Resident Evil (Remake) & the Spencer Mansion

October 19, 2021 / atomicbobomb / Leave a comment

It’s spooky season and I’ve had a hankering to play the Resident Evil remake again. I first played the game a little over two years ago and loved it. You can find my thoughts on it in the Critical Miss post, but I wanted to take a deeper look at one of the most interesting aspects of the game: the Spencer Mansion. A mix of atmosphere, great design, and just the right amount of goofy locks, the Spencer Mansion is one of the most memorable settings in video games. While it’s not the only location in the game, it is the main one and any player who can brave its halls until the end will come out with an experience they will not soon forget.

The main hall greets the S.T.A.R.S. members as they burst through the front door and it perfectly encapsulates what to expect throughout the rest of the mansion. Large, dusty, and desolate, the mansion is dripping in the lonely, moody atmosphere expected of a horror game. But the interesting thing about the Spencer Mansion, the thing that sets it apart from other horror game settings in my mind, is that the mansion isn’t completely run down, decrepit, or ugly. Lots of the rooms in the home are gorgeous and pleasant—it doesn’t look like a bad place to live. Where most horror games tend to lean too heavily on settings that are overtly grimy and blood-splattered, so over the top they become desensitizing, Resident Evil shows the Spencer Mansion shortly after its fall. You get the sense that people lived in and cared for the home until recently from the brightly lit rooms and tables still set for supper. It’s not until you explore deeper that you start to find the unkempt, unused rooms and dank, dingy cellars, the blood-soaked carpets and filth crusted walls.

This restraint and subtlety with the environmentally storytelling in Resident Evil helps heighten the horror of the game. Once your character separates from the rest of the S.T.A.R.S. team, they are alone in this hostile home, and you, as a player, are also alone with just your imagination and echoing footsteps throughout the halls. With the fixed camera angles and loading-screen doors between every room, you never know what’s coming up and the developers use these blinds spots to hide zombies and other nasties to jump out at you. It makes every corner anxiety inducing, every door threatening, every window possible of crashing apart as a monster flings itself through it to grab you.

The game uses the presence of monsters to great effect as a way to pace itself for the player. As the game progresses, the player finds more ammo, more health items, and better weapons that make short work of the standard zombies roaming the halls. So bigger and badder foes start appearing in the mansion and surrounding areas to make sure the player never feels too comfortable. The enemy type that requires a special mention are the Crimson Heads, which were introduced in the remake as a nice surprise for veteran players of the original. Unless a zombie is killed with a gushy headshot, their body remains laying on the floor throughout the rest of the game. They literally lay there and wait to return as a Crimson Head, a faster, stronger, more deadly creature to face. Besides a headshot, the only way to prevent a zombie returning as a Crimson Head is to burn its body before the transformation takes place. This requires the use of a limited quality of kerosene. Giving the player this autonomy of where to burn bodies makes them look at the mansion and think about what rooms or halls they want to be safe from hazards. Clearing hazards out of the rooms and halls is extremely important because you will be traveling back and forth across the mansion consistently, but in doing so, the true depth of the Spencer Mansion’s design becomes apparent.

The Spencer Mansion is essentially a giant puzzle box that you are dropped into in order to discover a way out; it’s basically an escape room before they were popular. The mansion is full of items to find, puzzles to solve, and the most impractical locks you’ll ever see in a game. Hidden passages behind walls that up open by playing the Moonlight Sonata on a piano, doors that inexplicably unlock when emblems on placed on them, and gates that open once some weathervanes are pointing in the right direction are all different ways the Spencer Mansion is designed to keep prying eyes from its secrets. While it makes sense that the people in the secret lab beneath the home would try to keep people out, the methods of the locks make no goddamn sense and are even silly sometimes, but I feel that adds to the charm and memorability of the mansion.

You will also remember the mansion intimately after a playthrough or two due to how much you will be running back and forth across it. It’s easy to get lost in the mansion; it is a maze of halls and rooms, one way doors and locks. You will eventually get maps of every area you explore and they are life savers. Clearly showing which rooms you have visited, which doors are still locked, and what rooms still have items to find let’s you know where you need to explore further for progress. I find myself pulling up the map every minute or so while playing Resident Evil, which some people may find tedious or immersion breaking, but I love it. It makes me free stuck in the world, trapped in the mansion along with my character desperately trying to find a way out. The map helps you know where to head in the moment, but what helps you retain knowledge of the Spencer Mansion between playthroughs is backtracking and designs of the rooms.

