Horror has always been a genre that will have throngs of fans. From George A. Romero and John Carpenter, to Stephen King and H.P. Lovecraft, it has been able to rake in the cash.
Who is the big horror name in the gaming industry, though? Many would argue that it is the creator of Resident Evil: Shinji Mikami.
In 1996, Resident Evil (also known as Biohazard in Japan) was released for the Playstation to tumultuous crowd approval. Originally working on a game about a haunted mansion and soon diverting the story to be about a massive bio weapon leak, the game delivered scares that gamers hadn’t experienced before, successfully bringing to light the Survival Horror genre of video games, and helping the creation of such other series as Silent Hill and Alone in the Dark.
Over the years, more Resident Evil games were released, but they all used the same formula, until the once mighty series was being called stale. So, in 2004, Shinji Mikami once again brought the scares back to the table by revamping the Resident Evil gameplay and story and redefinind the Survival horror genre with Resident Evil 4.
Originally released for the Nintendo Gamecube (GC), it is lauded not only as the greatest survival horror game, but also one of the greatest games, of all time. It successfully reinvigorated the Resident Evil series, and with it, helped introduce a whole new slew of games to the world, such as the Dead Space series. Shinji Mikami left the series shortly after, when Resident Evil 4 was ported to the Playstation 2.
Its success came at a price. Resident Evil 4 was much more action oriented than the previous entries, and the game creators saw this as an opportunity to introduce new gamers to the genre. Without Shinji Mikami to convince them otherwise, Capcom figured that Survival Horror couldn’t generate as much money as shooters such as Call of Duty; so why not try to mesh the two?
With that thinking, Resident Evil 5 was released in 2009, to much less critical acclaim. Called by many a fun game, but not a good Resident Evil game, it missed all its marks. Where did it go wrong?
For one, it introduced multiplayer in an attempt to draw in more audiences. Unfortunately, more players does not mean better, as it takes away the effect of being alone in a terrible nightmare.
In addition to that, when there wasn’t a second person to play as the opposite character partnering with the main character, the AI that took over was laughable. Not only was she a poor backup fighter in any circumstances, but she was the scariest part of the game. As famous game critic Ben “Yahtzee” Crowshaw puts it, in relation to the AI trying to heal your very minor wound with a very major health item, “When you’re running away from your support character with more desperate terror than you feel with any of the actual monsters, something has definitely gone wrong somewhere.”
The Resident Evil series continued blasting into the great beyond without the help of Shinji. The creators of 5 tried listening to fan complaints and tried to mesh horror and action aspects in a more acceptable way. Three years later, in 2012, the result of this attempt was Resident Evil 6 – and it garnered an average score of 66/100. It appeared that, once again, the Resident Evil series had begun to fall.
Masachika Kawata, the series’ current publisher, has stated that he is thinking of rebooting the series to bring it back to its horror roots. But where is Shinji Mikami in all of this?
Nowhere else but working on his own horror game. Published by Bethesda Softworks (famous for games such as Skyrim and Fallout 3), the game is called The Evil Within and is going to be pure survival horror. Shinji Mikami is very excited about it, and if you are a fan of survival horror, it sounds like you should be, too. Looking as if it is taking visual and monster concepts from the Silent Hill series, and with a very Shinji Mikami flare, it is looking to be very good, very original, very scary, and very much what gamers have wanted in a survival horror game for a while.
It is set to come out late this year, so keep your eyes peeled and be ready to be scared, because this game is going to go all out.
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