Marguerite isn’t having a great day. You busted into her house, burned her bug-children, stole her dead (sort of) kid’s serum-producing arm, and dissolved her into a pile of black goo. Who’s the bad guy here? Anyway, she gets mad and her legs and arms grow longer, her undercarriage erupts into a bug-birthing abscess, and she makes it her mission to murder you in the greenhouse. It’s not as obtuse a battle as Jack Baker's boss fight, but can really put a drain on your supplies if you don’t use them correctly. Use these tips to spend your precious bullets wisely and make Marge's day the worst she’s ever had, you jerk. 

Find a safe sentry point on the second floor 

Running around is valid tactic, but it can be easy to turn a corner and bump into Marguerite unexpectedly, where the ensuing panic might mean bullets wasted and unnecessary damage taken. I found a decent place on the second floor where I could keep track of her pretty well and get away if she got too close. The key her is patience, and making her come to you rather than seeking her out. 

Save your flamethrower fuel for swarms 

Sometimes Marge will hide to birth swarms and the larger flying insects. You can chase her down and get a pistol shot in or two to interrupt the process, but if you can’t find her, make sure you save flamethrower fuel to take care of the incoming swarms. If you can, just knife the big suckers, but the swarms are quick and a huge distraction. Taking them out as soon as possible is key.

Use the pistol to knock her down 

Marge will climb all over the walls and ceiling and can be knocked down with a few well placed pistol shots. Once she hits the floor, she’ll land on her back and struggle to upright herself, which is a perfect time to get some damage in. When she disappears to birth bugs, she'll lay eggs too, which continually spawn bugs throughout the match. A shot or two from a distance will knock her down. Listen for her moaning, birthing noises and try to interrupt her before she can finish. 

Save the shotgun for damage 

If it wasn’t obvious already, shooting Marge in her festering bug wound does the most damage. Do your best to save your most powerful weapons for such an opening because she doesn’t stay still for long, even after a good stun. If you're desperate to do some damage, but can't get a bead on her bug bits, then headshots are a decent alternative. 

If she gets too close, drop down for a supply run 

There are a ton of supplies hidden all around the greenhouse, and once you get a good hit in on Marge after she approaches you (ideally from a second floor sentry point), she’s hard to get back down immediately. Use the opportunity to drop down to the first floor for a quick supply run. There’s ammo tucked away in a few drawers and a box, chemicals on the lawnmower and in the spider-covered locker, and a health tonic near this tipped ceramic. They’re not too difficult to spot once you’re close enough—just look out for the little arrow UI icon. Once you finish your quick sweep, head back upstairs to your sentry spot. 

If you want some extra help before the fight, look left before the first set of stairs where she pops out of the window. There are some psychosimulants on a couch. They'll speed up your ability to item snaffle while running around as it marks them all on screen temporarily.

Take a peek at the gallery below for a few item locations. 

Before Resident Evil 7 came out, there wasn’t much incentive to care about whether or not I could play with an HTC Vive or an Oculus Rift on our PCs. After the disaster we call Resident Evil 6, I think we all just wanted it to be good. Now it’s out and not just good, but intensely great. Andy called it ”tense and refined survival horror with a brilliantly bleak, grimy atmosphere” in his review. So for those with access to VR headsets, the inability to step into that grimy world ‘for one year’ thanks to an exclusivity deal feels more like a hard kick in the shin than a simple missing feature. 

I replayed the first three hours on a borrowed PSVR headset to see what PC players are missing out on, and even on lesser hardware, Resident Evil 7 is the first fully-featured game that doesn’t feel compromised by VR design. If not for the low res textures and jagged edges, I’d step away from the PC version and play the rest of RE7 with a headset blotting out the rest of the world. Best of all, despite directional movement detached from my body, I didn’t get motion sick once like I normally do, and I’m incredibly sensitive to VR games.

Spoiler warning: I mention events from the few hours of the game beyond this point.

Why it works

The first 30 minutes of Resident Evil 7 feel built for VR. From the garish, low-res foliage on your initial walk into the house to the numerous up-close skirmishes with your mangled, bloodthirsty girlfriend, you’re driven forward through a series of haunted house surprises feel too contained and slow on the PC. But in VR, watching her rip through your wrist with a chainsaw or old man Baker try to pry your mouth open with a knife—well, it’s extremely disturbing. Giving scale and dimension to otherwise flat (literally, as in on a screen), goonish characters takes a bit of instinctual and emotional recalibration. They stop feeling like videogame enemies the moment your brain interprets that hunched man power-walking your way as a genuine threat.