When I booted up Resident Evil again after a couple years, I was surprised how much I remembered of it—certain rooms and halls were burned into my brain and I knew exactly where on the map I would find them. Of course, some things got lost in the fog of the time, but I remembered a lot of rooms and what to find in them immediately upon entering them. I tend to forget a lot of the little details after playing a game and only remember the board strokes like different sections or biomes. So Resident Evil must be doing something right for me to remember so much of the mansion after only playing it once before. And it does something right: backtracking. When I said before you will travel back and forth across the Spencer Mansion over and over again, I was not understating that. Oftentimes, you will find a key or item used to unlock a room on the complete other side of the mansion, requiring you to hussle across the building, avoiding or killing any zombies you left in rooms along the way—this is why burning bodies in areas you know are going to be well tread is so important. But with each trip across the mansion, you learn a little more about it. As the mansion opens up more and the area you have to explore becomes larger, the time it takes to travel across it becomes shorter thanks to better knowledge of the layout and doors you will unlock creating shorts between areas.

The Spencer Mansion is a mastercraft of level design and atmosphere. The fact that the designers use its echoing halls to heighten the tension of the game, make backtracking rewarding as players learn quicker, safer routes across it, and making each room distinct enough to be memorable long after putting the game down is truly incredible. And Capcom would show time and time again they understand how important and well designed the Spencer Mansion is as they revisited the same mentalities for the police station in Resident Evil 2 and the Baker’s home in Resident Evil 7. It’s easy to see why the first Resident Evil is so highly regarded after so many years, why the series is still one of Capcom’s most successful after so many games. It is built on such a solid foundation.

Silent Hill 2 – Critical Miss #20

October 31, 2020 / atomicbobomb / 3 Comments

_{Photo by AlexShepherd. Found at http://silenthill.fandom.com}

Town of Blood and Fog

It’s October which means it’s spooky season. While I love horror movies, I haven’t actually played many horror games. I could make excuses like how they don’t tend to interest me or I find them mechanically light typically, but the truth is horror games freak me the fuck out. It comes down to interactivity. I can sit back, idly watching a movie and judge the characters for making poor decisions, but in a game, I am the one who has to make the poor choices if I want to progress. When it came time to choose a classic scary game for the Halloween Critical Miss this year, there was one game that immediately came to mind.

Silent Hill 2 released in 2001 to immediate commercial and critical success. Even today, it is widely considered to be the high point of the series and one of the scariest games ever made. It’s praised for its atmosphere, psychological horror direction, and symbolism in design. The game centers around James Sunderland coming to the fog shrouded resort town in search of his wife, Mary, who has sent him a letter despite being dead for three years. Walking toward the town, you meet a woman named Angela who warns James not to continue onward because there is something wrong with the town. And she is absolutely right.

The titular town is enveloped in a dense fog making it impossible to see more than ten feet in front of you and is infested with monsters, terrible humanoid shapes with their arms pinned to their torsos like their burnt skin is a straight jacket. When you first make it to Silent Hill, you will spend a good chunk of time wandering aimlessly around, dodging the shapes materializing out of the fog, until you find any indication of where to go. Silent Hill 2 is not afraid to make the player lost. Once you find the thread to follow to destinations, the game is sign-posted well enough, but until then, you are on your own. This is extremely effective in creating fear since you are trapped in this unfamiliar town you can barely see and there are monsters around every corner and hiding under parked cars ready to jump out and maul you.

All monster encounters are extremely tense since the controls are very stiff and weighty. Combat, when you are forced into it, is especially stiff, sticky, and enemies take a lot of damage before dying. It is always advisable to run away from enemies rather than fight them due to resources needed to kill them, both ammo if you have any or healing items needed to keep James alive. I was very grateful to discover you could turn off tank controls earlier on, but the free movement is still based on a very uncooperative camera. Camera angles change suddenly, leading to running back down the hall you just exited and it swings slowly ,almost drunkenly, around when positioning it behind James. The camera is disorientating and makes the player never feel settled in a place.

