Grade: A
Lordy. The Resident Evil survival horror series is three decades old. It probably qualifies by now as Sitting Tenant Evil. Picture it snacking on flies in just the sort of dingy, hasn’t-been-tidied-for-30-years rent-controlled apartment that would make a good setting for a scene in the game. We’re still waiting for the instalment in which the Umbrella Corporation – a biotech firm that makes Purdue Pharma look like a model of caution and probity – faces a class-action lawsuit (X button to file an amicus brief; circle button to object in cross-examination), so for now here’s more of the glorious same. After all these years, it’s still capable of being ace.
The narrative alternates between two characters, series veteran Leon (now a grizzled thirtysomething) and fresh meat Grace, an FBI analyst with a manic pixie dreamgirl crop and a Dark Past. Default settings are third-person for Leon’s action-oriented bits – which see you moving merrily through zombies with (among other things) a chainsaw – and first-person for Grace, who does a bit more cowering, skulking, trembling and hiding.
It’s always dark, something’s always about to jump out and go boo, and the chief villain looks like Doc Brown from Back to the Future if he’d been pickled in something unsavoury like one of those thousand-year eggs you don’t eat in Chinese restaurants. Anyway, it’s bliss. There are puzzles to solve, doors to creak open, conspiracies to unravel, horrid toilets and, just like the good old days, green herbs lying around in all sorts of unlikely places. And – to the probable confusion of Gen Z players – you still save your progress on a typewriter. ‘You are dead,’ the game over screen will tell you, often. But, it should add, Resident Evil lives.
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