Summary

Resident Evil is a survival horror game (some would say the definer of the genre) originally released in 1996. It was developed and published by Capcom for the PlayStation. We will be playing the remastered HD version that came out in 2002 and got released for a number of consoles and later the PC. In Resident Evil, you play as either Chris Redfield or Jill Valentine who are sent to investigate a series of bizarre murders. Someone didn't get the memo that zombies were back...

Resident Evil has been on my mind to play for a while. I knew I wanted to eventually get to this and the Silent Hill series. Recently, I've come upon the idea of filling out my personal knowledge of the classics and going through the best and most notable games that I have not myself played. Thus, we find ourselves here ready to die a number of times while solving silly puzzles.

Review

Pretty good. Definitely could feel the old game-ism, but it wasn't bad or anything. It felt very familiar, even though I had never played it before. I'm left quite interested in playing more of the series. I did find the general puzzle nature of the mansion to feel quite silly. I'm not sure how much of that is intentionally meant to be funny or if this is just the 90s returning for a bit to play with us or what. Are we being self-aware when the mansion is completely insane and playing with established tropes? Or is this the trope establisher and we were totally serious at the time? Not quite sure.

I do think the remaster was quite well done. Graphics were surprisingly good for a 2002 game. And it was generally pretty friendly to play. I don't know what all changes were made from the original to the remaster, other than the graphics in general. But it didn't feel bad playing to my modern eyes and hands, so I would say they probably did a good job. I'd like to get rid of the ink ribbons. I understand why they're there, but this isn't an arcade. We don't need to worry about a limited number of quarters we can put in the machine. I never ran out of them, but it still just feels kinda ick. I'd just rather be able to quit whenever. There's just modern conveniences that I would prefer over the tension having a resource be limited gives. Sometimes you get a phone call or you gotta go do something. Adulting happens.

I liked the overall structure of the game, in terms of exploration. I love when you have a relatively small setting that loops back on itself repeatedly. During the playthrough, I compared it to Dark Souls 1's world design. Hope that that trend continues in the future. I don't necessarily need for every game in the series to be that way. It was just a fun aspect of this one so I hope they revisit it.

I liked Chris as well. He had this weird charisma to him. The guy barely speaks in the game, but I got a decent amount of personality from him. Maybe I'm just a basic gay who saw a big handsome military muscle man and gave him a thumbs up. Whatever, sue me. I think it's the animations that made him stand out. They're really quite good for the time. I'm used to the scrappy underdog barely getting by, and it was interesting having someone actually posing with the pistol and all that, creeping up and down stairs. It was very additive. I hope we see more of him in either case.

I started Resident Evil because I knew the first couple games in the series were considered some of the best survival horror games of all time. And for the year of 2025, I am (was, if you're reading this later) working my way through a Best Of list to better educate myself on great games I'd never played. I could see myself working through much of this series, however. Not just those first couple. I've seen bits and pieces of the big mommy one and it seemed quite fun, so I'm probably gonna finish up Fallout and put a semi-permanent Resident Evil in its timeslot. At least for the time being. I do like to skip around between genres.

On to Resident Evil 2 (1998)

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