Last month, Tim braved the console waters to bring you word of Resident Evil 7’s Banned Footage Vol. 1, the first DLC pack which PS4 owners got to sample a month early. Today, both Banned Footage Volumes 1 and 2 are available on the PC, included as part of the Season Pass for $30 with a future bonus episode to come, or individually at $10 and $15 respectively. Our man liked the first pack overall, lauding its variety and the Bedroom episode’s focus on escape room puzzle-solving, in particular.

But Vol. 2 isn’t an easy recommendation for me. It retains the strange charm of Resi 7’s new bayou setting and gives us more quality time with the Bakers, but doesn’t feel as creative, revelatory, or substantial as I’d hoped. Here’s a rundown on what comes in Banned Footage Vol. 2 and whether or not it’s worth your time.

21

This episode is literally just Resident Evil 7’s deranged interpretation of blackjack. Starting with a single card flipped over, players take turns bluffing their way to a hand that adds up to as close to 21 as possible without going over. You’re seated at a table with another unfortunate prisoner, while Lucas Baker lays down the stakes from a remote location and spits out cards from a machine. In the first round, your hands are clamped out in a machine that cuts a finger or three off with each loss, after which a new torture device is rolled in to up the ante.

A few rounds in Lucas throws introduces trump cards, special cards that change certain conditions and don’t consume a turn. One adds two to your opponent’s total, another returns your last upward facing card to the deck, and others pull specific cards to your hand. With each consecutive round, more trump cards are introduced and your bag-headed opponent gets more cunning to compensate. It’s a nice way to spice things up when playing against the AI, but trump cards won’t change the way you think about blackjack forever, let alone the half hour it takes to get through the scene.

21 might be the only game of blackjack that reduces your face to hamburger with enough bad luck—it’s novel and worth a few laughs for the overwrought presentation and Lucas’ deranged dialogue, but it’s still blackjack. I would have preferred another escape room puzzle from Lucas rather than one of the world’s best known card games with a spooky makeover. Still, if you’re into Resi 7 for the cheeky tropes and character rather than actual scares, maybe this is your deal.

Daughters 

The more Resident Evil 7 focuses on the Bakers, the better it is, but Daughters feels too familiar to contribute much. It's a short episode played from Zoe Baker’s perspective, following the family’s last moments as somewhat normal people before becoming mind-controlled goop monsters. (Spoilers. Kinda.)

Zoe is slower than Ethan, has nearly nothing to defend herself with, and without a flashlight she can only see a few dimly-lit feet ahead of her thanks to a small lighter. Daughters felt darker and scarier from the start, despite knowing the Baker house like the back of my hand.

But the episode is over before it really begins, burying its meager rewards in rummaging through the Baker house yet again in search of a secret ending—my first play through took about 20 minutes. Here’s the real secret: it’s dull. Either way, it’s nice to get chased by Jack again even if being pursued by a madman wearing just pants is starting to feel like routine. Dude is still scary.

I’d be fine with the short runtime, but Daughters rushes the Baker family’s transformation. There’s no subtlety or slow decent into madness. Zoe leaves her nice family for a minute and comes back to the loonies we know from Resi 7. There’s nothing to learn about how they normally relate to one another or how a (spoiler, definitely) creepy young girl slowly took over their minds. Eveline comes in from the rain, you fetch her some warm clothes, and boom, Marguerite is puking up bugs like it’s her job. The rushed transformation deflates Eveline of any power the spooky kid archetype gives her, and she was already the weakest character in the main game.

Daughters feels like a deleted scene that needed deleting—it simplifies the Baker origin story to a boring bullet point, and even then, doesn’t reveal anything about the plot we couldn’t already put together on our own.

Jack’s 55th Birthday 

The final part of the package is a totally throwaway mode, but Jack’s 55th Birthday has just enough depth and charm to make it worth playing. The clue to the ridiculous setup is there in the name. It’s Jack’s special day and he needs feeding. You start off in a room with the birthday boy where you can get ready for the food hunt via a storage box full of weapons and healing items. Head out the door and the timer starts, counting down from 15 minutes. Your goal is to fill Jack’s satisfaction meter by finding edible items in the house. The catch is that they also take up inventory space and molded enemies (wearing silly hats) continually spawn while you’re outside the kitchen.

If you’re a combat expert, taking fewer weapons and healing items opens up more room for munchies, but increases your chance of dying. Simultaneously, every time you shoot an enemy bonus time builds up. It’s a way to force not just combat, but super careful, precise combat. You’ll want to take out the molded, preserve every bit of ammo possible, and have as much inventory space for food items you can. Some items can only be combined with others to make a more filling dish, and others exist purely to throw you off track (don’t feed Jack any garbage). Careful inventory management, as cumbersome as it can be, becomes as important as nailing headshots, especially if you want that elusive S-rank. New arenas pulled from environments in the main game unlock as you play, and each offers a bit more complexity and challenge than the last.

