resident evil revelations Archives

What Did You Think of Revelations? – Poll Results

Oct 072014

I’ve already discussed my own feelings toward Resident Evil: Revelations, not to mention my lack of enthusiasm for its upcoming sequel, but what do visitors to Words of a Mad Author think of it?

Not much, apparently.

The results of our Revelations poll were rather dismal. Out of a total of 5 votes, 1 person liked it and considered it survival horror, two people liked it but didn’t consider it survival horror, and 2 people hadn’t played it.

If you’re the one who considers it survival horror, chime in with your reasons. I’d love to debate it with you!

That’s all for now, but stay tuned! One of my most anticipated survival horror games is now available, so I’ll be back soon with my initial thoughts on Alien: Isolation.

Revelations: The Little RE Game That Couldn’t

Reviews, Video games No Responses » Tagged with: resident evil, resident evil revelations, survival horror

Sep 152014

Resident Evil: Revelations.

It can’t catch a break.

I’ve mentioned this game a few times, and not positively. In my first-ever blog post, I described it as a “step in the right direction,” but decried it and games like it as “half-hearted, watered down compromises.” Last month, I referred to Revelations as “a half-way attempt” when considering the future of the Resident Evil series.

Now that a sequel has been announced, it’s time I take a look at this game once again.

“Revelations is not survival horror.” A lot of people consider those of us who make such a claim to be nostalgic whiners who will never be pleased with anything. Is that true? Let’s break it down.

Back in that first blog post of mine, I said a survival horror game must have:

“a disturbing or frightening atmosphere, de-emphasized combat, a maze-like environment that encourages exploration, and puzzles”

I’ve since refined my description. The essential elements for a survival horror game are:

Horror elements (“a disturbing or frightening atmosphere”
De-emphasized combat
Recursive unlocking (“a maze-like environment that encourages exploration”

Puzzles are a tricky issue. Some are clearly puzzles, like the riddles in Silent Hill or the water puzzle in Resident Evil 3. Others are more ambiguous. If you need to put a gem in a statue to get a key, is that a puzzle? If it is, is using a medallion to open a door also a puzzle, or is that just a part of the recursive unlocking? And if that’s a puzzle, doesn’t that mean it’s a puzzle whenever you use a key, or if you unlock doors with a key card you found?

Due to the ambiguity of puzzles, I now consider them a secondary element. Two elements that help survival horror, but are not necessarily required are:

Puzzles
Apocalyptic logs

Of course, there are many optional elements often mistaken for what survival horror fans want, such as fixed camera angles, save points, and inventory management. These things help, but they aren’t vital, and they can’t carry the game on their own.

So, how did Resident Evil: Revelations do?

One out of 5 isn’t bad… but it isn’t good, and it doesn’t make it survival horror.

Revelations is horror. I’ll give it that much credit. It even had a creepy atmosphere on the ship, and some moments were tense. There were some monsters I was terrible against, and I became nervous whenever I heard their signature sound–a definite trait of survival horror games. Attempting to use the Genesis Scanner to earn more herbs and unlock bonuses was also a nice, atmosphere touch.

The checkpoint system took away from the gameplay’s suspense, though, because you almost never lost significant progress.

I take that back. I managed to lose a chunk of progress when I got a checkpoint, then wandered in the opposite direction of the objective to explore as much as I could. Since there were no checkpoints along the non-plot path, I lost my exploration progress when I died.

On one hand, I want to say this is a good thing–exploration is a part of survival horror, so if you play it more like a survival horror game, you’ll have to fear lost progress.

On the other hand, the game punished me for exploration.

I wish I could say Revelations had de-emphasized combat. Two years ago, I said:

“There was no reward for fighting enemies, and many could be avoided. While there were more sections that forced you to battle than the original games had, this is probably the point where Revelations came closest to truly ‘returning to series roots.'”

