Something that Resident Evil fans like to talk about a lot is how long they'd survive in Spencer's Mansion or Raccoon City before having a zombie pull their jugular vein straight out of their neck and eat it. I always thought I'd be able to make it pretty far because those zombies move slowly and I'm a pretty good shot with an airsoft gun—yes, I know real guns are not the same thing, but I once shot my friend right in the butt. Precision aim. However, I now know for a fact that I would not survive for very long on the Bakers' plantation, thanks to Madhouse's cruel realization of just how fucked up Ethan's situation is in Resident Evil 7. And I'm still probably being a little bit overconfident.

I've beaten Resident Evil 7 on Normal difficulty twice. In my first playthrough, before the final stretch of enemies, I had 67 handgun bullets, 36 shotgun shells, 160 machine gun bullets, nine remote bombs, and a bunch of support items. My second playthrough wasn't too different, and I was never conservative with my ammo. I was Mr. Video Game Hero, and I was really good at making monsters' heads go boom. In fact, there wasn't a single monster I came across that didn't end up headless at some point. If this version of me was real, girls would think I'm cool. 

This feeling, however, would not last in my third playthrough. After seeing both endings, I wanted a challenge, and the Madhouse difficulty—unlocked by completing the game—was my only option. Knowing nothing other than the requirement of cassette tapes to save, I jumped in, expecting to be faced with a harder version of the game I already knew. And that's what it seemed like up until the garage fight with Jack Baker. Having done this twice before, running over Jack with my car both times, I sprinted over to where the keys were. But wait. Where are the keys? All I saw was a locked box only accessible with a lockpick. A panic spread over me, as I slowly started to realize the game was going to play on my expectations for the next eight hours. I scrambled to find a lockpick, no idea where to start, running laps around the garage as a crazy old man chased me.

This small deviation, coupled with the increase in difficulty, set the tone for the rest of my run. I wasn't sure what would be different about this game that I had evidently grown too familiar with. I breathed a sigh of relief because, at the very least, I had put Jack down for the time being and could explore the house, looking for changes like some kind of demented Easter egg hunt.

To start things off, I walked into the main foyer and noticed the next big change: a set of bird cages sitting around a table. In Resident Evil 7, bird cages contain upgrades that you can obtain by inserting Antique Coins, which are found throughout the game. The cages in the normal game contain a Magnum and upgrades for health and reload speed; these cages, however, contained new items. One of them immediately caught my eye, as it contained the Scorpion key, which can be used to gain access to certain areas. In the normal game, it's located in an area behind a bunch of enemies; knowing how helpful it would be to have up front, I grabbed it just in time for Jack to burst through the door. 

"He's not supposed to show up yet," I thought, recalling how Jack would only start roaming the house after you trigger a specific cutscene. In Madhouse, though? He's on your ass immediately. And he's faster than you. Panicking, I darted through the closest door and ran towards a nearby safe room to regroup, but I didn't quite make it there. A four-legged Molded now called that hallway its home, so it came around the corner, lunged, and killed me, sending me all the way back to the last time I saved, which just so happened to be right before the garage fight. Yep, I had to do that all over again. I almost cried.

This made me realize that I was no longer the cool video game dude that I thought I was. I was now a fragile boy whose guns were no longer keys to a world of exploding heads, but instead lockpicks that I had to use carefully and thoughtfully on one obstacle at a time or else I'd get overwhelmed. And sometimes, guns aren't always the best answer, let alone an effective one at all. Memories of playing the original Resident Evil flooded back as I thought about which enemies I should run away from and which ones would be best to dispose of—at times, the only right choice was to cut my losses and flee to fight another day. And, for the first time, I was forced to utilize one of the game's core mechanics in most situations: blocking. In Madhouse, I'm not trying to put down everything that moves, I'm just trying to survive.

This entire experience comes together to make something very special. If Madhouse was just a harder version of the Normal game, I wouldn't be compelled to continue forward. It's like having an unreliable memory; you know the bathroom is the third door, down the hall on the right, but there's a monster that pops out of the second door that you're positive wasn't there before. It's stuff like this that's given me new reasons to recheck every nook and cranny for items, see what twists the Madhouse has arranged for me, and most importantly, be scared again.

