Hazard The House: Resident Evil 7 Beginning Hour Is A True “Playable Teaser”

Article

Abstract: The Resident Evil franchise has had a rough past decade. Capcom looks to reinvigorate the long running series with Resident Evil 7: Biohazard. Announced and released at E3 2016, Resident Evil 7: Beginning Hour is a standalone demo for the upcoming game. Beginning Hour is clearly inspired by 2014’s wildly influential Playable Teaser (P.T.). P.T. remains one of the best horror experiences I’ve ever played. Beginning Hour learns from the lessons of P.T. to deliver something familiar and something new, and in the processes establishes its own identity. Beginning Hour is a true playable teaser, in that what’s shown will translate to a large release, unlike what was present in P.T. Beginning Hour and P.T. give separate looks into how to bring players into a new horror world that makes me excited for the future of the genre.

E3 2016 has come and gone, but not without its big surprises still leaving us reeling. One of the most shocking, perhaps, was that a Capcom-produced PlayStation VR tech demo Kitchen was actually a well-disguised teaser for Resident Evil 7: Biohazard. Kitchen received high praise from fans and games writers alike in its ability to create a terrifying atmosphere and deliver high quality scares. The reveal on Sony’s PlayStation stage was terrific, and one that got many longtime fans of the franchise excited again.

For those of you who don’t follow Resident Evil closely, the series has had a substantial downturn over the past ten years. Resident Evil 4 was the last truly great installment, and it released just over a decade ago. Since then, the franchise has moved away from survival horror into a more action-packed zombie blasting territory. The tone deaf Resident Evil 5 featured the living bicep Chris Redfield blowing away thousands of zombies from one action setpiece to the next. Resident Evil 6 was a disappointing mix of old & new that ended up failing on all fronts. Spin-offs and smaller Resident Evil titles since Resident Evil 4 have been plagued by hammy writing, bad controls, and cliché scares.

Punching boulders is not what I want from a Resident Evil game.

Resident Evil 7: Biohazard promises to be a return to the franchise’s survival horror roots. Capcom wants to deliver an experience that terrifies in the same way the original did to a whole generation of gamers. I was one such gamer. I didn’t even play the game myself, but watching the first Resident Evil over the shoulder of my friend left me with gore-filled nightmares for weeks. How was Capcom going to course correct a decade’s worth of mistakes? If Kitchen and the Beginning Hour demo are any indication their answer is clear – draw from one of the most influential horror titles of recent memory, P.T.

Hideo Kojima and Guillermo Del Toro’s Playable Teaser, or P.T., though only a few years old has inspired a new generation of horror titles. Originally intended, as the name would imply, to tease fans for the release of a new Silent Hill game (titled Silent Hills), P.T. transcends its franchise bonds and exists as a standalone experience. Soon after its release P.T. would truly become a standalone game, as Konami restructured and cancelled the Silent Hills project. The legacy of this roughly thirty-minute demo is extraordinary. We’ve seen elements of P.T.’s world building and ambient scares manifest in titles like Allison Road (now also cancelled) and Perception. And now, P.T. looks to be a key influence on one of the longest-running and well-known horror franchises of all time, Resident Evil. But why did P.T. make such an impact?

P.T. still haunts the horror game discussion in a big way.

P.T., for better or worse, delivered a horror experience gamers had never seen before. The entire demo is set in one small hallway. P.T. respects the way people have learned to play games and subverts them to unnerve and establish its world. Repetition, for instance, is a foundation of gaming. You do the same thing over and over to get good at it – your input always resulting in the same output. Not here. Performing the same act can give the player wildly different results. Walking through the same hallway multiple times changes it, adding layers of complexity and scares from the mundane. While so many other games have emphasized size and scale, P.T. focused on a dense microcosm. P.T.’s hallway it replete with hints at the player character, hints and the world, and hints at what to do. Nothing is told to the player, everything must be discovered. Scares are well earned, as P.T. builds tension through a subtle build up of sounds and sights. P.T. also acknowledges that one of the most compelling elements to horror is its mystery—the less the player knows the more terrifying its secrets. P.T. is packed to the brim with hidden mysteries that I suspect players are still trying to uncover. Now roughly a year later I find myself coming back to that hallway, to P.T., still impressed with what it delivered.

