the horrible manifestations surrounding Torque. As Torque moves through the island, his murdered wife and children appear before him several times, forcing him to confront his past. Phones ring in the prison and answering them allows the player to listen to conversations from the past. Three ghosts of long-dead island victims, each representing Torque's good, evil, and insanity respectively, attempt to guide Torque towards salvation or damnation. Finally, the very island molds itself around Torque's internal torment. The graffiti on the prison walls becomes accusatory, asking Torque if he ever loved his estranged family, while the abandoned insane asylum flashes Rorschach images at the player, dragging Torque deeper into insanity. I've long believed that the best haunted house stories involve characters who are already haunted themselves, and nowhere is this better displayed than the private hell created for Torque.

The game has a morality system, where the choices the player makes impacts the game's ending. At several points in the game, Torque is given the choice between doing good and doing evil. As these opportunities unfold, the player hears Torque's wife urging him to do the right thing, while the demonic voice of his insanity urges him to acts of cruelty. The consequences of the choices are displayed on a photograph of Torque's family that the player carries. Good choices make the image appear more pristine, while violence and cruelty slowly corrupt and distort the photo.

Torque suffers from amnesia about the specifics of what happened to his family, and the choices the player makes ties into the truth about their fate. Were they murdered by outsiders in a gang conflict or did Torque's jealousy and rage swallow them all? The effect is much more personal and chilling than most games with morality systems. Making the player take control of a potential family murderer is a bold move and, try as I might, I'm too invested in the plot to play the game any other way but good.



There are a lot of other wonderful touches to the game. Setting the game in the prison resolves the hoary old problem older horror games had, where muscular, well-armed characters couldn't go through a flimsy mansion door without a rooster key. Here, Torque's progress is controlled and blocked by heavy prison doors. The puzzles are all logical and fit will with the prison motif. Finally, the game includes a couple scrap books in the extra features section, one kept by a fellow convict and one by the wife of one of the prison guards. As the player advance through the game, the scrap books are filled out by the characters, detailing the monsters and horrible events on the island. It's a great touch, and both writers have distinct personalities and points of view. Finally, the game's music is comprised of samples of prison doors closing, chains rattling, and other sounds of incarceration and penance. It's a great counterpoint to the action.



The old girl hasn't aged well. It's a generation-old, having been released for the Xbox/PS2 and the character graphics and animation are crude by today's standards. This breaks my heart. Video games, more than any other artistic medium (feel free to debate the term) are very technology-dependent. Players tend to have very little interest playing games that look out-of-date, and gems like The Suffering get lost in the mad dash for the next best thing. Apparently there's a movie in the works starring Chiwetel Ejiofor as Torque, but I'll believe it when I see it.

I should probably say a few things about the sequel, The Suffering: Ties That Bind, but the easy answer is I didn't like it as much. The action moves to a demonic invasion of Torque's native Baltimore, and involves mysterious government goons, a gang lord, and a bunch of other pulpy touches. I liked the notion of the first game that a place can soak up so much evil that it take on horrible life of its own, but TTB turned the event into another apocalypse. Finally, Torque's wife shows up a lot more often and is more nagging and unpleasant, making me reconsider killing her in the original.

Whatevs. Check it out. You can apparently download the full PC game here.

Dead Space

I had a lot of fun playing Dead Space.

The horror genre works well in video games. You stop being a passive observer. Suddenly you're in the bad place, running low on health, with something terrible chasing you. Dead Space is like that. Only this time the bad place is a space ship. And you've got a chainsaw.

So it's not particularly subtle. American games rely on the illusion of competence, so you're not going to be some frightened little girl with a camera, like in the Fatal Frame series. No, you're gonna be some heavily armed tank, wading through the darkness with a selection of high-tech power tools at your side.



The game's combat-heavy emphasis is on "strategic dismemberment." As an engineer responding to a distress call from the mining ship USG Ishimura, you pick up quite an array of nasty power tools. You're gonna need 'em, too. The Necromorphs, horribly insectile distortions of human remains, can't be killed by the traditional FPS shots to the chest. No, you gotta blast their limbs off or they're gonna keep coming after you, screeching and spitting all the while.

Beyond that, you get to do fun futuristic engineering puzzles. There are several environments in the game that are zero gravity and a few breathtaking sequences out in space. Your power suit comes equipped with a stasis projector and a kinetic lift, allowing you to slow down and manipulate objects. I had a lot of fun messing around with the monsters and the environment. I'd like to sound cool and jump on the "the puzzles were too easy" bandwagon, but I appreciated that it didn't take a trip to the strategy guide to figure anything out.

Simply put, the game is fun to play. A really good story will sometimes carry me across the chasm of mediocre gameplay, but if I can interface with the game smoothly, if I can be sucked into the world, the game is a winner. Dead Space was really smooth. I didn't feel like I was getting dicked around by bad controls, I didn't feel like dangerous threats were being obscured by bad camera angles, and I had a lot of fun exploring the depths of the Ishimura.



As to the stuff I didn't like, your fellow crew mates, Token Gruff Black NCO and Token Crabby Scientist with the Big Rack, are genuinely unpleasant people. When they aren't shrilly arguing with each other, they're barking orders at you. There's not much going on with the game's story beyond "go there, repair this." About 90% of the game's levels start with a radio call from TCSwtBR telling you that something needs to be fixed, but you need to jump through a couple more hoops to do it. After awhile, you want your character to grab the mic and scream "Hey, why don't you come down and do some of these stupid fetch quests yourself!" Needless to say, one of them winds up betraying you.

The whole Unitology thing is kinda goofy. Sure, you get big creepy rooms where ritual suicides have taken place, but the whole thing kinda smacks of obvious allusions to Scientology. If it were actually bringing issues of faith and blind allegiance into question that would have been interesting, but it's just used as a window dressing for the game, something to supply whispered chants and spooky runes in the dark hallways of the Ishimura.

Dead Space also relies almost exclusively on my least favorite scare tactic: the soundtrack-spike jump scare. The survival horror games I grew up with relied on a certain enforced vulnerability. You were afraid because you weren't much of a match against the monsters you faced so your best bet was to hide from the small stuff, figure out the puzzles, and take down the big stuff quickly before it drained your painfully limited medical supplies. Dead Space is all about combat and dismemberment, which isn't exactly fertile ground for tension to grow. Instead, you get a bunch of screeching Necromorphs jumping at you from ceilings and air vents. It's not particularly subtle but it works well enough, and the sound design for the creatures are genuinely creepy. Also, for all my griping about cheap jump scares, the game's final cut scene ends with one of the scariest jump scenes I've encountered in awhile.

Finally, the "twist ending" didn't make a lot of sense. Spoiler city here, but if the hive mind is trying to manipulate you into returning the marker, why is it sending all its creatures out to kill you? Is the Marker a seperate, sentient entity, unattached to the hive mind? Is the hive mind easily confused and cranky? Walk me through this, please?

Don't take the negatives too seriously. I am a hater, after all. In the end, Dead Space was pretty darn cool. It plays like the video game equivalent of House on Haunted Hill: completely obvious and lunatic and a whole lot of popcorn-chompin' fun.



For those of you video game devotees, I was going to write a long essay on the decline of the survival horror genre, but someone else already beat me to it. They did it better, too. Check out Leigh Alexander's incredible kotaku article here.

Amazing Thing!

Image from io9.com

Did you grow up on the Choose Your Own Adventure books? I did, and now someone made a zombie movie CYOA: The Outbreak. Give it a shot. I made it through two choices, then I died.