Escape The Room Resident Evil 7

When Resident Evil 7 was released early in 2017, it managed to make such a triumphant splash because of how it truly felt like a render to form. After the series had meandered and lost its way amidst bloated globetrotting sequels and forgettable spinoffs, RE7 pumped the brakes, reconsidered what fabricated the series beloved in the first identify, and brought those elements into a whole new world.

While the shift to outset-person seemed jarring at offset, this new perspective opened the door for all kinds of new terrifying scenarios that the histrion would have to overcome as they escaped from the deranged Baker family unit. Merely while most people might focus on the jump scares, hellish bosses, or resource management that hearkens back to the original games, the thing nigh Resident Evil 7 that'due south stuck with me are a pair of puzzles that delivered a kind of challenge rarely seen in video games.

Comparing Resident Evil 7 to the original games is similar comparing the appearance of an adult to their elementary schoolhouse yearbook pictures. Y'all can see similarities in the optics and ears, perchance the manner their lips curve into a grin, but the person has clearly inverse. This is what making your fashion through the brief descent into RE7'southward hell feels like to me.

The core elements are all still in that location — resource scarcity, an expanding playground that doubles dorsum on itself, and a never-catastrophe parade of creatures that want to cause y'all bodily harm. The Molded feel like a cantankerous between traditional zombies and the Regenerators of Resident Evil four, Marguerite'due south transformations feel like a hellish cross betwixt Hunters and Lickers, and Jack Baker is a ameliorate and more tenacious Nemesis than the one we faced off against this yr in Resident Evil 3. But one character in the story with no historical precedent is Lucas Baker, and he's the source of one of the game's most memorable moments.

Lucas Baker is kind of like an amalgam of The Riddler, Jigsaw, and Jake Paul. He'south less about transforming into a nightmarish brute that you accept to pump endless rounds of ammunition into, and more than about putting you lot in the kinds of scenarios that would bulldoze most people past the brink of insanity. Ethan, Resident Evil 7'due south protagonist, gets a taste of his machinations early on on through i of the playable VHS tapes that human activity every bit flashback mechanisms, simply marked "Happy Birthday." Ane of these recurring flashback characters is Clancy, the cameraman for a low-budget ghost-hunting reality prove. We're introduced to him early on in the game every bit a sort of tutorial guide to the house, and we quickly see that things don't go well for him and his coiffure.

The Happy Birthday video shows that Lucas has tossed Clancy into what appears to exist a darkened apartment. The merely calorie-free stems from a candle beingness held by a decomposing body. Lucas makes your goal simple — take the candle into the next room, and use information technology to lite the other candles on a birthday cake. Piece of cake peasy.

Only given that Lucas is clearly a psychopath, there's a catch — a steady stream of water from the ceiling separates the two rooms, so there'southward no manner to get the candle to its destination without extinguishing the flame. And thus begins 1 of Resident Evil vii'southward two fantastic escape room-inspired puzzles utilizing a terrifying scenario, real-world rules and logic, and a good for you dose of the franchise's strange past to deliver an expertly crafted challenge.

The Happy Birthday escape room takes the spirit of the strange and obtuse puzzles of the original Resident Evil and bestows reality-based logic onto them. Where it seemed cool that the Spencer Mansion would require all these hoops, ladders, keys, and statues for one to simply use a bathroom, the hell that Lucas concocts in Resident Evil vii makes perfect sense for his grapheme.

If you've stumbled across the various bits of optional backstory, you've discovered that Lucas grew upward equally a sort of wunderkind, with trophies and awards for achievements in scientific discipline and engineering science adorning his room. Even so, he also had dark thoughts and lacked basic homo empathy, which laid the groundwork for the bioweapon known as Eveline to infect the family. So having Lucas create this arcane scenario makes perfect sense in this world.

Your escape room is filled with an assortment of items that seem completely random at first — the aforementioned candle, a filthy spyglass, a deflated balloon. But once you begin to explore your environment and think about how the elements would logically interact with each other in positive and negative ways, the pieces brainstorm to autumn into place. Similar with a classic adventure game puzzle, y'all begin to speak the same language as the designers.

Though this merely lasts a few minutes, it'southward filled with these tiny "aha!" moments that give you the endorphin rush of solving a riddle, besides every bit effective jump scares and a growing sense of unease over the whole scenario. As yous might be able to estimate, things don't ultimately work out too well for our cameraman. But Clancy crawled so that Ethan could fly.

If y'all've taken your time, thoroughly explored, been willing to backtrack, and unlocked all of the weirdo bird cages scattered throughout the grounds, then your Ethan is probably a beefed upwardly killing automobile with a healthy stockpile of weapons by this point in the game. Only the team at Capcom wisely subverts this by tossing y'all back into the birthday scenario, where no amount of armament and stat upgrades will help you.

Before Ethan can fifty-fifty enter the area, you have to manually place all of your weapons, ammo, and tchotchkes in the particular box outside the front end door. It's a nice touch that leaves yous feeling incredibly vulnerable, save for the noesis that Lucas doesn't realize y'all learned from watching Clancy's terminal moments. Completing the puzzle once again, merely knowing how to avoid that final twist that ended up ending Clancy, is a fantastic feeling, and one that really tips the scales of the conflict betwixt Ethan and the Bakers.

The effectiveness of this puzzle scenario is used over again in one of Resident Evil seven'due south DLC challenges. Once again, poor Clancy is put at the center of the Baker family'due south machinations, this time with Marguerite strapping him downward to a bed and leaving the room for a moment. While she'southward gone, it's your job to finagle your mode out of your restraints and explore every nook and cranny of the sleeping room for a means of escaping. There are dozens of interactive elements in the room that might firm clues, items, or secret paths. It kind of feels like a distilled version of Fireproof'due south fantastic Room series of games.

The rub is that many of these elements make noise, which attracts Marguerite's attention and brings her dorsum to the room. Yous then merely take a few moments to put everything dorsum where it was and slip back into bed before she checks in on you. If nothing seems out of the ordinary, she'll get out once again. Only if you forgot to supervene upon a picture show y'all removed from the wall or hang a lantern dorsum upwardly on its claw, it's the stop of the line for Clancy.

Both of these scenes provide unique and thrilling challenges that utilize the change in perspective, your own powers of deduction, and the history of the Resident Evil series every bit a whole in fantastic means. They act as mental palate cleansers that throw a new gameplay state of affairs at you, while simultaneously helping bolster the world and its characters. With all signs pointing to the reveal of Resident Evil 8 in the near hereafter, it would be peachy to see Capcom have a look at how these two scenes were so successful and push it fifty-fifty further in the next installment.

Source: https://www.escapistmagazine.com/resident-evil-7escape-room-puzzles-survival-horror-lucas-baker/

Share this post