On the other hand though, it was apparent that P.T. would struggle to translate into a “full” horror game experience. Game systems are at an absolute minimum, giving the player little tools to interact with its fantastic world. The "throw you into the deep end" approach works brilliantly for a 30 minute game, but blindly stumbling through a 10-12 hour horror game would be abysmal. The play on repetition works for a chamber piece like P.T., but a bigger game requires forward momentum to keep players engaged. In this way, P.T. is actually quite awful at being a “playable teaser.” It works so much better as a standalone game. This is where it differs from Resident Evil 7: Beginning Hour.

P.T., and its famous hallway, is a much better as a standalone game
than a teaser for a larger project.

Launched on the same night as PlayStation’s E3 2016 press conference, Resident Evil 7: Beginning Hour is a roughly 30 minute demo for Capcom’s upcoming release. The demo takes place immediately following the events that transpired in Kitchen. The player awakes alone in a derelict house, blood on the floor and filled with memories of what has just transpired. You must navigate your way through the creepy rundown house to not only find your way out, but also piece together why you’re here in the first place. Playing Beginning Hour instantaneously brought me back to my time with P.T. You’re alone, walking through a hallway or two, in the creepiest house ever. The hallways are packed with secrets and hints at the larger narrative. A mysterious phone call, moving mannequins, split-second ghost woman appearances, Beginning Hour succeeds in creating a terrifying world to explore. Looking at the paintings hanging on the wall, listening to the creaks and cracks and growls of the house taps into the deeply ingrained fear of being unsafe in a traditionally safe space. The slow movement, the limited light source, the sense of impending dread all elicited that same spine-tingling unease I got while playing P.T.

Very different hallway, very similar scares. In a good way.

What I soon realized, however, was that playing Beginning Hour was a fundamentally different experience than playing P.T.. And that’s because Beginning Hour is a true playable teaser. The differences became evident quite quickly. For starters, Beginning Hour is a goal-oriented demo. You’re given the prompt “Exit the House” right as you start the demo. A quick scan of the first room you find yourself in informs the player of some of the game mechanics we’ll likely see in the full release of Resident Evil 7: Biohazard. You can find a VHS that’s missing a tape, with a clear “Press X to enter cassette” “You don’t have a tape” prompts. You find an electrical breaker box that’s missing a fuse with a “You must find a fuse.” As you explore you can find some bolt cutters conveniently placed just after you come across a chained up cabinet. Picking up the bolt cutters gives the player their first look at an inventory screen, which is classic Resident Evil through and through. These elements and more combine to tell the player a story that transcends narrative and atmosphere, but begins to inform on what they will be doing in an expanded version of this game. Beginning Hour lays a clear foundation for a 10-12 hour horror game in a way P.T. never did. But both are exceptional.

Beginning Hour gives players a great idea of what we'll be doing
in Resident Evil 7: Biohazard. Like looking for lock picks.

Being a true playable teaser isn’t objectively good or bad, however. I can appreciate the glimpse into gameplay and the work being done to establish Resident Evil 7: Biohazard’s world. I can also appreciate its clear lineage with P.T. in creating a standalone horror experience (it’s been confirmed the main character and events of Beginning Hour will not be a part of the final game). I love that Beginning Hour is a smart realization of where fans want horror games to be now and I love that Beginning Hour does a great job at being a great demo. On the other hand, I love that P.T. isn’t tasked with being a preview of what’s to come—in fact, I’d argue P.T. is better for it. It can be more experimental, more mysterious. It can do things 10-12 hour long games never could. Beginning Hour took me back to when I played P.T., but also established its own identity in the process. Experiences like P.T. and now Beginning Hour get me excited for where horror games are going. I’m glad I hazarded the house – there was a lot there to enjoy. 

