Forget Sweet Home
Resident Evil may have coined the term survival horror. But until RE, that term wasn’t used. Nowadays we have a more fleshed-out realisation of what it means to be a horror game (Evil Within, Soma) but in the 1990s, the vocabulary was translated from terms that already existed. For example: Clock Tower, a Japanese horror game from 1995, was referred to as an adventure game at release but is now retroactively called a survival horror game.
Before the games console boom, Japan had a wonderful relationship with home computers. MSX. Sharp. Pre-Windows, FM Towns was a DOS PC. PC-98. Western adventure games were popular too; King’s Quest, Kyrandia, Monkey Island, Zork. I want to make the case that adventure games like these impacted the core Resi experience more than was originally thought.
Look, I know Sweet Home exists but just bear with me on this okay? Everywhere you look it’s SH. It’s actually staggering. There are mixed messages regarding Sweet Home’s importance. Some say RE started as a sequel or a remake; SH Director and Resi Producer Tokuro Fujiwara conceptualised RE as a spiritual sequel. Resi director Shinji Mikami said he never wanted to make a Sweet Home successor. Typical ringfenced Japanese PR. I do not believe the inspiration for this game exists in a vacuum. I want to demonstrate the DNA of Resident Evil is more diverse and goes back a lot further than Sweet Home.
At its core, Resi is an adventure game
Think about it. The core Resident Evil experience is this:
- Exploring a spooky old mansion, turns out to be on top of something larger
- Selecting a character
- Tank controls and wonky combat
- Revealing more story by exploration
- Puzzle solving / item questing to progress
- Inventory / resource management
- Different endings based on choices you made
I’m not going to speculate where Mikami got the idea for a haunted mansion, but in interviews he said he was inspired by both The Shining and Dawn of the Dead. Much in the same way that Clock Tower’s director Hifumi Kono was inspired by the work of Dario Argento (who BTW wrote DotD). The spooky old mansion is a horror trope that predates computer games by a long way. It’s a good setting for a horror story. It’s claustrophobic. Economical. A small environment with a hard physical boundary. New areas can be discovered and unlocked. No surprise that a great many horror games are about exploring an old mansion (science lab, museum, hospital etc).
Multiple characters & spooky mansions
Right at the beginning of Resident Evil, the player is asked to choose who to play as. This affects the story, the items the player will have access to and the solutions to some of the game’s puzzles. Maniac Mansion starts with a girl going missing, and a group of kids breaking into a mansion to investigate her disappearance. It turns out that the mansion is actually built on a secret lab where bad scientists have been doing bad science. At the beginning of the game the player has to choose which characters to play as, with each character having different skills and abilities which help with the game’s puzzles. The puzzles largely revolve around finding specific items and using them on the right thing and there are different endings depending on the characters you chose and the choices you made. If there was an ur-Resi, I think MM is a strong case for it. A lot of features here would appear in SH. Other Haunted House games existed, but Maniac Mansion (1987) released two years prior to Sweet Home, with a Japanese Famicom release in 1988. Somebody at Capcom could conceivably have played this game.
Tank controls & janky combat
As the 3D era emerged, standards were slow to materialise. There was a lot of variety in these games as developers tried to get the most out of the technology available. The game which inarguably inspired Resi the most is Infogrames’s Alone in the Dark (1992). The first three AitD games were released in Japan on both the PC-98 and FM Towns computers as well as console ports. All three came out before Resident Evil was released and the series was one of the few Western titles to achieve genuine success in Japan. In an interview with french newspaper Le Monde, Shinji Mikami said that had he not played Alone in the Dark, Resident Evil would probably have become a first-person shooter.
The similarities don’t end with fixed camera angles and tank controls though. Alone in the Dark is also about two people investigating a spooky old mansion after a suspicious murder. You can choose between two characters to play as and as you play, it’s revealed that the mansion is built on a big complex filled with all kinds of evil stuff. Resi’s producer Tokuro Fujiwara did admit that he also used AitD as inspiration for how to make a horror game. It feels to me like AitD was the boilerplate for RE; this one game’s influence is far more obvious to me than Sweet Home.
One thing which Resi did bolster up is the gunplay. AitD has something like 12 bullets in the whole game and really focuses on the idea that direct confrontation is rarely the best option. Resi does echo this. Especially in the REmake, avoiding the zombies altogether is often a good strategy. But pistols, shotguns, big iron, grenade launcher. The gamefeel is so satisfying. The amount of guns does dilute my adventure game analogy.
Silly stories & exploration
Exploration plays a big part in the storytelling in the first few Resi games. The story is pretty minimal and the only way to figure a lot of it out is if you’re willing to hunt down and read the old text documents scattered about the place.
This is taken whole cloth from Alone in the Dark, where the lore is discovered by reading old books and letters and diaries. The direction is pretty opaque, it’s not super obvious what you’re supposed to do from one minute to the next. Exploring is one of the ways you discover different endings, as well as the choices you make along the way. So if you don’t care about story, you wouldn’t explore. Touching a bunch of filthy old books would make Resident Evil a pretty dull game.
Inventory management & puzzles
Mikami knew he couldn’t just make a game about running away from zombies and schlepping about an empty mansion. So he added puzzles and mysteries into the game to incentivise the exploration. Puzzles are the bulk of the gameplay in RE. Most of the puzzles revolve around having the right item in your inventory and using it on the right thing, but puzzles they are.
This piano puzzle is very adventure gamey. You can tell you have to play the piano. Have to find the music, jam it out. Secret door, take the gold thing, replaced with the wood thing. Backtracking backtracking. Moon logic. Doesn’t take long. Good dopamine feeder. It was these peter to paul item quests that made me realise how Resident Evil is as much an adventure as anything else. You can feel the influence of a great many games. These puzzles hark all the way back to Maniac Mansion and are present in basically all adventure games.
Resi takes this one step further than most. Most adventure games let the player carry unlimited things. But Resi will only let you carry a set number of items, some games even limiting this even more depending on which character you choose. Sometimes annoying but good.
There are a few more involved puzzles and a few insta-death traps. These don’t set this apart – Prisoner of Ice and AitD had these. If anything the puzzles get better from game to game. Resi 3 has a puzzle copied from Shivers. Not saying that Resi directly copied Shivers. It’s a puzzle involving gears, I’m sure two people could think of that separately. What I am saying is that these games were clearly approached with the mindset of an adventure game designer.
Closing
Over the course of the original trilogy, we saw the title evolve into a more action-based franchise. Later games in the series would move away from spooky mansions and became less about horror. Mikami was aware that the spookiness was decreasing from game to game. And could be why 0 revisited that intimate, stressful sensation and slower pace. As the Resi franchise has evolved over the years, the locations may have got bigger and the game may have leaned more into the action, but the puzzles and adventure theme stayed strong.
At this point, it feels like the Resi franchise is able to adapt any genre to its horror vision. Rail shooters, walking simulators, co-op action games, pachinko machines. I’d love to imagine what Resi could be like as an actual P&CA. A full mouse driven experience. All the elements are there, you could probably do this with a mod to the original game. Blade Runner has a P&C and you right-click to quickly switch to the gun. How do I start a crowdfunder for that?
When I first played Resi back in the 90s, my takeaway was that it was really hard, gruelling and scary. Replaying it recently, I really appreciated it through the lens of it being an adventure game. If you’ve not played it and have been put off, maybe give it a go with this in mind. Oh and definitely play it on easy.