Destiny was my calming chaser to follow every nerve-wracking session of Alien: Isolation. I felt jittery down to my fingers and my toes, too alert and nervous to head to bed and get some sleep. I loved the game, but the first-person perspective would gradually become too much for me to bear. I never completed it. A couple years later, Capcom would release the Resident Evil VII: The Beginning Hour gameplay teaser. Despite there being no proper risk throughout the demo, I felt that same sense of frightened nervousness as I had playing Alien: Isolation.

As a result, Resident Evil VII: Biohazard was the first mainline entry in the franchise I had not purchased since discovering Resident Evil Remake on the GameCube. I had concluded that first-person horror and I just did not mix.

Yet I could not hold back my excitement when I saw the trailers for Resident Evil Village. Just as VII: Biohazard seemed to call back to that old mansion of the first game, Village seemed to be beckoning back to the rural European hamlets and castles of Resident Evil IV. There was no way I could avoid this one. However, I felt it necessary to go back and play through Resident Evil VII and familiarize myself with fresh-faced protagonist Ethan Winters.

I’m glad I did, and I’m just as glad to have done so on stream. The crowd of viewers peering over my metaphorical shoulder provided a calming effect to what would have been a dreadfully nerve-wracking sense of isolation. Though they often mocked my decisions or frightful yelps, it allowed me the courage to creep forward through the Baker household… even if it was on the easiest, most cowardly difficulty setting. Nonetheless, Resident Evil VII captured so much of what I loved about the earlier games in the franchise while carving new, gruesome and terrifying territory for the survival horror franchise.

...mostly.

While the plot of the original Resident Evil and its 2002 remake were your typical cheesy B-Movie absurdity, the documents and history found within the halls of the Spencer mansion revealed compelling, memorable tragedies of innocent victims to an irresponsible ambition. The core narrative brought to greater light in the remake was that of eccentric architect George Trevor and his family. His uncanny imagination and engineering prowess were the primary contributors to the Spencer mansion’s many traps and hidden passages, yet were also secrets that made the man an unsuspecting liability to client Oswell E. Spencer. George, his wife and his daughter were invited to the mansion by the future founder of Umbrella Corporation under the pretense of offering them a vacation. Instead, his family was the victim of several early experiments into the T-Virus, and George Trevor himself was condemned to die. Traversing a hidden passage he himself had designed as an escape route, the architect instead found his own tombstone.

There’s still a degree of camp and silliness to this absurd story of an imaginative architect trapped in the home of his own making, yet the manner in which it was told felt like the real heart and narrative to Resident Evil. The true monster was never a zombie, a man-eating dog, a monstrous reptilian hunter, or the hulking and stalking tyrant. It was always Oswell E. Spencer and his merciless, selfish ambition.

As the franchise went on, Capcom seemed to lean further and further into the campy B-movie narrative while abandoning the more serious tragedy of the Trevors. Resident Evil IV would be the apex of this form of story-telling, where snarky boy scout Leon S. Kennedy would respond to self-serious villain monologues with a cheesy, often dorky, quip of his own. The story was absurd, but the game itself was winking right back at you.

Resident Evil V, on the other hand, seemed completely unaware of just how silly and bad its own narrative was, and by the over-the-top and convoluted sixth entry you got the feeling that Capcom was convinced their story was actually good. This trend continued into the Revelations spin-offs, with the first being mind-bogglingly nonsensical in its spaghetti plate of convoluted twists and turns, and the second incapable of letting go of past villains or their legacies.

Which is perhaps why Resident Evil VII was such a welcome surprise. Just as the true heart of the original Resident Evil was the mansion and the tragedy of the Trevor family, Resident Evil VII followed the unfortunate fate of the Baker family and their household. Rather than learning about their demise in hindsight, however, the player is instead witness to the monstrous transformation of a seemingly normal group of people.

It’s not the monstrosity of the Baker family that is so effective, but the visible humanity on display. Your introduction to their dynamic is at a dinner table. The eldest son chuckles and plucks food at their guest, trying to have fun at this stranger’s expense. The mother excitedly encourages their guest to try the meal she spent so long preparing, and is understandably insulted when said dinner guest spits the food out. The father is angered and frustrated at both his misbehaving son for being rude as well as to the guest’s disregard towards his wife’s feelings.

What causes these otherwise normal human behaviors to be unsettling is the table full of randomly assorted organs and body parts, the violence of the father’s discipline, and the “aw golly gee” response the son gives to his arm being hacked off. Oh, let’s not forget the father shoving a knife into the guest’s – and therefore Ethan’s, and therefore player’s – mouth for spitting out his wife’s food.