As charming as Jack’s 55th Birthday is, I have a hard time seeing much depth or reward beyond optimizing runs after unlocking all the bonus items. Even if the amusement of Jack’s dumb birthday hat wears off before long, as a hokey time trial arcade mode that gives me Mario Party flashbacks, it’s easily the star of Banned Footage Vol. 2.

Even so, Vol. 2 is a much harder sell than Vol. 1. None of the tapes are particularly deep beyond their initial burst of novelty, whereas Vol. 1 contained Nightmare and Ethan Must Die, two challenging modes with hours of potential, and Bedroom, a tense surprising escape room scenario that makes sense within the Resi 7 universe. And it only costs $10 to Vol. 2’s $15. That said, the Season Pass mentions a bonus episode that we still don't know anything about. If it proves worthwhile and seals the deal on a $30 purchase, then through sheer variety it’d be an easy recommendation. For now, sit tight with Banned Footage Vol. 1 and if you haven’t yet, maybe give Resi 7’s Madhouse difficulty a shot.

Resident Evil 7: Biohazard may only have launched in late January, but its first and second slices of DLC were made available just weeks later on PlayStation 4 consoles—on January 31 and February 14 respectively. We've had to wait a little longer, but both portions are out now on PC. 

Never one to be scuppered by console-exclusivity, our Tim ventured into Banned Footage Vol. 1 on PS4  Pro (heathen! etc.) earlier this month to see what the fuss was about. He came back fairly impressed if a little underwhelmed—suggesting much of its minigame makeup could perhaps have been packaged alongside the base game. Here's an extract from his thoughts: 

"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." 

In any event, both Banned Footage volumes are out now on PC. Number one comes with three scenarios—Nightmare, Bedroom, and Ethan Must Die—and costs £7.99/$9.99; while number two includes Daughters, 21, and Jack's 55th Birthday, and will set you back £11.99/$14.99. If you already own the Resi 7 Deluxe Edition or Season Pass then you'll have access to the above at no extra cost. 

Speaking to the DLC, the game's director Koshi Nakanishi says: "Resident Evil 7 features a blend of horror, combat and puzzle-solving, so I wanted to use the DLC to explore each of those concepts separately in depth. As with the main game, the found footage tape idea lets us explore things that didn’t happen all in sequence, but rather to different people at different times. So players can start a DLC tape and not be sure where they even are—and of course, it means the player can die at the end.

"We had more freedom in the DLC to let the team try different things. Each of the experiences lets us explore one concept in depth in a way, so for Nightmare it was pure combat. In Bedroom, I wanted to show Marguerite in detail and give players a chance to finally try the food she got so upset you didn’t eat in the dinner scene. You can literally eat it until it kills you."

Lovely. 

Resident Evil 7's Banned Footage Vol. 1 and Vol. 2 DLC is out now. Our sister site GamesRadar has some tips on how to best tackle the aforementioned Daughters scenario, incase that 'un proves too difficult.

If you've played or are still playing Resident Evil 7: Biohazard, you've probably found yourself asking questions. What's the deal with this family? How the hell do I kill that thing? Why are there so many series-typical, yet wholly incongruous to the setting, keys and contraptions strewn around this old dilapidated mansion? How far you've played will ultimately determine how many of those you've managed to answer, however I'd guess there's one question still plaguing many of you: who the heck is Aunt Rhody?

I caught up with composer Michael A. Levine to discuss the origins of the sinister-sounding melody that inadvertently became the theme tune for Capcom's latest survival horror stalwart.  

PC Gamer: Resident Evil 7: Biohazard was announced at E3 in 2016. When did you first begin working on the 'Go Tell Aunt Rhody'?

Michael Levine: I’ve forgotten when they first contacted me, but once we agreed on a direction I did most of the work in Spring of 2016. 

What was Capcom’s initial directions for the song, and did those change as the creative process began?

They liked the work I had done (with Lucas Cantor) on Lorde’s version of Everybody Wants to Rule the World which was featured in both the Hunger Games Catching Fire soundtrack and the Assassin’s Creed Unity trailer. They wanted a similar rethinking of a familiar song, turning it from joyous to menacing. But they didn’t want to use a pop song, so that meant finding a traditional song that would be known in more than just one country. 