Resident Evil 7 is a very scary videogame set in a creepy old mansion. Typically, it takes players around 10-15 hours to finish the game, but in real life you'd probably not want to linger around a house full of deranged murderers for that long. No, around three hours seems more reasonable, which is what speedrunner Quizzle has done.

He's playing on the Madhouse difficulty as well, which lacks checkpoints and regenerating health. The final run time is 3:26, with eight restarts and, uh, all Mr Everywheres destroyed. 

Check out the run below. I won't be attempting this anytime soon because I found this game utterly punishing. In a good way, I guess.

If you bought Resident Evil 7 off the back of our strong review, then by now you’ve probably survived the horrors of the Baker homestead and are wondering what’s next. The answer is the game’s first DLC drop, the evocatively titled Banned Footage Vol. 1, but unfortunately, due to Sony exclusivity shenanigans, we have to wait until February 21st to play it. Undeterred, I fired up a PS4 Pro to let you know what we can expect from the pack.

There are three new nuggets of content, each of which offers varying amounts of replayability. Let’s start with the one I think is best…

Nightmare

This is a tight little wave-based mode. As cameraman Clancy Jarvis, you wake up back in the Bakers’ shitheap home and have to survive five waves of molestation from the game’s goop monsters and two encounters with Jack, the Baker patriarch whose insistence on fighting stripped to the waist and wearing sex offender spectacles remains the most terrifying thing in Resi 7. The hook here is resource management under severe pressure. The mode uses a sectioned off area of the house that amounts to a handful of rooms and interconnecting corridors. Dotted around these are a couple of machines which pump out “scrap”, the mode’s currency which is used to buy weapons, ammo, and other upgrades like speed reload and health boosts. The obvious plan is to make loops between the machines, setting semi-deadly traps (which also cost scrap) along the way, while enhancing your gear and dealing with the enemies as cost-effectively as possible.

Sounds simple enough, but Capcom has added a couple of cute strategic touches. Firstly, as you buy a particular type of ammo, so its price increases. This encourages you to mix up your loadout. Become too reliant on the high utility shotgun and shells will eventually become prohibitively expensive. There are also additional scrap machines hidden behind locked doors which need to be opened with corrosive fluid, the first use of which costs a cool 1,500 scrap. So you have to decide whether to starve yourself of ammo early in order to get the machine online, which helps immensely during the final couple of waves. Adding to the moreishness of the mode, high scores unlock more exotic weapons like the circular saw and juicy Albert-01R handgun, which I only now realise must be named after Wesker. Huh. Nightmare owes a little of its DNA to the acclaimed Mercenaries minigame, and although it’s not quite as rich or compelling, it’s a fun, claustrophobic diversion that you’ll want to play a dozen or so times.

Bedroom

Changing pace completely, Bedroom is a puzzle-centric take on those “Escape Rooms” that have become popular with monied hipsters (not surprising, seeing that an official Resi 7 escape room is making the rounds already). This time Clancy wakes up handcuffed in bed, with mad old Marguerite in the role of his Misery-style nursemaid. (Pro tip: Don’t eat her soup.) Whenever she leaves the room, you need to break out of bed and start looking for a longer term way out. In classic Resi style, that means combining objects, swapping painting positions, and faffing around with clock hands in order to acquire new items to do likewise with. Here’s the kicker though: completing certain puzzles will make a noise that alerts Marguerite. At which point you have 30 seconds to scramble back to bed, but first you’ll need to replace anything she might notice has been moved.

The tension as she busts the door open and begins scanning the room for inconsistencies is real. A single mistake will lead to her coughing up some of her attack bees or, worse, vomiting a giant centipede straight into your mouth. Dr Quinn Medicine Woman she is not. If you make multiple errors, she’ll go hog wild with a knife in your guts. For those of you who’ve played the main game, it works a lot like the videotape in which you have to put a candle on a birthday cake. You’re probably looking at about 45 minutes of play here, and it’s not something you’ll return to once done, but played with friends it’s a lot of fun. If The Witness had been 50 of these puzzles I’d probably have liked it a lot more. Escape rooms are a cool idea that I expect to see the rebooted Resi explore further in the future.

