#oneaday Day 870: Resident... EEEEEEVIL

Someone (I'm not sure who, since there was no gift note on it) bought me Resident Evil 7 for my birthday, so I figured it was probably high time I checked out the series as a whole.

Back in the ol' PlayStation and Dreamcast days, I used to rather like the series, but to my shame I've never played Resident Evil 4 or any of the other ones that came after that — and I've found it rather hard to go back to the old ones because the control schemes were horrid back in the day, and feel even worse now we're all even more accustomed to proper analogue control.

So I decided to nab myself copies of all the PlayStation 4 releases, since they were all pretty cheap on Amazon. Call it a birthday present to myself or something — plus it's always nice to have the entirety of a series on a single platform.

I've spent a few hours playing Resident Evil Zero this evening. I know that's not necessarily the best place to start, but it is one of the pre-Resident Evil 4 games in the series that I've never played through to completion — or indeed very far past the initial "train" section. I've been enjoying the experience quite a bit, as this is a type of game we don't really get these days outside of the indie sphere. (Caveat to that statement: I haven't played Resident Evil 7 yet, so I have no idea what sort of game that is and how it compares to the more "action-oriented" installments.)

Specifically, I've been enjoying the amount of lateral thinking involved, particularly in terms of inventory management and getting puzzles solved between the two playable characters. It's genuinely satisfying to figure things out for yourself, and for the most part in a lot of modern games, that actual aspect of "puzzle solving" is largely absent. Just something as simple as having to go into your inventory and choose "use" on an item rather than the game taking care of it for you is a forgotten art — though the Resident Evil series has always been good enough to automatically use items like keys when it's blatantly obvious what they're for.

I remember the first time I played Devil May Cry on the mistaken assumption that it would be a Resident Evil-like game — as many of us assumed back when it first came out — and being disappointed that you didn't need to manually use inventory items to solve puzzles. And I've disliked the whole "you have the right item, so just interact with the right hotspot to use it automatically" idea ever since; while having to use your inventory is undeniably clunky, there's just something much more satisfying about doing it yourself. You feel like you solved the puzzle, rather than the game solving it for you.

And talking of puzzles, I miss survival horror games with gratuitously stupid, incongruous puzzles to solve under critical circumstances. To finish the first part of Resident Evil Zero, you have two maths puzzles to solve while under a strict time limit. Dumb? Absolutely. But I love it.

Part of the reason I've been playing this this evening is that I'm considering doing some sort of lengthy, ongoing feature over on Rice Digital about the series, as part of the hype surrounding Resident Evil Village's release. Seems as good a time as any to dive into the series in depth, and I may as well do it for the day job while it's relevant!