Resident Evil 7: Biohazard review – a masterclass in terror

Capcom's survival horror series goes back to its origins as a truly shocking, challenging and terrifying experience

Who lives in a house like this? It's a question the Japanese horror series Resident Evil has been asking of its players since 1996, when it first locked us inside an aristocratic mansion on the outskirts of Racoon City, somewhere in the American mid-west. There, behind creaking doors and sliding oak panels, the answer was a grotesque menagerie of ragged zombies, bloody Doberman hounds and terrifying Homeric snakes. Since then both the locale and the locals have changed, from Resident Evil 4's sojourn to a dejected Spanish forest to the fifth game's contentious trip to sweltering African townships.

Swampy, buzzing Louisiana is the setting for this, the seventh game, which, thanks to the involvement of the Texan writer Richard Pearsey (Spec Ops: The Line; 1979 Revolution) takes its cues not from Hammer Horror but from Truman Capote's harrowing non-fiction novel In Cold Blood and the 1974 slasher film Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Protagonist Ethan Winters arrives at the gates of a derelict house on the edge of a fetid bayou on the trail of his presumed-dead wife, Mia. Inside the home he finds the Bakers, a hick family who live in squalor. There's a dead crow in the microwave. There's a cascade of offal in the fridge. There's a mangled deer in the cellar. What else would you expect from a family that built a morgue in the basement?