Back to the Past: Why I'm Still Playing Resident Evil

You’re a Special Forces police officer who has been dispatched to investigate a bizarre helicopter crash in the centre of an eerie forest. After discovering nothing but a severed limb amongst the wreckage and regrouping with your other, presumably shaken squad mates, you try to make sense of what you’ve discovered in the thick undergrowth of Raccoon forest. There’s no time though, rabid dogs accost you almost instantly, and you have no choice but to sprint for cover. Something, anything, to put between you and your pursuers will be enough to let you catch your breath, even if it’s just for a few seconds of respite. Clearing the mile-high trees, you reach an intimidating structure – a mansion – in the middle of nowhere: unbeknownst to you, this is the real reason you’re here, and the beginning of the true nightmare.

Forcing your way through the rusted doors of the Spencer mansion and into the dimly lit foyer, only a handful of your fellow Special Tactics And Rescue Service (S.T.A.R.S) members remain from the frantic dash to safety, and two of these members (Jill Valentine and Chris Redfield) are your conduits for the horrors that await. It’s one heck of a premise, and one that would later be credited as the progenitor of the modern-day survival-horror genre.

The Resident Evil series may have taken a rather large diversion from its roots in recent years, but earlier entries in the zombie conspiracy narrative provided some of the most memorable moments in all of gaming; by both design and presentation. This is the first genuinely unsettling game that ever entered the disc drives of many gamers – me included – and one of the reasons that I still revisit the mansion and its horrors almost 20 years after its initial release.

The voice acting of the original – not the GameCube remake – release back in 1996 may have been infamously bad, but the zombie-plagued mansion of Capcom’s original release didn’t need a stellar voice cast; the atmosphere and struggle for survival are what made Resi so replayable.

In this little slice of hell, you weren’t armed to the teeth, you weren’t inundated with ammunition, your health didn’t replenish itself over time, and most importantly of all, you couldn’t even rely on auto-saves. The now iconic save system, in which your progress could be saved through use of a typewriter, ensured that every step, bullet and first-aid spray you consumed had to count, because if you perished, your stiff corpse was dragged all the way back to the point in which you last saved your progress.

The inability to record such progress without ink ribbons further piled on the pressure of how to proceed. Did you decide to push ahead through the dank corridors of the labyrinthine mansion, not knowing what lay ahead, or did you retrace your steps back to a previously discovered antiquated typing machine, simply so you could ensure that you didn’t have to risk overcoming those monstrous tarantulas if you copped it?

Cautious exploration is a big part of Resident Evil’s charm, and it’s a concept that has recently been expanded upon by games like the Souls series. For every door you unlocked, puzzle you solved and diary you read, you were rewarded with a greater understanding of what the mansion you were traversing was truly built for, and that was remarkable. With every return visit to the Umbrella facility disguised as a family home, I absorb every last ounce of detail possible. Sure, I already know what each and every scrap of paper has scrawled on it, but I read it anyway, because it’s part of what immerses you in the world. Similarly, puzzle solutions and item locations have been committed to memory, but the allure of additional playthroughs never diminishes. No matter how well acquainted I think I am with the world, I test myself. Do I know the specific location of the magnum? Have I remembered what’s behind the enigmatic tiger statue tucked away in a small alcove? Is Yawn the snake really as difficult as I remember him to be? These are all questions that I almost will myself to forget the answers to, so I can return and rediscover them as if they were fresh revelations.

It’s a testament to Shinji Mikami’s excellent direction that I still consider Resident Evil one of my most treasured gaming experiences even today. Any other title with the same format and contents could easily have been a throwaway experience after one completion, but not here. With the upcoming release of Mikami’s The Evil Within this year, we may just see a return to the roots of the survival-horror genre that Resident Evil kicked off. But for now, I’m going back to the mansion; I heard there’s a secret lab under it somewhere.