James must find his way through Silent Hill to find Mary and to do that he must navigate its streets and buildings while plunging deeper and deeper (literally at times, as in the prison) into the darkest depths of the horror and misery of his past. You’ll visit four main areas throughout the game that sort of act as dungeons from a Zelda game or a RPG. There are the apartment buildings, the hospital, Silent Hill Historical Building and the prison inexplicably below it, and the hotel. You will have to search rooms for items to either solve puzzles or unlock new rooms to search. The puzzles are typically clever logic puzzles, like the coin puzzle, or have hints somewhere nearby to clue you in to the solution, like the clock puzzle or combination lock. As the game progresses though, I feel the puzzle start becoming more obtuse. The main culprit of this is the block of faces just after the prison. I’m not sure if I missed the hint saying what to do, but I could not for the life of me figure out what was expected of me until I looked up the solution. The puzzles are either clever but solvable, or encourage exploration, both which I enjoy, and they are only really let down by the clunky inventory menu. Overall, the gameplay of Silent Hill 2 is fine, it’s passable, but that’s not the star of the game. The real reason to play this game is the town itself, James, and the complete horror one finds when confronted with their darkest secrets.

As James gets pulled into Silent Hill, so does the player through the game’s atmosphere. Everything is dank and empty with metal doors rusted, windows broken, and the walls covered in grime. The game takes familiar settings like a hotel or hospital and makes them hellish and alienating by plunging them into darkness and coating everything in rust and filth. The visuals still hold up extremely well today, but the sound design is on a whole other level and is some of the best I’ve ever heard. Sounds range for the loud radio static when monsters are nearby to the quiet barely heard whispers of unknown voices, the constantly pounding of James feet to sudden crying of a baby heard in only one room. Everything sounds chucky and uncanny, real enough to be recognized but odd enough to unnerve anyone hearing them.

Uncanny is how I would describe the characters too. Not in an “uncanny valley” sense where their models invoke an unease in the players (although there is some of that since this is the PS2), but more in their actions and conversations. James is pretty unflappable. Sure, he reacts to the horrific things happening in front of him, but he never seems to react to an appropriate level. His first encounter with Maria is a perfect example: he first mistakes her for his wife because she is Mary’s exact double, but is a sexier outfit. She immediately takes a liking to James and comes on to him very hard, despite the fact that they are trapped in a town full of monsters. James acknowledges Maria’s likeness to Mary, but that’s it. He just accepts it and moves on, no real questions after this interaction. I think James’s cold acceptance to the things he sees mostly has to do with the voice acting, which is not great with flat and stilted delivery, but it honestly works better than expected. It helps add to the other-worldly feeling of the town, as if the characters are too numb, terrified, or simply indifferent to care much about what is going on.

Whether the poor voice acting was intentional or not, it adds so much subtle unease to a game that’s filled to overflowing with subtleties. There are quiet sound effects, like footsteps following you in the beginning of the game and heavy breathing in certain rooms, that only happen in particular areas and are easy to miss. All the enemies represent the larger themes of the game. There are all feminine in nature, like the mannequin enemies that are just too sets of women legs and the nurses, except for Pyramid Head, face of Silent Hill since his introduction in this game. Pyramid Head is a tall, powerful male figure often seen attacking and assaulting the feminine enemies. The enemies represent every thing of James’s guilt of past actions to his frustrated libido since Mary’s passing. It’s so unnerving when you realize this because it adds so much more to the town of Silent Hill itself. It makes the town feel the main antagonist of the game, an alive, thinking entity with its own agenda for James.

All this builds to a tense and terrifying game. It breeds that special type of anxiety in you, that tightness in your chest, the sense of never feeling completely safe. The dread builds and builds until the very end where the game closes like a quiet door. It doesn’t offer a big, cathartic climax where the secrets of the town are discovered with a big, horrific set piece like many other horror games offer. Instead, the game’s climax is an emotional one, where the player watches James admit to and accept responsibility for his past sins. It’s a quiet, bleak, and heart wrenching moment because it’s not easy to not get invested in James and his suicidal quest in Silent Hill.

When I played, I got the ending that suggests that James commits suicide to be with his wife. You never see it, but it’s very much implied. After watching the other endings, this one feels the most fitting for me and my understanding of the town of Silent Hill. The town doesn’t not exist to redeem or offer any sort of relief to those it chooses, it exists only to punish and to torment.