Wearing the headset, I naturally became one of those stupid teens from a horror movie, constantly looking over my shoulder, crouching around a corner to catch my breath, and peeking around to check for danger before—here’s the part where you’d yell at the screen—heading directly into it.

The controls work well too, even though I prefer to not play first-person games with analogue sticks. Lucky for us mouse-and-keyboard trained, weapon aiming is tied to where you look. It feels as accurate as any mouse, but does require a bit more effort to move around. And if someone is behind you, there’s a quickturn option that dulls the edges of your screen with darkness so you don’t get dizzy spinning around to take on enemies behind you.

All sorts of other accommodations have been made to stave off VR sickness, and the most jarring might be the incremental turn controls. By default, turning happens in degrees. One tap of the analogue stick left or right snaps your character 10 to 20 degrees in that direction. There are options to change the increments in which he moves, and you can turn it off for a smooth movement, which typically makes most people sick, including myself. But it doesn't in Resident Evil 7.

Sprinting, hectic combat encounters, and UI juggling has yet to make me feel even the slightest bit sick. According to our friends at GamesRadar, some reviewers still felt ill while playing, so the PSVR version isn't a completely safe bet yet. A PC version could stave off sickness further with a higher refresh rate and better resolution, but the PSVR version is still impressive. I’m usually clutching my stomach and done for the day after 10 minutes in similar VR games. I’d be impressed that the PS4 can maintain such a high refresh rate if not for the obvious hit RE7's graphics take to sustain it.

Graphic content 

That scene where Mia saws off your hand? On the PC, the depth of focus shifts in and out to a stump spurting out quarts of blood by the minute. In PSVR, it’s just a dull, bloodless nub. Shadows meant to have smooth edges cast in serrated zigzag patterns, and intricate wall and floor textures, are so blurry they only imply what they are. Wood. Wallpaper. Blood maybe?

Note: the video captures footage as the hardware renders it, not the image as you'd see it in a headset, which would be much closer to the eye. Aliasing and texture resolution are worse than they appear as a result. 

When you're moving around, the low-res textures are easier to dismiss than normal due to the sense of space in VR, but because the Baker plantation is such an interesting, detailed setting its overall power is wasted in PSVR. As soon as you stop to examine a room the disgusting props and the story they’re trying to tell blend into a noisy backdrop of muddy textures and thorny aliasing. The PS4 just isn’t capable of giving Resident Evil 7 its due in VR, and knowing that capable PCs and headsets could is a huge disappointment.

By the time VR support does arrive on the PC for Resident Evil 7, the majority of fans will have played it by then. And while any excuse to give it another go is welcome, I’d rather have the opportunity to remember the Baker house as a novel, unknown place rather than a videogame level. As is usually the case, modders are working on ways to implement VR functionality with or without Capcom’s support. Progress is slow—the limited FOV and stereoscopic vision is still an issue, but modders always find a way.

For the VR enthusiasts that can weather a year of waiting, much respect. That’s real survival horror.

While most of us are still tip-toeing our way around the Baker estate, speedrunners are blitzing through Resident Evil 7 in mere hours. Twitch streamer 'Stirliing' currently holds the world record at 1:51:02, but runners will likely trim that time significantly as the competition and strategies begin to solidify. Right now, I'm just enjoying watching a new speedrunning scene emerge.

Stirliing's world record run is interesting to watch for several reasons, like how humorous it is to see him effortlessly sprint through areas that caused me a great deal of anxiety in my own playthrough. A lot of this has to do with the fact that he is playing on new game plus, which starts him off with an Albert-01 pistol—a veritable hand cannon that trivializes some of the early fights. Jack Baker, for example, usually takes almost an entire magazine of pistol ammo to stun for a few minutes.

Much of Resident Evil 7's length comes from poring over documents littered about and solving extra puzzles, which Stirliing avoids entirely. His core strategy at this point seems to be "run the hell away from everything that moves"—which I also do except he doesn't end up whimpering in a corner. It's amazing how well he's been able to map out the house in his mind in just a couple of days, as some areas are confusing as hell. Throughout the run, Stirliing remarks that he's been streaming nearly constantly since Resident Evil 7 launched, over 14 hours or so at the time of his run. That's dedication.