On Horror, Games, Death, and Immersion

Article

Abstract: Horror is a balancing act between immersion, momentum and tension. The movie genre is one of my favorites for its ability to create and draw me into a new worlds. Horror is not my favorite game genre, however. Player deaths can break immersion and halt forward momentum, which weakens them as horror experiences. My favorite horror games, Dead Space, Resident Evil 4 and SOMA however, are able to find this balance and each accomplishes this feat it it’s own unique way.

Horror speaks to me. I love the thrills, chills, kills. All of it. Slashers and monsters and psychological and supernatural. Every October I throw together a Scare Fest list, compiling a bunch of horror movies to watch and review. This year I even started doing a special seasonal podcast in which my fiancée and I discuss a recent scary movie we’ve seen together: Snuggle & Scream.

There are a lot of reasons I love horror, too many to write out in this article. One of the main reasons, and the inspiration for this article, is immersion. The genre as a whole is routinely effective at world building. The movies craft their characters, motivations, and the antagonist  clearly—and have them fit into a cohesive world. The source material mandates this. To be scared you need to be involved. A part of that world. Often this can be difficult when the ‘truth’ of your world involves werewolves and ghosts and preternaturally strong psychopaths. Horror movies often create worlds entirely dissimilar to our own. So they work to create a setting detailed enough that the viewer is transported there. Once you’re in the world, you can be scared.

John Carpenter's The Thing brought me into a new world. A terrifying one.

The immersion typically found in horror films is a strange one, though. There’s limitations. You’re in the world, you are the characters… right up until they die. As a viewer, you’re free from the deaths and murder. In the best horror films, you’re affected by it as if you were the character themselves but there’s that crucial separation that occurs at the character’s last few moments. The observer-participant hybridization is something that continues to fascinate me about horror, and one of the main reasons it’s my go-to movie genre.

Horror’s observer-participant dynamic allows for several things, the most important of which is momentum. Deaths do not remove you from the experience. Quite the contrary, deaths are a key facet of the experience. Despite rapid ends to character arcs, you’re (almost) always treated with one continuous experience. Culling, whether it be of characters or questions, is additive in horror—it narrows the focus and builds towards the film’s conclusion.

In Alien, you are the crew of the Nostromo. Until you're not. Because they're dead.

Despite my fanaticism for horror movies, that level of adoration hasn’t directly translated to a passion for horror video games. Don’t get me wrong, I do love horror games. I’ll talk about my three favorites here shortly. Several horror games have even been seminal in the understanding and implementation of modern game design. I would say, however, that as a whole horror games struggle to recapitulate the feeling you get while watching a scary movie. All too often, horror games fail at preserving momentum.

How do horror games, even some of the best, struggle to maintain a brisk momentum throughout? It all comes back to immersion. Like I wrote above, in horror movies you’re immersed right until the point of death. Your immersion breaks for a few moments, and then you’re right back in with the characters who’re still alive. But dying is a serious issue in games. The immersion in games does not end when a character dies. You are that protagonist whether you die or not. Death results (usually) in a game over screen and being sent back to your last checkpoint. This loop is problematic in three important ways. First, you lose momentum. The actions of your hero are halted dead in her tracks, only to be repeated once you make your way back to where you died. Second, it breaks immersion. Dying and coming back to life five minutes before you ate it isn’t something that happens in real life, nor is it a part of the game world that’s ever explained. To clarify that last point: when you die and respawn in Outlast it doesn’t fit within the reality of the game. There’s no explanation to it. There isn’t something like “In this insane asylum, those confined within its walls are doomed to live and die endlessly.” Or something to that effect. You respawn in a horror game because you have to, not because it fits the truth of the world. Functionally, the game just pretends you didn’t die. And finally, player deaths remove tension. Knowing what killed you and where it’s hiding (usually) strips fear from the encounter, and makes the final experience weaker overall.

Friday the 13th had a great / terrible game over screen. Seeing this too often
can kill the 'horror' of your time with any horror game.

