The Intro – Resident Evil 7
It had been a long time since fans were introduced to a new Resident Evil protagonist since every mainline game has featured returning characters. Enter Ethan Winters, just an ordinary man looking for his wife.
You take your first steps into the Baker estate, a mid-western mansion that is pretty much the opposite of the Spencer estate from the first game. Everything is run down or just plain disgusting and instead of it looking like someone just left yesterday, the Baker home looks like no one has left there in years.
The crescendo of the opening is when you finally find your wife, Mia, and soon discover that not only will escaping be difficult, but Mia is definitely not the girl you knew three years prior to the game. Seeing your wife crawl on all fours up a flight of stairs and then lunge at you will make you literally jump out of your seat.
What then ensues is a one on one brawl between you and your wife, and the only thing you have to defend yourself is a hatchet. You really get to see how gruesome this game will be when you bury the hatchet in your wife’s neck after she shoves a knife through your hand.
Once you think it’s all over, Mia leaps straight out of being dead and attacks you once again, in possibly one of the best jump-scares in the game. Thanks to the first-person perspective, you get to see how detailed and grotesque the character models can be in this game.
With limited lighting and peripheral vision, mixed with one of the creepiest settings in a horror game, this is one of, if not the best intro to a Resident Evil game.
There has been a great debate on whether or not future Resident Evil games should be over-the-shoulder, or stay with the first-person perspective, and I think Resident Evil 7 does a great job of showing how this works, especially in the first few moments of the game.
