Resident Evil Survivor*

 

I played Resident Evil Survivor*. It was fine?

I played this on an emulator, see below for details

I initially played through this about a week ago and had some pretty harsh things to say about it, but after revisiting it I think I've come around on it.

I suppose I should preface this with how I played the game. While I've been able to play and buy all of the others through various online storefronts, there really isn't any way to try this game outside of hunting down a copy on eBay and, for myself at least, overpaying some reseller doesn't really feel that much more legitimate than, well, finding it through alternative means. When I can I'm still trying to get these things officially if only for my own peace of mind, however misguided that may be.

Suffice it to say, as a result of all this I played the game on an emulator. Because of that, however, not only was I able to use and abuse save-states, but it gave me an opportunity to play a modded version of a PSOne game. Resident Evil Survivor, if you aren't aware, is a first-person light-gun game that initially shipped with support for the "GunCon" peripheral in Japan. When it came stateside, however, that functionality was dropped (video game guns were a hot-button topic in the US in the early 2000s) so it was only playable with a controller. Thanks to the power of The Internet, though, someone added GunCon support back in to the American copy of the game and that's the version I ended up playing. While I don't have a GunCon, my emulator let me set up mouse support to replicate that peripheral.

That mouse support may have been one of the reasons I wasn't hot on this game initially however. While aiming with a mouse is much snappier than with a gamepad, the GunCon seemingly only had three buttons so controls for this game (even after remapping things) were awkward at best. The input for running is very similar to the input for walking backwards, the menus are opened and closed by pressing two buttons simultaneously, and multiple inputs would frequently not register (or would not stop registering), though I imagine that last one has more to do with my unconventional setup than the game itself. When the controls worked it was great because I could effectively think of this as a mouse and keyboard shooter, but all of the headaches involved in setting it up probably weren't worth the effort.

I think it's funny that this is basically Ethan's outfit from RE8

(but maybe I'm getting ahead of myself)

The thing that made me enjoy this game, to my surprise, was playing it with a controller. Yes, moving the reticle could be slow and it was easy to miss shots, but beyond that it controlled like a Resident Evil game. Tank controls suddenly felt so much easier to manage with a d-pad and menus could be reliably opened. While I'd been thinking of this more as something akin to a Time Crisis, this really was a first-person Resident Evil. Running past enemies was almost always an option.

The Resident Evil of it all is a big reason I started to enjoy this. While there aren't necessarily any "puzzles" there are a fair amount of locked doors that you'll need to backtrack to after finding a key. Many of the enemies and environments feel directly lifted from those earlier games (even though this is set in a new location) and seeing some of those enemies' attack patterns up close felt cool; Hunters would jump out of your view before coming down to lunge at you and dogs would charge towards you before running away. These may have been easy to kill in those other games with their generous auto-aim but it's a different case entirely when you have to be the one to line up those shots.

 

Seeing one of these walk in out of the darkness also feels way scarier

To make it feel even more like a Resident Evil game, this was also designed with multiple playthroughs in mind. On a handful of occasions you'll find a key before being presented with three locked doors. Maybe you'll investigate a church, or a kitchen, or a movie theatre, but whichever you pick you'll be locked out seeing the other two. There are weapons unique to each route, so a completionist would need to see all three to get the full set, and there are also discrete bits of text or lore locked behind each route. In the same way that playing the A/B stories of RE2 fleshed the story out, seeing all three gave me a better grasp on what was going on at the island. These paths all converge at a certain point, but then there'll be another choice with another three routes, and yet another later on. My second playthrough gave me a boss fight against a thing I had no idea even existed in my first run through while the stuff I saw the third time around gave me some context for why people with guns were suddenly everywhere. All in all, it's a pretty novel thing because I assumed this would only be "Resident Evil" in a superficial sense.

As far as the story and voice acting were concerned though, it was maybe a bit too close in quality to the original Resident Evil which, after 2 and 3's marked improvement, was a pretty huge step back. The story opens on some generic dude with amnesia and isn't helped by the fact that his voice acting is pretty rough. I probably shouldn't have expected much from the plot (a spinoff's not ever going to be that significant to the setting) but I thought it was a shame that there weren't even any memorable characters.

 

 

This game has some good quotes to add to the list

It's not an incredible game but looking back on my time with it I'm glad I played it. It's a fun enough relic of the era, at the very least.

I was initially planning to just bundle my thoughts about this and its sequel into one post later (I plan to play the second one Soon™), but I had way more to say about this game than I thought I would.

Lastly, given how hard my opinion on this game flipped, I feel I owe Resident Evil 3 another shot. Maybe I was too hard on that.

*It's called "Gun Survivor" in Japan and I still can't decide if that's a better or worse title