Horror works when you have a perfect balance of the three: immersion, momentum, and tension. Horror games work when the balance of difficulty and death is titrated in such a way that you need to just barely survive. You are constantly in fear of dying, but death comes infrequently. Because you’re ostensibly one of the few characters that survives the ordeal, or at the very least makes it to the end of the ordeal (i.e. the end of the game), death is more set-back than an intended possibility. So few games get this balance right. In some, you die far too often and it kills momentum, tension, and immersion. In others, you never die and the game loses its scariness, transforming into either an action or exploration game depending on the underlying systems. Fortunately, there are a select few horror games that do an excellent job at maintaining this delicate balance. They also happen to be my three favorite horror games of all time. Let me tell you about how all three get the balance of difficulty, death and momentum correct, each in their own unique way.

2008’s Dead Space, by EA Redwood Shores (a.k.a. Visceral Games now) is first on the list. Let me make something clear from the start. Unless you’re incredibly, overly, pain-stakingly cautious, and good at third-person shooters, you will die during your time with Dead Space. It’s going to happen. Isaac Clarke, space-engineer turned space-alien slayer, can die in some pretty gruesome ways. Why deaths work in Dead Space as opposed to other titles, though, is how intimately they are a part of the game’s narrative and world. Ok, sure, Isaac Clarke isn’t supposed to die and the game offers no explanation on why you respawn. Death in Dead Space, however, is edifying. It builds immersion. The mysterious necromorphs are at the heart of your experience. Necromorphs are these emaciated, gory humanoid forces of dismemberment and death. Throughout most of the game, though, their particular brand of evil is a mystery. Why they are, what they are, and what their purpose is. While the game offers other types of narrative to answer these questions, one of the key ways in which you begin to understand your foe is death. They ways in which they decapitate you, disembowel you, build Dead Space’s world. There aren’t very many characters with which to interact in Dead Space. The necromorphs have no other way to communicate with the player other than tearing you limb from limb, so your early deaths act as a conversation. On top of all that, the ways in which they kill the player (rending extremities from torso, generally) reinforces the central gameplay mechanic of ‘strategic dismemberment.’ Shooting off necromorph limbs is the only way to kill them. Well, that plus a swift stomp to their noggin. Your death works synergistically with both world building and gameplay. In that way, Dead Space finds it’s own way to balance player deaths with its horror intentions.

Deaths are used as both conversation & world building. They're essential
to your experience with Dead Space.

Resident Evil 4 is next on the list. I love the Resident Evil franchise, but it wasn’t until the fourth entry into the main series that it really clicked for me. And I think a large part of why it felt so good to play, and felt so authentically horror, is because it nailed the balance of death and momentum. What I didn’t expect, however, is that the infusion of better action elements would be the reason behind this balance working so well. Leon Kennedy isn’t your standard powerless horror protagonist: he’s a government agent who has already proven his skill at killin’ zombies. With that knowledge, it makes sense he comes equipped with plenty of tools to handle his situation: guns, knifes, grenades, you name it. And you know how to use them. In addition, you have access to a fairly generous merchant who shows up everywhere to keep your personal armory stocked. All of this is necessary though, because Resident Evil 4 pits you against unfathomable odds. While playing the game you always feel like you’re on the cusp of dying. After each fight you’re left with precious little health and even less ammo. But you made it out alive. Resident Evil 4’s scenarios are perfectly designed to give the player this feeling over and over again. Case in point is one of the game’s earliest encounters in the town square. The player is tasked with fighting off a seemingly endless horde of angry villagers. The fight can last upwards of 15-20 minutes. Every time I’ve played the scenario I feel like I’m teetering on the precipice of death—my health is too low so I’m forced to sprint to a distant house to hide and heal, or my ammo is low so I try to bait the angry mob to come at me one at a time by strategically running way and re-engaging. Sure, you can die (and I did), but with skillful play and the right difficulty setting (normal or hard depending on player skill) Resident Evil 4 kills the player only a precious handful of times, and has them spread out often enough they don’t severely impact immersion or momentum.

You might be a badass, but Resident Evil 4 continually finds way
to put you on the precipice of death.