I was born in Tokyo and so, almost by accident, knew that the American traditional song Go Tell Aunt Rhody had the same melody as the Japanese 'Musunde Hiraite'. Plus Rhody had the key word "dead" in its lyric. I changed "the old grey goose is dead" to "everybody’s dead" and we were off and running!

Go Tell Aunt Rhody is featured on the trailer and has pretty much become the theme for the whole game. Did you have any idea when you first started working on it, that it was going to be featured this much?

No, but I am delighted Capcom had such confidence in it.

This song has a very interesting history and origin that not many people know about. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

We know the chorus melody was used in a French opera in the mid 18th century, although it probably predates that. It traveled from France to the UK, to the US, and, eventually, to Japan in the 19th century when American schoolteachers were brought to Japan to help establish the public school system. 

Most Japanese people think Musunde Hiraite is Japanese in origin. I added the RE7-specific verse.

I read that the song’s vocalist, Jordan Reyne, is located in the UK and you are located in LA. Where did you all record the song and how did that process work?

We recorded everything but the lead vocal in my studio in LA. Jordan—who is another fabulous New Zealander like Lorde (I have good luck with those kiwis)—recorded in the UK and we communicated via the internet during the session. Our clients also attended via the web. 

This was ok for me—10 am in LA, and Jordan, 6pm in London; but I am impressed by the stamina of our clients at 2am in Tokyo!

What surprised you the most with Go Tell Aunt Rhody after it was all done?

How well it worked with so little traditional musical framework. Our first pass was much more of a straight-ahead song, but the clients kept asking for it to get weirder and darker to the point where it’s almost an art-house sound-design piece. 

Usually, I do something 'out there' and the client has to reel me back in. This was one of the rare cases where they kept saying, "Go even further!" I love to work for people like that!

Is it easier to come into a project that has a huge fan-base, such as Resident Evil, or one that has a clean slate?

I think my relative ignorance was a blessing. Had I truly understood how massive the following of this game was I might have been intimidated.

If there is anything else you would like readers to know about your process creating this song, then please do share.

I am rather fond of puzzles and what I like to call cryptomusic—where there are things embedded that may not be obvious on first listen. I am not saying that is the case in this song.

But I’m also not denying it.

(NB—it seems Redditors were onto this idea of cryptomusic shortly after the first Aunt Rhody trailer was released. This particular thread offers some interesting theories, even if Levine himself remains tight-lipped.)

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.

Resident Evil 7 knows that filth is a staple of good horror. Just like Seven, its credits are a series of disorienting shots of old cut-out newspaper articles and photographs, scribbled on by some offscreen creep. It introduces the Baker family by seating the player at the foot of a dinner table covered with plates full of (likely human) meat, almost completely recreating the composition of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre’s climactic scene. It nods to Saw, too, through a toilet bowl filled with syringes and disgusting rooms that can only be left via grotesque self harm—film has always understood the power of dirt and disorder in creating fear.

Anyone who can’t be bothered to take a pile of trash from the kitchen a few steps away to the patio (the Baker’s solution: just shove those suckers into the oven) obviously doesn’t care too much about, well, anything. 

It’s the subtle discomfort of exploring this setting that makes the chainsaw fights and hide-and-seek chases frightening. Without the dread that comes from spending time amidst the trash and rot of their home, the Bakers—Jack in particular—wouldn’t be nearly as scary.

A real fixer-upper 

Though out of the way in the Louisiana backwoods, the Baker home is potentially gorgeous—a multi-story plantation house set on a sprawling property with a series of smaller sheds and outbuildings surrounding it. There’s a spacious front hallway with a pair of stairways leading up to a balcony, a greenhouse set up next to docks that run through a patch of Southern bayou, and a well-equipped barn. It seems like a pretty great place to raise a family.  If only Jack took better care of the place.

As Ethan Winters, one of the first things the player sees after arriving at the Baker’s property is a gnarly, almost palpably stinking meat sculpture. Lifting yet again from The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (in this case, the nightmarish corpse installation featured in the movie’s opening shots), entering the house involves ducking under a bizarre ouroboros of rotting cow legs circled around a horned skull, bits of tattered flesh still spoiling on the bone. It’s evidence of the creator’s madness, sure, but also of their artistic sensibilities.

Throughout the Baker house, meat is used not just as food, but as conversation piece and ornament. Before he knows anyone is home, Ethan picks through the kitchen, opening a fridge where loose piles of either intestines, raw snake, or some wretched mix of both are stacked haphazardly on a big sheet of aluminum foil. He lifts the lid of a pot on the family table and a handful of cockroaches come skittering out of a greyish-brown stew, the fat from some mystery creature congealing on the surface.