However, at the time, I was discussing only the parts of the game set on the ship. While most of Resident Evil: Revelations was set on the Queen Zenobia, other chapters switched to different characters or to flashbacks, usually with a hefty dose of action. The developers hyped this as a feature, because apparently players would get too bored if they didn’t get a break from the survival horror gameplay.

For every area where you could avoid combat, there was an action-fest waiting elsewhere. Half credit for de-emphasized combat, I suppose.

Recursive unlocking is where I felt not disappointed, but betrayed by Revelations. When I revisited the demo to see where it led me astray, I described it as “window-dressing . . . superficial shout-outs to the classic games to pretend that’s what it was.” Unless you’ve played it or something similar, you can’t imagine how excited I was when I saw a door that needed a Helm Key. It felt just like the system of locked doors and keys in the early games.

It wasn’t. Sure, you might find a key that unlocked three doors, but would those three unlocked areas give you more pieces to gradually progress forward? No, one would lead to the next plot point and the other two would contain some herbs or ammo.

And that leads us to the problem of puzzles.

What do you think? Fun puzzle, moving the wires around so that they form a shape and all light up, which unlocks the door for you? I hope you said yes, because this is Revelations’ puzzle.

I don’t mean it only had one puzzle. I mean the majority of them were this exact type. If you encountered a puzzle, chances were pretty good you needed to use you screwdriver to open the panel and solve one of these.

Other “puzzles” fall back into the category of superficial shout-outs. There were a handful of item puzzles (such as a slot for a medallion) that, when I saw them early in the game, convinced me classic RE-style puzzles would fill the game. They didn’t. A few existed just to call back to the originals (or to trick people into thinking there would be puzzles).

There were a couple of notes that also served as series fanservice, but not enough to be considered Apocalyptic Logs. After the demo, we had all kinds of story theories based on the “hints” we thought we saw… nope. Not that sort of game, not that sort of storytelling.

Before I played Revelations, I saw people describe its story as weird and convoluted. I was okay with that, because I have nothing against games with weird, convoluted stories.

But it isn’t weird and convoluted in the same way as Professor Layton games, where you just have to roll with the insanity. Revelations’ story is weird and convoluted in the way where you don’t really know what’s going on, and when it’s all over, you don’t really care. (Apologies to anyone who enjoyed the story, but I found it particularly unmemorable.) And instead of giving you a single story through the eyes of one or two protagonists…

You play as Jill for the majority of the story, often accompanied by an AI partner named Parker. Some chapters switch to Chris, accompanied by AI partner Jessica. Then there are flashbacks where you play as Jill and Chris. Flashbacks where you play as Parker and Jessica. Concurrent missions where you play as Quint and Keith, two side characters so annoying that some reviews docked points just for them.

I enjoyed parts of Resident Evil: Revelations. I might go so far as to call it a decent game. However, you’ll notice the lack of affiliate links in this post. It doesn’t deserve that much credit from me.

It was unfocused, unmemorable, and definitely not survival horror. Yet it took a step toward survival horror. Overall, it gives the impression that its creators were afraid to make the survival horror game they wanted to.

Revelations tried and tried to return to series roots, but in the end, it couldn’t.

RE: Revelations Demo Revisited

Video games No Responses » Tagged with: resident evil, resident evil revelations, survival horror

Jul 032012

Today I was looking at my 3DS, and I saw the demo for Resident Evil: Revelations. As you know, Revelations was marketed as a return to the series roots, and if you’ve read my thoughts on the state of survival horror in the Resident Evil series, you know that Revelations was decidedly not survival horror. However, when I first played the demo, I was delighted with it! I was convinced that if the majority of the game played like that, I would be content. (Ironically, I felt the part of the game that the demo came from was actually stronger in the main game; the two didn’t play exactly the same.) So I decided to replay the demo and see what it had that the game itself lacked.

Starting the demo, I find myself controlling Jill. She is alone, having woken up in a strange room aboard the Queen Zenobia. Contacting her partner, they make a plan to meet up. From there I can investigate the room. There are several things to look at, with Jill silently commenting on the various objects I inspect. The room itself is beautiful, letting you study other things that can’t be interacted with–many of which spawned theories and speculation that in the end meant absolutely nothing.