The most recent addition to this list is Frictional Game’s SOMA. The game does so much exceptionally well, and it’s easily one of the best games I've played this year. On top of having an incredible and mature sci-fi narrative that leaves the player with lingering existential dread, SOMA also has created a stunningly immersive world that is reinforced by a perfectly crafted balance of death and momentum. Perhaps most importantly, SOMA tries to scare the player very differently than most other horror games. SOMA isn’t about the fear of death and dying, like in Dead Space or Resident Evil, but rather the fear that arises when you ask questions like ‘what is death’ or ‘what does it mean to die.’ SOMA would be terrifying even if it were impossible for the player to die. But there are monsters, and you can die. Smartly, SOMA moves away from one-hit-kills like those in games like The Evil Within or Amnesia: The Dark Descent. It’s always two. This maintains momentum and severely limits replaying sections. Further, monsters appear frequently (or infrequently) enough that you’re constantly on edge that they might appear, but you’re never bogged down having to move past monster after monster. It maintains their scare factor. And finally, SOMA gives the player interesting ways to avoid dying. Some enemies, for example, can only see you if you are looking at them. This creates a new kind of tension. The player not only must move without looking at the monster, but it also places you physically closer an enemy than most other games. That quasi-safety in proximity creates a near-death feeling horror strives for. As a result, SOMA is a fantastic horror experience. Game or not.

SOMA moves away from scaring the player with death. It scares the player
by making them think about what death actually is.

The best of the best, whether movie or game, balance the many tensions that exist in horror. Horror games must be exceeding hard to design in this way, which makes the exceptions I described above all the more worth commending. So maybe give one of them a shot this Halloween weekend. Happy Scare Fest everyone.

News & Views

10/10/15-10/16/15

News & Views is your source for the week’s best video game writing! I found a lot of great articles for you all to enjoy. Check out below for links to writing about the neuroscience of survival horror, colonialism in Metal Gear Solid V, and gaming’s reinforcement of the ‘American dream’.

And of course you can check out the brand new episode of The Impact Factor podcast that was posted today! You can subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, or if you prefer other methods, check out our SoundCloud. We’re on YouTube too!

Spotlight

Fight or Flight: The Neuroscience of Survival Horror

Maral Tajerian, Gamasutra

Worth Reading

It's still a man's, man's, man's world; Or, who is Nathan Drake?

Reid McCarter, Kill Screen

Placebo effect present in video games, say UK researchers

Chris Kerr, Gamasutra

The Colonialist Undertones of Metal Gear Solid V

Omar Elaasar, Paste

Gaming's Never-Ending Adolescence

Jeremy Parish, US Gamer

How a front page Reddit post affected the sales on an indie game

Askel Junkkila, Gamasutra

With Comments

How Videogames Are Saving the Symphony Orchestra

Sarah E. Needleman, Wall Street Journal

The Legend of Zelda symphonic performance on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert inspired me to include this article. Orchestrated video game music can be amazing. I’m so happy to hear that these kinds of performances are drawing huge audiences back to the concert hall. While I understand criticism from long-time orchestra fans, I find most of their complaints unfounded. Perhaps video game music will get a new crowd to attend Tchaikovsky?

Pain is temporary; quitting last forever

Riley Macleod, Kill Screen

Macleod gives a fascinating take on how video games have consistently reinforced for the idea of the ‘American dream.’ A dream that’s often an illusion, writes Macleod. His argument centers around how success is almost always represented as a feature of a person’s character, citing that in reality, you can do everything right and still fail. It’s a great perspective and well worth reading.

The Horror of Being Human

Kaitlin Tremblay, Unwinnable

Tremblay’s short piece about horror is a good one. Horror so often plays upon what it means to be humans, and the fear surrounding the human condition. Tremblay uses two of the most iconic video game horror franchises of all time, Resident Evil and Silent Hill to comment on this. To put it briefly, Resident Evil displays the fear of losing your physical self, and Silent Hill is all about the fear of losing your mental self.