I wouldn’t call the game itself very punishing. It checks a player’s overconfidence through stiff combat and having James be quick to die, but mostly the gameplay is just a little stiff and the puzzles oblique. But it works for this type of game and paired with the thick atmosphere and fantastic story. James and his journey through hell will always have a place in the back of my brain, poking at my thoughts like a thorn. I’ve been turning Silent Hill 2 over in my head again and again since completing it, and that’s always the best sign to me that I really loved a game.

Paratopic Review

August 31, 2020 / atomicbobomb / Leave a comment

August has been a hell of month for me. Between personal issues, vet appointments for my cat, and the power adapter of my Xbox 360 getting fried, I didn’t have time to complete the game I had intended to review for Critical Miss this month. But I wanted to get a short post up anyway, so I decided to review a short game I recently experienced.

Paratopic is a first-person horror experience. I remember hearing about the game when it came out, but I didn’t know much about it besides it was short and the graphics were apparently creepy. This won’t be an in depth review due to the short length of the game and lack of hard mechanics in general, but I want to discuss some things that really got to me.

You play as three characters in Paratopic: a hiker trying to catch a photo of a rare bird, a smuggler transporting illegal VHS tapes across the border, and an assassin as they perform a hired hit. A lot of the fun in the game comes from trying to unravel each character’s storyline. Since there are no character features on display and the story jumps from moment to moment, it’s up to the player to pick apart the plot. This goes a long way to immerse the player. Since the game lacks a lot of moment-to-moment gameplay, the best way to engage the player is to give them something to think about as they play. The mystery of the plot and who you are playing as is a constant in the back of your head while playing through the game. As you are forced to search around for context clues, you have to study the world. You get so drawn in that you even start to notice when things are slightly off.

The visuals do most of the heavy lifting when it comes to the horror, but there are hardly any overtly scary moments in the game. Paratopic excels at getting under your skin and unsettling the player. The game is bathed in the dying light of a perpetual sunset and the art style is reminiscent of early 3D games from the PS1 or Quake era. Everything is orange or brown or deep black darkness. But it’s the subtleties that shine through in the visuals. Characters’ faces will slide around the model of their heads, landscapes are jagged and harsh, and the textures constantly change on the trees as you walk through them, making them seem to pulsate and bubble like one of Lovecraft’s soggoths.

I think my favorite way the game unnerves the player is with the scene cuts. Each time the game moves to the next character or next part of the sorry, there is not a smooth transition or expected jump during a usual story beat. It just cuts in the middle of an action and you are in a new location. You might be walking along a cliff, watching it twist out in front of you, and think you have a long way to walk, but no—cut and you are driving in a car. The transitions are never expected and extremely jarring. They just make you feel uncomfortable through the entire playthrough because you never know when the next cut is coming up. They almost act as jump scares without actually resorting to jump scares in the game and it’s extremely clever.

I’m not going to spoil any of the story or any of the surprises or scares here. Paratopic is so short, about an hour long max, so just play through it if you are interested. The game is an incredibly effective horror experience by how it works to unnerve the player. I don’t get actually scared from a lot of media anymore, but Paratopic did manage to get under my skin a bit. I would compare it to an Ari Aster film like Hereditary. The unrelenting tension and atmosphere has you on edge even while nothing horrifying is happening directly on screen.

Resident Evil 2 (2019) & Mr. X

January 18, 2020 / atomicbobomb / Leave a comment

It’s now on record that the Resident Evil 2 remake was one of my favorite games of 2019. Lately, I’ve become enamored with the classic Resident Evil formula and the Resident Evil 2 was a perfect update to it, adding more RE 4 shooting mechanics to the level design of the PS1 style games. But there’s one mechanic in the game that fascinates me more than any other and that’s the character that fans affectionately refer to as “Mr. X” and which I will be referring to as such because it’s shorter to type than the tyrant.

Mr. X appears in the station at some point during a playthrough and stalks the player in select sections of the game. If he gets line of sight on the player, he will chase after you until you outrun him, which isn’t easy to do since he walks about as fast as the characters run. If he doesn’t know where the player is, he will search throughout the station for them. You can hear his heavy boot steps thumping on the floors and the crash when he throws open doors. Even though you can hear him stomping around, it’s never completely clear when he is, and it’s very startling to open a door only to find him on the other side, ready to deck Leon or Claire in the face. Knowing where you are safe from him is invaluable knowledge. You can take a quick side path around him when he’s spotted down a hall or dip into the S.T.A.R.S. office or a safe room, where he can’t follow you, when being chased down.

