Resident Evil

I am incredibly late to this party, but that first Resident Evil is a pretty good game.

This series is something that's always been a bit of a blindspot for me. I've been aware of its popularity and have had people try to get me to play them for a very long time, but for one reason or another I kept bouncing off of this original game every time I tried to start it. It's an obtuse game and the opening can be rough if you're not willing to be patient with it and I eventually just assumed that maybe these original games weren't for me. Enough time has passed that I felt it was worth giving it another shot, and with it now being October this'd be a great way to get me in the Halloween spirit.

I played the "PSOne Classic" of this on the PS3, for reference 

Why start with the PS1 game, though, and not the (apparently widely believed to be better) remake that came a few years later? Well, back in 2015 I played through all of the Metal Gear games for the first time and I found it fascinating to watch a series that prolific and iconic find its footing and evolve over the course of decades, and while the original might not be the easiest or most forgiving place to start I wanted to see how this series actually began.

With all of that out of the way, let me just say that I really liked this game. It's definitely an artifact of its time and it's far from perfect, but I was constantly surprised at how effective it still was as being a horror game. The infamous "dog hallway" made me jump every time I had to play through that bit and is honestly just a really solid jumpscare. While it was less of an issue as Jill, Chris's playthrough constantly made me nervous I was going to run out of ammo; for a portion of the later section with Hunters I had used up basically everything and was down to just a few pistol shots (and barely any healing items) and that made navigating the mansion extremely tense. 

I still feel a bit odd about the Jill/Chris split though. I get that it's a way to add replayability, but the end result feels a bit uneven as a result. The story that you get with Chris feels more fleshed out than with Jill (Chris seems to have more of a reaction to the plot developments and Wesker's actions are more apparent) and the balance changes between the two's gameplay leads to Jill feeling like an Easy mode compared to Chris's Hard, but very little of that is signposted beforehand and these differences seem arbitrary at best. Jill is the Master of Unlocking and she also has access to a "Bazooka" whereas Chris has to scrounge for keys and is effectively missing one of the most powerful weapons in the game for no real logical reason.

I liked that Jill and Chris had unique animations here

While I did enjoy seeing a location I was intimately familiar with be (slightly) different on my second go-around, I can't help but wonder if it might have been a tighter experience if they had just focused on one character, or at least made the two's plots more noticeably different.

I don't mean to be a downer, I realize I got a bit sidetracked. As a whole I deeply enjoyed this game and it was cool to see where it all began given how massive and influential this franchise would go on to become.

The game's age honestly didn't bother me as much as I thought it might. I love some chunky pixels and character models and the tank controls, once you adjust to them, are not at all a problem. The voice acting was... actually as bad as I had been led to believe (I thought everyone was exaggerating but, no, it's filled with questionable line reads and a sometimes outright strange script). It rides the line between bad and being enjoyably bad, and that combined with some of the contrivances that happen during the story adds to the B-movie vibe it, at times, seems to be going for. There's also the weird basement clown music which is, uh, at least memorable.

All in all, I had a very good time with this game and I'm looking forward to starting Resident Evil 2 and seeing how well that one's aged.

Here are my completion screens, by the way, for posterity's sake.