The door leading to the hall is locked, controlled by panel to the side that is screwed shut. Fortunately, there is another door, leading to a new room to explore. Inspecting that area leads you to a tub that must be drained, with a screwdriver concealed inside. That triggers the first monster attack, as leaving the area puts you in contact with an Ooze that must be killed so that you can escape the room. If you play the way I do (badly) this uses a lot of bullets, of which you only have ten, but there are five more lying nearby.

So far, other than the forced battle, nothing has happened that points against it being survival horror. Now you have to solve a puzzle to open the door, an interesting little thing that makes use of the touchscreen. It’s not bad for a first puzzle–they didn’t tell me that virtually every puzzle in the game would be a variation on the exact same thing. Instead, this suggested unique ways to employ the touchscreen in RE puzzles.

Out in the hall, you find a room with a shotgun–a bit early to find a better weapon, but you only have two bullets for it–and your first green herb. Depending on how that Ooze battle went earlier, you may have to use it and be down to no green herbs again already. The same room also contains the chest that will be used to upgrade weapons, but you can’t use it in the demo. But better yet, the hallway contains two more doors! One is locked–an excellent sign for later exploration, and the other leads to the next area.

The next two rooms contain an easily avoidable enemy, a little ammo, an herb, and several things that look out of place–like they might be puzzle items later on. I believe one or two might have actually been files in the main game. None were puzzle items.

Next we find a hallway with one locked door–clearly different from the last one, as it requires a keycard–some ammo, and a jump scare. The Ooze can be avoided, if you want to go to the next room instead of fighting. This leads to a beautiful room with a few doors (four, to be precise: the one you came from, one locked door, and two up the stairs), a couple items, and the general feeling of a hub area akin to the main hall of Spencer’s mansion. One door leads to a room where you get the scanner, one of the game’s best features.

The ability to scan for items and handprints–and by items, I mean ammo and herbs; it’s not like the game has any puzzle items for you to find–increases the desire to explore, and scanning enemies will get you percentages towards a new herb. Unfortunately, backtracking with the scanner gets you nothing, unless you want to scan the Ooze you dodged.

Another enemy appears in the room once you have the scanner, although it’s still fairly easy to dodge. Using your scanner instead of hurrying ahead nets you some more items; you may be full on handgun ammo by now. The ammo limit could be taken one of two ways–either you’ll always have enough, so you don’t have to worry about stockpiling it, or it will purposely reduce your ability to fight. In my playthrough on Normal, it leaned towards the former. Here you also find a grenade.

In the next room, you find a regular Ooze that can be easily avoided, an exploding Ooze that always gets me, and another grenade (hidden, so you have to use the scanner). That is a strength that carries over to the game–using the scanner can help you find more items, but it makes you slow down and therefore puts you in more danger from enemies.

In the next hallway, there is a hidden item and a dangerous Ooze. By this point, I had accumulated enough shotgun ammo that I could take care of it, but not without taking damage myself. I then went to the elevator. The elevator reunites me with Parker, but my AI partner takes off without me to reach the bridge. In the next room, there are lockers to investigate and find some ammo in, but not much else. Finally making it to the bridge, we find a locked door and the plot point that ends the demo.

So in the end…what was it? The combat was fairly consistent with how Revelations actually was; I think it was mainly what even the start of Revelations did as well that got me–hinting at survival horror elements. The locked doors–suggesting greater exploration than what you ever got. The screwdriver and door puzzle–suggesting puzzles like in the games of old. Overall, the demo never lied about anything. It just presented things in such a way that if you were hoping the game would be classic survival horror, you could convince yourself that the elements were there.

The game took it even further, teasing the various keys that would be needed and having an item you couldn’t get without a medallion. The depressing thing is that it was all window dressing. Revelations never made the jump to survival horror, but it used superficial shout-outs to the classic games to pretend that’s what it was.