He pushes the player to rush. No longer can you slowly inch down a possible dangerous hallway and you have less time to decide whether to shoot a zombie down or wait for the right moment to juke pass them. If he’s not coming up on you at the moment, he could be always be entering the room at any second. The worst areas are the halls with Lickers in them, who are aggroed by the sound of the character running. If Mr. X is running you down through one of those, yous can choose between going slow and being pummelled by Mr X or running and being clawed by a Licker.

Puzzles and inventory management must also be done quickly. Sure, you are safe in the pause menu to arrange your items all you want, but if Mr. X was standing right in front of you with fist raised when you paused, he’ll still be waiting and ready when you unpause. Luckily, he doesn’t show up in a lot of the inventory management puzzles, like the chess piece puzzle, but during the puzzles where he is bearing down on you, he will make you feel every second lost as you stand in place, pausing and unpausing.

Hearing Mr. X thundering through the rooms helps accomplish two things. The first is letting the player know where he is in the station. While it is difficult to pin down where exactly Mr. X is at any point, the sounds he makes gives the player a relative idea of his location. This helps them know when they are in relative safety. If you hear him across the station, you’ll probably safe to go slow for a while, but if the footsteps are nearby, it’s best to be on guard. Being able to always hear Mr X. also works as a constant reminder that he is out there, he is hunting for you. This keeps the tension high while playing in areas of the police station where the players know they’re safe.

This constant tension builds until Mr. X suddenly appears. Whether he bursts through a door you were heading to or you spot him at the other end of a hallway, it is a very distressing occurrence. He usually appears standing between the player and where they were trying to go when they run into him, forcing them to figure out on the fly another path through the station to their destination.

It can’t be understated what an imposing presence Mr. X has in the game, as he hulks toward you, eyes angry and shoulders squared. But I think what makes him the scariest is that he in not a fully known entity. After multiple playthroughs of the Resident Evil 2 remake, I still don’t know what determines Mr. X’s behavior. I never figured out for sure if he actually has to look and find the player when he is off screen, or if he’s always making a beeline to their location. I believe it is the former because there was a time I was standing above the ladder in the library and I watched Mr. X enter through the main hall, stopped and looked around, and exit out through a side door. This moment, character standing in a room with this monster and me holding my breath in real life, stands out to me because it was totally unscripted to my knowledge and actually scared me as I waited to see what Mr. X would do.

There was another moment, while playing through Claire’s A scenario on hardcore mode, that stands out to me. After progressing to the point where Mr. X is introduced, I did not see him at all until leaving the station for the orphanage. I didn’t even hear him that entire time. I started to wonder if the range you can hear Mr. X in hardcore mode is reduced or if my game was bugged somehow. Was I just getting lucky not to see him? I was filled with uncertainty during that entire section of the playthrough because I wasn’t sure if the game was taking advantage of my incomplete knowledge. This playthrough became more stressful than any other because, as it turns out, not hearing Mr. X and not knowing where he’s located is scarier.

While Mr. X stalking the player throughout the police station is designed to create fear in the player, it also helps reinforce the knowledge of the game they’ve learned and give the players a sense of growth. When he pops into a hall unexpectedly, Mr. X works as a roadblock. The player then must figure out a way around him, a side path to get them where they were heading, clear as possible of additional threats. After hours of playing the game and exploring the halls of the station, they can easily do this in a single moment. When players first enter the police station, it is confined and narrowed by locked doors and puzzles. The player will slowly open up the station as they progress through the game into a complex web of halls and rooms. The developers were smart to introduce Mr. X into a playthrough when the station is mostly open. By that time, the players will be well familiar with its layout and all the quickest, safest paths throughout. If Mr. X appeared earlier in the game, before the players had a chance to get a mental layout of the station, it would feel unfair.

The real strength of putting Mr. X in the game is that he gives the players moments of satisfaction as they backpedal away from him and use their knowledge gained throughout a playthrough to map out a new route through the police station. The true genius is his dual purpose design that creates a constant sense of fear but also a sense of knowledge in the player and how easy his design accomplishes both these purposes.

Atomic Bob-Omb

Horror video game