This is the franchise that took Survival Horror forward after building on titles like Alone in the Dark. Here though, the franchise, or at least this demo, seems to take more of its cues from Silent Hill. Until you picked up an item in game, I thought this was the successor to P.T. or Silent Hills. It reminded me a lot of Silent Hill 4 the room, honestly. Let alone the heavy use of mannequins and things seemingly just appearing before you. Do note, there are spoilers that follow, and as noted the content shown in this demo may not appear in the final game.
What we see to begin with is information about a tape, with the cameraman being someone named Clancy. It discusses how it was found in the house the footage was taken in. The footage shows two people bound, and a camera in the room. They attempt to cut their bindings. Now we move onto the demo itself.
All right. After seeing Resident Evil 7 at E3, a little hands on time was necessary so let us get down to it. There is a vague sense of horror just starting in the dark with a small spotlight to see your surroundings. The ambient noise itself was horrifying because you could never exactly tell if it was coming from your own movement, the house’s structure creaking because of how derelict and run down it seems, or someone else moving around that you can not see separated from you by a wall or corner. Where the E3 presentation begins upstairs, this demo starts you in the room that ended in, the one with the TV. There are several things to note. First would be a paper note, which seems quite threatening. It states “I shall dash them upon the stones”. Moving around the room shows off the TV with a VCR, a fuse box with a missing fuse and a piano that the lid for the keys smashes down before the player can interact with any keys. From here we move out into the hallway. There is a small room to the side, with a door that looks like either a closet or a route to the basement but it’s all boarded up. Looking around, there are strange wicker dolls hanging from the ceiling. There is a locked door at one end and a mannequin finger in a drawer. There are also several doors that are all blocked off. This leads us to the front entrance way, with two options. Going upstairs or moving into the kitchen. Since E3 started upstairs, I decided to investigate. There are several mannequins without arms, so the finger makes little sense. There is button to activate some kind of stairs, but it doesn’t function. At least not yet. There is no phone like we had seen before. So this leads back down stairs.
The kitchen is very much like what we had seen. There is a disgustingly filled pot, plenty of drawers that open. The stove and fridge are full of plastic garbage bags it seems. There is a locked drawer but I never figured out what it takes to open. This takes us further down into another hallway. There is a locked cabinet, and a door further down the hallway. Continuing down takes us to what looks like a main door. There is the remains of a half rotted cow, several dolls hanging from the ceiling and more garbage bags. There is a bolt cutter embeded in this mess. The door at the end of the hallway is locked. Picking it up adds it to our inventory but also causes a doll to fall. So we take the bolt cutters back to the cabinet. Inside is the tape that was just sitting out in the television room of the first showing. Putting it in starts a playable video flashback. Here we see a film crew of a haunted house show.. The star of which is named Pete. Its producer and the cameraman named Clancy we are playing as in this segment. They came here to explore the house, and after some bickering find the front door locked. Of course, Andre kicks the front door in.
Once inside we see they had entered the door near to where we had found the bolt cutters outside of the video. We are told the farmhouse had been abandoned for around three years, and the date if the intro clip was accurate gives the video a current date of around June 1st, 2017 at 11:40 PM. The family is comprised of Jack and Marguerite Baker. They were said to have gone missing. Andre tells us that their son Lucas was known to be trouble however. At this point we lift the lid on the same pot we do in the current game and their isn\’t any visible festering decay. The room also lacks the number of trash bags strewn about, so the time frame between the two settings is uncertain though definitely connected. A month or so perhaps? At this point Andre is separate from the group and disappears. We again go into the television room, this time with it turned off with no apparent VCR on top.Pete finds a hidden trigger located in the fireplace that leads to hidden passageway that goes behind the wall. We find a ladder and Pete tells us to head down since we need to film him descending the ladder. When we get to the bottom, we see Andre near the wall with a tunnel past hem. As we approach he falls back on top of us with his eyes and mouth gushing blood. Not a pretty sight. A pair of boots approach from the direction of the tunnel and the video cuts out.
We cut back to the current day, and the note we saw when first waking up is right in front of us. It now has the word You, instead of Them scribbled over it in red with red on the back as though a bloody set of fingers had grasped it. Of course, trying the hidden switch in the fireplace works. We are able to enter the same back room we had seen before. It is mostly empty, except for a couple of boxes and some roaches near the hole going down. There is no ladder so we cannot go down this time, but right at the edge is a key labeled for the door. After we do so we head back towards the door to the main hall. As we do we see a figure walking buy in what may be overalls and is likely a member of the missing family.
We start to work our way through the house. As we approach the kitchen, we see cans rolling across the floor but no person. As we approach the hallway up ahead, a mannequin falls over that I don’t remember seeing in the hallway at all. When we enter the last room there is no sign of anyone. The door itself at the end of the hall is still locked but the key fits and opens it. It seems we are scott free. Whelp, I was wrong. A man says “Welcome to the Family son” and as we turn around he punches our lights out. He doesn’t look in the healthiest shape, with what appear to be lesions covering all his visible hands and face. The demo cuts back to the video we had seen before. We see Pete and Clancy trying to cut their bonds to escape but what appears to be a woman enters the room. She stabs through Pete and as we see her looming face the video again cuts out.
We see a screen that mentions the Family is waiting for us in early 2017, and notes the Resident Evil Ambassadors program while mentions the hashtag re7. We have a link to the program.
http://www.capcom.co.jp/ambassador/re_bh/us/
After hitting any buttons, it actually leads right back into the room we started in again. So I decided to check my inventory to see if it was like new game+. I don’t have anything, but I decide to check the switch and the hidden passage to see if I can just grab the key and get out again. This time, there is no key, but on top of the boxes back here is the missing fuse and it’s labelled for the stairs. Since the switch upstairs said stairs, I decide to try it out. Doing so lowers an attic stairway from the ceiling and I go up. You start to hear a phone ringing. the corridor has a door to the side, and going around the corner shows the end is barred. Entering the room gives us a couple of things. We see a note next to the phone showing a helicopter, and it has a note on the back asking “Are they watching us from the helicopter?”. The most striking thing, and the thing that links this most to Resident Evil franchise is the big honking Umbrella logo on the side of it. When we answer the phone, a voice say “I know who you are” and tells us we have “the power to choose”. It ends saying the choices may not work out how we think. <sarcasm>Not cryptic in the least.</sarcasm> Once we hang up the phone and go to pick it up again, all we get is a busy signal. A quick look around the room shows that nothing is in here with us, but then when you try to move the man from the other ending shows up to knock us out with the same tag line as before leading to the same film footage and ending.
This demo shows they really know how to play with expectations and hide layered nuances to the story. What seems completely unconnected at first ends up a very similar parallel to the events of the Arklay Incident of the very first game. These people have become infected by something, and we will delve right back in to the horror.
Here is the E3 trailer itself again, which does cover a lot of the area seen in the demo, it’s just played in a sequentially different order. I’m adding it in as a showcase of the building, and some of the things shown from outside of it.
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