No Guns, Flamethrowers, or Chainsaws: Resident Evil 7 Does Not Need Weapons

We were as excited as anybody about the new Resident Evil demo back in June.  The demo doesn’t feel anything like a Resident Evil game.  No zombies appeared.  We never found any weapons we could use (though we later found that axe).  There wasn’t any way to die outside of completing the demo.  Other than being in a creepy old house, there was hardly anything we’d recognize as a Resident Evil game.  Actually, the demo feels much more like a homage to PT than anything else, which isn’t a bad thing.  But, as good as it was, the Resident Evil demo didn’t have the longevity or legacy that PT did, and the demo needed a few more secrets and random events to keep people interested. One thing the game does not need, however, is weapons.  In fact, we’d argue that Resident Evil 7 needs to be the first Resident Evil game without guns.

Never, ever go first.

To understand why Resident Evil needs to avoid guns, it’s important to understand what Resident Evil games have become in the last few years.  Like other franchises like Halo and Assassin’s Creed, Resident Evil definitely needs a new direction.  After hitting a high water mark with Resident Evil 4, the game had made some decisions that haven’t worked out well.  For example, adding cooperative play (which sounded like a good idea) in Resident Evil 5 changed the nature of the game considerably.  It’s fun to play with a buddy, but it’s really hard to be scared when you have a partner, and the game was far more cooperative shooter than survival horror.  For us, whether or not the game was fun to play was overshadowed by the game’s uncomfortable race dynamics.  Then came Resident Evil 6 which was, inarguably, not all that fun.  The games by that point had drifted far from their origins of a limited-resource haunted house exploration into a global, World War Z-style shoot-em-up adventure.  Resident Evil had become more of a cooperative shooter like Gears of War and had let go of the survival horror elements that gave it its identity.

I don’t think Millennial gamers are gonna know what this device is.

So we were left with something of a void for horror games.  Dead Space seemed to be angling to take over the title of scariest game, but then came Dead Space 3 which made all the same mistakes Resident Evil had in its later iterations (i.e., becoming a cooperative shooter and abandoning its horror roots).  In the absence of Resident Evil or Dead Space, other games have moved in to fill that vacancy by creating a sense of horror by making your character completely vulnerable to whatever dangers you encounter.  Most notably – to us – has been Outlast, a game that puts you in constant danger without any ability to defend yourself.  We liked the original Outlast and loved the Whistleblower DLC (and we can’t wait for the sequel).  The Amnesia games have also done well exploring this space, as did Alien Isolation. Heck, we really enjoyed Among the Sleep, another first-person horror game in which you play as a toddler navigating through a creepy dreamworld.  These games managed to scare us the way Resident Evil used to, by making us feel completely powerless against the horrors out there.

As the graphics get better and more detailed, the house looks worse and worse.

Resident Evil is smart to move into this arena, but we’re concerned about some reports that the game will have “chainsaws,” “shotguns” and “flamethrowers.”  Last night, I was playing the new and improved version of the demo and I found something that truly terrified me, handgun ammunition.  Sure, it’s possible that the game might be able to balance some weapon use while still maintaining that sense of vulnerability (Alien: Isolation did this well), but we we’d prefer the simplicity of the unarmed protagonist.  I think the moment the Resident Evil demo stops being scary is when you find that axe; now you no longer feel scared of what’s in the house, you just start having fun putting dents in everything.  The final game needs to keep us defenseless to keep us focused on survival.  I don’t think the final game needs zombies, or the T-virus, or mutants, or the Umbrella Corporation to be a success, it just needs to be scary.

I’m not saying you won’t WANT a gun in Resident Evil 7, just that the game will be better without them.

So we’re hoping the final game resist the urge to give us weapons and keeps the game tense and terrifying.  We’re heartened by the reports we hear about our protagonist being fairly defenseless though the recent trailer seems to show your character finding a gun.  We hope Resident Evil resists the urge to become a shoot-em-up and gives us something more terrifying.  Before that demo appeared in June, we hadn’t been scared in a Resident Evil game in a long time.  We’re really hoping we get to have that experience in the series again.