There's no denying that at this stage RE7 speedruns are messy and full of little mistakes that cost seconds. I'm looking forward to seeing how things tighten up in a few months once runners begin to figure out the best routes through each level. If skips and glitches are found (and who are we kidding, of course they will be) we could see even bigger cuts to time. Remember, this is a game that took Andy around nine hours to beat when he reviewed it.

If you want to give speedrunning Resident Evil 7 a try for yourself, there's an achievement for beating the game in under four hours, which is a sensible place to start. Intrepid wife-saver James Davenport also has a guide for tackling the butcher room boss fight, which should help you shave some seconds off of your time. You can also join the community at speedruns.com to get the latest updates and tips. 

Already done with Jack, but having trouble with the second boss? We have a guide for that.

Resident Evil 7 is an incredible game that will likely stand among the best in the series once the initial relief that it's not another Resi 6 settles. But it’s not without flaws, and the boss battles are among them. Because of the first-person perspective, the one-on-one butcher room chainsaw duel with Jack Baker might look cool as hell, but it’s not very fun encounter.

You might be confused or frustrated, and rightfully so—the battle doesn’t telegraph itself too well and goes on for a bit too long—but by keeping a few things in mind, it becomes a cinch.

Get the shotgun

The more tools at your disposal the better. While the shotgun won’t exactly make the fight a breeze, but having more methods for knocking Jack to ground is definitely a good thing. First, you’ll need the Scorpion Key, which is located beyond a blue gate in the Processing Area of the house in the basement. Once you get it, head back upstairs to where you likely found the Mia tape earlier. Face west, and you’ll see a door with a scorpion on it. Take a guess at what unlocks that. Inside is a broken shotgun. Grab that, head down to the main entrance hall and replace the statue’s working shotgun with the broken one. Boom. There’s your boomstick.

Shoot his knees with the pistol 

Like Resident Evil 4, if you shoot Jack in the knees you can stagger him, which is especially helpful if he’s charging you or wielding massive chainsaw scissors that block his face. Once staggered, he’ll kneel down and present his shiny bald dome to you. If you have the chainsaw, you know what to do. Otherwise, get our your knife and slash. If you’re feeling confident and have deep ammo reserves, keep the pistol out or bring out the shotgun for more damage.

The chainsaw can block most damage 

Don’t forget about your block ability, especially once you’re able to grab the chainsaw. With good timing, you can blot out most of the damage from Jack’s swings, the exception being his charge attack. This doesn’t mean you should stay in his face the whole time though. Block only if you have no other choice. Otherwise, back up and wait for an opening.

There’s an extra health tonic hidden in the corner 

Be sure to explore every nook and cranny before the fight and craft as many tonics as possible, but if you end up running out anyway, don’t fret quite yet. There’s another tonic hidden in the corner of the arena. Just make sure to pick it up during a safe window of time.

Most importantly, be patient

Like a Dark Souls boss, rushing in to take a jab before Jack has finished up a moveset means you’ll die quickly. He has a few moves he always telegraphs beforehand. The battle goes on for a long time too, so even if you're on a fifth attempt and need to go to the bathroom, don't rush the process. Exploding a man takes time. 

Since Leon first got his head chainsawed off Resident Evil 4, I’ve been more afraid to die in survival horror games than ever. But with such gruesome defeat comes the terrible catharsis of a well-produced and dramatic end for your character, something any fan of grisly horror will seek out. And so now videogame death montages have become a tradition of sorts, a way to bear witness to violent ends without experiencing them first hand—unless you’re awful at horror games like I am. 

The excellent Resident Evil 7 ups the ante with a ton of death scenes, but this time, you get to partake. The Bakers are a mushy bunch, capable of regenerating from the smallest puddle of goo, and so you’ll reduce them to such time and time again with chainsaws, shotguns, fire, and whatever else you can muster. Still, they’ll do the same, and with a gorgeous, detailed new first-person engine, the scenes are more messed up than ever. I mean, check out this intimate chainsaw evisceration sequence. Hope you already ate. 

Some are even interactive sequences where the characters toy with you for a while. In my favorite so far, if Jack catches you while wielding the shovel early on he might cut off your leg. You can then pick it up as an inventory item before eventually bleeding out on the floor (around 6:55 in the video). I don’t know, maybe it unlocks a door somewhere. Not likely. While your vision slowly fades to black, he goads you towards him, crouched, promising to help. It’s a twisted, funny sequence that further characterizes Jack as a sadistic madman—and it’s totally possible you’ll never see it.The game only just came out which means players are still discovering different ways to die, so we’ll be sure to update with a more complete array of videos as they drip out.