As Ethan continues to poke around the house he finds stacks of unwashed dishes filling rusty sinks, ashtrays overflowing with yellowed cigarette butts, and little clouds of flies buzzing around tables piled with decomposing fruit and, no surprise, yet more spoiled meat. The walls haven’t been painted in what looks like decades. The wooden framework juts out in almost every room, the house’s skeleton showing through the crumbling wallpaper of its skin. An unassuming metal tackle box has nothing stored in it but a few hundred glistening maggots. I wonder if Jack likes to fish.

We see that Jack Baker (or “Daddy” if you’re nasty) cuddles up on a crusty bare mattress when he wants a nap—that when he takes a shower he has to kick aside another full garbage bag and watch out for plunging holes in the cracked tile. By the time Jack gets to the business of actually trying to kill Ethan, the player sees him as more than just an old, balding, khaki-wearing jerk out to kill with a spiked hammer or jury-rigged chainsaw scissors.  

He becomes whatever other horrifying traits we fill in for someone completely okay with eating rotten food, making death sculptures, and living in an elaborately architected dumpster. And it’s all overlaid with the familiar: a home that should be beautiful, a man that should be domestic and boring and telling awful dad jokes. ‘Hey, Ethan, I’ve got a bone to pick with you.’

What makes Jack scary is that he, like the rest of the Bakers, is developed as a character through context, not direct exposition. Exploring his house, we see that he was once just a guy who liked playing football and posed for regular old family photos with his wife and two children. The state of the Baker house forces us to fill in the gaps between a stereotypical American dad and the scuzzy creep trying to kill Ethan. 

Before the game takes (the really unnecessary) steps to explain exactly what caused his transformation, Jack is far more frightening as someone twisted from regular family man into a strange creature who, for reasons we don’t yet understand, is now something else entirely—a bizarre, violent man who lives in filth and is hell-bent on murder.

All told, the player doesn’t spend much time with Jack. They see everything that makes up the man, from humble beginnings to the twisted monster he is now, and it’s in attempting to reconcile his humanity with the absolute opposite surroundings that horror takes shape. What is otherwise a goofy dad character model is now a living person with a terrible, impenetrable psychology. And he’s coming this way, hammer in hand, calling out your name.

Homesick 

The deranged killer stalking their victim to bash in their head with a spiked hammer, or hang them from a meat hook, evokes basic, instinctual fear. Physical danger is easy horror. Resident Evil 7 wouldn’t be much more than an action game if the Bakers weren’t surrounded by the big, stinking mess they leave behind. It proves this itself towards the end.

As the setting shifts from the grotesque Baker house to a wrecked ship and the tunnels of a salt mine, most of the atmosphere is left behind, too. The chipped steel bulkheads and dim, cramped compartments of the ship aren’t pretty, to be fair, but they’re industrial and dull in comparison with the lived-in mansion that came before.  

The molded enemy creatures that stalk the player as Mia navigates the boat are usually deadlier than the Bakers (especially in its narrow hallways and sharp corners), but there’s no greater context for the threat they pose. They’re just stupid and angry. It’s impossible to imagine the molded doing anything other than slopping their gross bodies around, being stupid and angry at blank walls when there’s nothing for them to kill. 

Resident Evil 7 is at its best when it wallows in its own filth—when it makes you wonder if Jack Baker has any hobbies besides mutilation, meat sculptures, and binging on rotten food. Walk around checking for items in rooms buzzing with flies, blocked up with knocked-over furniture, walls and doorways filled with pulsating, carcinogenic-looking black gunk, and a deep, discomforting curiosity sets in. 

This is an ordinary kind of dread, less exciting than bizarre creatures and masked killers, but in exploring a quiet scene dressed in a family's history, Jack's implied journey from average guy to middle-aged dad monster heightens the traditional videogame horror sequence. With every chase scene, we're not just pursued by an angry collection of polygons, we're pursued by a man with a tragic history, a dad fallen from grace that hates doing the damn dishes.

It was just a year ago that Chinese piracy outfit 3DM declared that it had given up on cracking single-player games, because the anti-tampering software Denuvo was just too damn tough to get around. It left the door open to a return, however, saying that it would take another run at the scene in one year's time, when advances in technology and know-how would presumably make the job easier. 

Here we are, one year later, and it appears that 3DM's choice of timeline was surprisingly good. Ars Technica reported earlier this week that a cracked copy of Resident Evil 7 had turned up online over the weekend, less than one week after its release. That's a much quicker turnaround time on a Denuvo crack than we've seen previously. 

