Bee Barnes
MINIMAL TO NO SPOILERS AHEAD
With the release of Resident Evil: Requiem barely two months away, I decided it’s finally time for me to catch up with the series. I’ve played the Resident Evil games up through RE: 4. Admittedly, I struggled to engage with 5 and 6 and didn’t finish my play-throughs. Maybe after Requiem, I’ll go back. We’ll see. For now, let’s talk about my experience with Resident Evil: Biohazard.
If you’re not familiar with the story of Biohazard, let me fill you in real quick. No major spoilers. Just the stuff you’d read on the back of the game box.
A man named Ethan Winters gets a message from his missing—presumed dead—wife who asks him to rescue her from a rundown plantation in a fictional town in Louisiana (Southern United States). When he arrives, he finds a family and their once beautiful home corrupted by a festering influence. In order to save his wife and make it out alive, Ethan must solve puzzles and eliminate enemies while navigating the booby-trapped halls. I won’t go any farther than that, but it’s a very interesting story, and the way it unfolds is very well done.
In the grand scheme of things, I’ve only recently become a fan of the series. The first Resident Evil game I played was in 2021 on Steam. I dove into the games and devoured them one right after the next. My whole world became Resident Evil. By the time I got to 5 and 6, I was tired of the series. Content fatigue, brought on by my own lack of forethought.
A friend noticed I was working my way through the games and gifted me a copy of Biohazard. I downloaded it and couldn’t get past the initial chase from ‘Daddy’. The first-person perspective made the scares more personal. I couldn’t handle it and immediately uninstalled it. My love for horror could eclipse buildings were it made manifest. Unfortunately, I am equally a big ol’ chicken.
My favorite game in the series is Resident Evil 2. I’ve played the remake a dozen times. One of the scariest parts of that game for me was the relentless Tyrant that stalked the player throughout the map. They’ve recreated that gut-lurching “oh god, he’s coming” feeling in the character of ‘Daddy’, AKA Jack Baker–the reigning patriarch of the Baker family.
The thing is, Biohazard is way scarier than RE: 2. The developers’ choice to make Biohazard a first-person shooter, rather than the comfortable third-person perspective I was used to, made the horror hit that much harder. I didn’t have the cute little avatar of Leon to be my proxy anymore. There’s nothing between me and the festering wound of a world that Biohazard has laid out for me.
The atmosphere is strong. The jump scares aren’t cheap, and they aren’t constant. That builds the sort of tension that made the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end. The placement of the enemies and the timing of when they respawn mixed in with the pacing of the stories blend to create this wonderful, terrifying experience. I’m very glad I put my brave-boy pants on and gave this game another shot.
Every aspect of the game is crafted to tell a story, and holy heck did they knock it out of the park. The sound team merits special mention. Wow. While the rest of the game was above my expectations, the sound design stood above the rest. Every little creaky floorboard, each drip of black goop, the wind groaning through the broken windows. It all comes together to create something that has me holding my breath just getting Ethan down the hallway.
And I never got used to it! Even at the end of the game, my shoulders were up by my ears from the sound cues. Maybe that’s because I played this almost non-stop over the course of two days, but regardless. The sound design haunted me. Fantastic work.
While I haven’t consumed other reviews on this game yet, I’m absolutely certain I’m not the only one to notice that the franchise has gone back to horror as its roots. Not only have the devs recommitted to scaring the pants off the player, but they’ve written a love letter to the subgenres of horror that came before their own fantastic entry.
Each member of the Baker family represents one of the pillars of horror. To avoid significant spoilers, I won’t go into great detail, but they’re literally the descriptions used on steam so I don’t feel too bad in this particular case. Survival horror, body horror, gore, and psychological horror. The game does an amazing job of making the player sit inside that subgenre just enough to get your heart pumping at a rate you didn’t know it could reach before sitting you out and kicking you down the road to experience the next subgenre.
I do need to take a moment to appreciate how the game prepares you for those escalations, though. The world prepares you to see something disgusting, then when you say, “Ugh, gross,” it laughs in your face.
It spins you around and says, “you think that’s gross? Then take a look at this!” while showing you some horrifying, goopy stuff. Actually, there is some pretty gnarly imagery throughout the game, and there’s one part I spammed X to speed through as fast as possible. Each boss battle is another spin, but fortunately, I never got too nauseous to keep playing.
In my opinion, the environment is the first escalation. The entire manor has rotted almost throughout with black tar fungus (not the real-world one commonly found on maple leaves btw). Outside, the buildings are beyond disrepair. Huge chunks have caved inward. Awnings have collapsed. Stairs and walls aren’t always steady. Then, the further we get into the story, the more the escalations focus on the Baker family and the player until all that’s left are two key characters.
Such a good game. Dang.
I’m eager to do some achievement hunting during my second play-through. I bought a physical copy for my PS5 (got it on sale!), so it’ll be interesting to compare the two experiences visually. Is Biohazard my favorite Resident Evil game now? Does it outshine my love for the RE: 2 remake? I think I’ll know for sure by the end of my second round.
Now, let’s talk ratings!
They should have been fighting outside than just beening inside the house all the time it should a been outside more it wood of been better