Anyone can make a monster, and anyone can make a gorefest. That doesn’t mean it is easy to make these things scary, but it is far easier to tap into our natural, psychological fears of the unknown and bodily harm by relying on these two crutches of horror. It is another thing altogether to combine madness and sadism with a seemingly normal family in order to generate something truly unnerving yet empathetic. Resident Evil VII‘s Baker family all have unique personality traits that govern their responses to Ethan as an intruder. Father Jack Baker is mocking and often cracks jokes, challenging the player to put up more of a fight. He dares to show Ethan some truly horrifying imagery, as if toying with the player’s own expectations as to what should and shouldn’t be happening. The mother Marguerite Baker feels unappreciated by Ethan, expressing her anger by first trying to keep him away from that which she most treasures, and then trying to murder him outright. She was the first to be contaminated, and was the one most vulnerable due to her own self-perceived sense of value (which I must be vague about in order to preserve at least some material for those curious enough to play through themselves).

It is the son, however, that reveals the true tragedy of the Bakers. While he is physically impacted by the contagion that has spread throughout the household, it is revealed through documents scattered across the premises that he was always mentally disturbed. If anything, the contagion has allowed Lucas to openly behave as he desires, and therefore to perceive his circumstances as a newfound freedom.

This revelation strikes hard, as it indicates to the player that this otherwise loving family was always caught on the rails of a tragic disaster to their loving home. The contagion merely accelerated and transformed the nature in which that tragedy unfolded.

While the Baker family are the heart of Resident Evil VII’s narrative, they are also the core to its mechanical appeal. Each one is unpredictable despite following a similar set of formulas. The player is first permitted to explore a building on the Baker estate in safety. A wandering threat, typically in the form of Jack or Marguerite Baker, is then introduced to interfere with the player’s calm investigation. This increased tension and possibility of harm will inevitably come to a climactic confrontation, forcing the player into an arena from which the only escape is the incapacitation of their opponent. The more SAW and escape-room inspired Lucas throws a wrench into these expectations somewhat, but even his maniacal madhouse follows a similar steady pace of rising and released tension. A dramatic and tense conflict is always followed by a sense of calm, and often one necessary for the player to catch their breath and compose themselves. The game will gradually begin to build that tension back up little by little, but allowing the player those moments to exhale and check their pulse is necessary in order to prevent them from becoming too stressed.

If the game were just focused on the Bakers and exploring their estate, then it would be a brilliantly executed game and perhaps the best of the franchise in terms of horror.

Unfortunately, the Molded exist, and the Molded are terrible.

Despite the thematic significance that Night Mind presents in his excellent analysis video on the game, I find the Molded to be an incredibly irritating and tedious opponent. They break the relatively “grounded” atmosphere that the game otherwise presents, and where the horror of the Bakers is psychological, the supposed “horror” of the Molded is carnal and minimally effective. It has no distinguishing features aside from large teeth and long claws.

“Death awaits you all – with nasty, big, pointy teeth!”

They didn’t have to be such a lame monster. The first reveal of a Molded is not unlike the first time you see a xenomorph peel away from its camouflage in Aliens. Your attention is focused elsewhere until you suddenly see this creature emerge from what you thought was just gunk on the wall. It’s brilliant and unexpected, but it soon becomes forgotten as every other Molded simply stands in their rooms awaiting the player to walk in and trigger their aggression algorithm. Or, in one particular instance for me, suddenly spawn out of thin air upon crossing a threshold specified by the level designer.

As the player marches towards the game’s conclusion there are more and more molded to be gunned down, dropped in front of and behind them in an illusory dance of panic and impossible odds. Resident Evil VII stops being a horror game and starts turning into a slow, meandering action game instead. The lack of compelling combat options or clever A.I. turns the final hour into nothing but a slog towards its final confrontation – which, at the very least, is rather rewarding from a narrative perspective, even if it took too much tedium to get there.

What is perhaps most frustrating to me is a slip of paper that suggests a limited number of Molded to have been created within the Baker estate. You’d think there’d be no more than twenty to be encountered throughout the entire game, but this number is in fact paltry to the final count that you’ll put down. If there were perhaps only a dozen or so Molded scattered throughout the entire game, and you never knew just which patch of black ooze on the wall was hiding one of these vicious creatures, they’d make for a far more intimidating threat to the player. Every gunk covered surface would give cause for suspicion, and the player would inevitably feel far more paranoid of the Molded rather than exhausted by their abundance. Instead, they felt like an homage to the cheapest, lamest, and worst portions of the Resident Evil franchise as a whole.

Despite my disappointment in the Molded, however, I cannot say they inhibit the game’s overall quality. Yes, they do diminish it from being wholly great, but the Bakers do all the heavy lifting. From the tragedy of their family story, to the manner in which they unnerve the player psychologically, to the mechanical pacing they set in regards to building and releasing the tension, it is because of the Bakers that Resident Evil VII is able to be mostly great.

I’m glad I decided to play it after all.