"Please note that we always position our Anti-Tamper solution as hard to crack, not as uncrackable. So far only one piracy group has been able to bypass it," Denuvo marketing director Thomas Goebl told Eurogamer. "As always, we continue working to improve our solution to create security updates for upcoming Anti-Tamper versions. We will do the same with the learning from this bypass. It's correct that the title in question was cracked some days after release. Given the fact that every unprotected title is cracked on the day of release—as well as every update of games—our solution made a difference for this title." 

That's a valid point. For big-budget games especially, launch day and the days immediately after are what it's all about. Long tails—that is, a game's continued sales over a period of weeks and months—are important too, but the fact is that if you haven't got a hit on your hands after a week or two, you're probably in trouble. So as brief as it is, that first week of protection is undeniably important. 

It's not uncommon for publishers to remove Denuvo from their games after the initial sales rush is over: Playdead dropped it from Inside, for instance, roughly four months after it came out. But if the time required to crack the software on new releases continues to shrink, it will inevitably become less relevant to game publishers—and I would think that if the time from launch to crack routinely becomes much less than a week, it's going to force pubs to reconsider their options. It could be that the quick Resident Evil 7 crack was a fluke, but it could just as well be a sign that the Denuvo shell is—dare I say it?—cracking.   

I'd never heard of panic rooms until I watched the titular 2002 Jodie Foster and Kristen Stewart-starring thriller of the same name. Growing up Glasgow, any bother I'd encountered at this point in my life took place outwith my home, and often involved gangs of youths bigger and stronger than I gratuitously chasing me and my mates around the streets because, well, they were bigger and stronger than us. At home things were suitably quiet, and my parents' need to splash out on a panic room in suburbia was eclipsed by the cost of raising an awkward teen with a seemingly never-ending appetite.

I had no reason to know what a panic room was, then, until I watched Foster and Stewart in action. Except I did know what a panic room was. Because I'd been unwittingly visiting them for years. 

My first stay came off the back of a hard-fought three-on-one situation, where a trio of undead T-Virus-infected bogeymen cornered me at the foot of a stairwell. I unloaded my 15-round S.T.A.R.S. issue baretta twice over, before their corpses finally slouched to the deck and large pools of crimson oozed over the floor. Gun raised and heart pounding, I hung a sharp right and entered the box room ahead. I was met with this: 

That ever-so-sweet melody would go on to define my stay at the Spencer Mansion—the main setting of the original Resident Evil (and it's 2002/2015 remake). I love horror games, but at the same time I'm a bit of shit bag and thus my earliest memories of the Resident Evil series don't always revolve around zombies and Lickers and Tyrants, but often instead involve me limping around their grounds with little ammo and even less health—bumbling from room to room in search of an ever-elusive typewriter. 

Save rooms were my Resi-slanted panic rooms, and I found as much joy in entering a room to the above theme as I did stumbling across ammo or taking down a mid-zone boss. With that door closed nothing could get me, and I was able to revel in the scant reprieve the four walls offered before soldiering out into the wilderness once more. 

In Resident Evil 2, I spent the best part of 20 minutes hiding in the save room immediately following that wall-shattering run-in with this guy. After almost crawling there—Claire all the while clutching her rib cage and nursing a terrible limp—I stood back from my computer, caught my breath, went to the toilet, made a cup of tea, and then waited another five minutes or so before resuming. RE2 afforded me a few of these moments, thus this melody is forever etched into my brain: 

As I mentioned in our list of Resident Evil games ranked from worst to best list, the third series entry, Nemesis, was the first to give enemies the ability to travel through closed doors after you'd activated the area-loading door opening animation. The first time I thought I'd lost Nemesis only for it to burst through a closed gate and continue its brutal hunt nearly gave me a heart attack—therefore the sanctuary of the save room became more important here than ever. The S.T.A.R.S.-despising monster could chase me anywhere on the map, yet the save room was immune to its relentless pursuit. 

At the time, I remember thinking RE 3's save room theme was a little more sinister against its forerunners, but, in light of the above, I don't think I was overly fussed with its composition when it came down to it.

I've visited many Resident Evil save rooms since—some more than others—and have now sunk a few hours into the latest series entry, Resident Evil 7. As you'll have undoubtedly spotted elsewhere, its first-person makeup and decision to part ways with its familiar series-serving cast has taken it in a bold and new direction. 

After some uncertain first steps, I'm now engrossed in a game which does feel fresh but also feels very Resident Evil-like. Locating keys strewn around an incongruously designed map, scouring every nook and cranny for health tonics and ammo supplies, and battling strange, hostile and ungodly creatures feels familiar but is no less enjoyable than before. 

I've had my fair share of panicked moments already, but they've been nothing the sound of entering a room to the following melody hasn't helped soothe.