Ethan Must Die

Hoo boy, I didn’t like this one at all. Ethan Must Die is aimed squarely at the self-flagellating Dark Souls crowd. But where the Souls games earn their punishing difficulty with great design and pacing, this is just hard for hard’s sake. You know it’s meant to be difficult because the sky above the Baker house has turned blood red, and because the game warns you multiple times that you’re going to die as it’s loading up. Initially armed only with a knife, Ethan must crack open randomised item boxes—some of which explode and instakill him—in order to acquire the weapons and items necessary to fend off the heavy enemy presence.

To be fair, you can examine the boxes to see if they’re suspicious (ticking, for example) before smashing them, but that’s a luxury you won’t be afforded when you’re being double-teamed by goop guys. Other interesting tweaks included less lighting in the house, and no map, which makes combat even more fraught. There’s also a Souls-esque system that means after dying you can reclaim an item from wherever your corpse fell. But honestly, the experience just doesn’t feel fun, and I had no desire to git anything like gud at it, though perhaps it will find an audience among more masochistic of Twitch streamers.

Overall, there’s enough in Banned Footage Vol. 1 to warrant your interest if you enjoyed Resi 7 and want to spend more time in it’s world. However, it does feel pretty rum that this stuff came out (on PlayStation, at least) a week after the main game released. I’m not one to bang on about cut content, but given that the main game doesn’t have any multiplayer or other modes, these minigames would have been a welcome addition to the package, and arguably shouldn’t require any additional spend. But that’s gaming in 2017 I guess, and given that Resi 7 has supposedly sold substantially less than its predecessor, perhaps you can see why Capcom feels it has to eke whatever extra it can from the project.

There’s also a second volume of Banned Footage in the works, which will include another two tapes, titled ‘21’ and ‘Daughters’, plus the addition of ‘Jack’s 55th Birthday’ mode. Now there’s a party I’d gladly skip. The season pass for the Banned Footage packs costs $29.99/£24.99 on Steam, but if you’re don’t want to drop any more money on the game, you can at least look forward to the ‘Not a Hero’ freebie in spring, which is new story content separate from the Ethan Stuff and therefore sounds like the most interesting of the lot. 

Last week we dug through Resident Evil 7's options files on an unsuccessful hunt for a way to widen the game's FOV past 90, the maximum allowed through the in-game menu. Entering larger values didn't work, and setting the value of one option, "FOVHackEnable," to 'true,' just rewarded us with a crash. So we asked Capcom if it was possible to widen the FOV, and today we were forwarded answers from the Japanese development team. The bad news: Resident Evil 7 isn't built to work with an FOV past 90.

Capcom offered both an artistic and a technical reason for 90 being the widest possible FOV option in RE7. "FOV capped at 90 degrees is a game design decision," said the statement we were sent via email. "The dev team explored potentially going wider after seeing feedback from the demo, but going wider introduces issues where certain objects, textures, etc. are then not fully rendered out for performance considerations.  It will also have performance implications since going wider will introduce more objects into the scenery. Having too much peripheral vision for this type of game can also lessen the tension and atmosphere intended for the game."

So what about that FOVHack setting in the options file? It's vestigial, Capcom told us: "FOVHackEnable was prepared during development and the parameters that weren’t used never went through testing, which is why a freeze occurs when set to true."

Some small issues aside, Resident Evil 7 on PC was overall a great experience at launch, with good performance across most systems on day one, some beautifully grotesque imagery, and support for HDR. It's one of the first PC games that can make that claim. Aside from FOV, one of the other common criticisms of the PC version is its missing support for 21:9 monitors, so we asked Capcom about that, too. 

The response: "There are currently no plans to support wide aspect ratio monitors."

Sorry, ultrawide gamers. No dice, perhaps because of Capcom's tight control of FOV for the sake of scares, as explained above.