It might be because I’ve been playing and discussing games for so long now, but I find myself wandering back to the same games every time the spooky season rolls around. I play new stuff constantly, horror games included, but I suppose it just takes a lot for something to really stick now. Anyway, I wound up thinking back to Resident Evil 7 earlier this week and wondering what it was that makes it so compelling even now. Certainly there’s lots I could point to, but in the interest of keeping things focused, I want to zoom in on its video tape side stories.

(Even almost 10 years later, this trailer still absolutely slaps! So many hints and reveals hidden in plain sight and a bunch even in the song! But, again, the VHS tapes are heavily used here too!)

One thing that tends to spoil the scariness of horror games (though certainly not all of them), is the implicit knowledge that your character has to survive until the end. Yes, you might die and get hit with a game over, but there’s a certain comfort in knowing that your character, as far as the story is concerned, is pretty much immortal until they reach the final encounter. In other words, you can rest assured that you won’t be blindsided by sudden death.

This holds true for Ethan Winters in Resident Evil 7, but, crucially, not for the unfortunate subjects of the VHS tapes he finds scattered around the Baker House. It’s established very early on that nobody is safe in these. The very first tape, “Derelict House Footage,” depicts a film crew getting straight up murdered by the Bakers! Just…wow!

Another tape has Mia running for her life only to get captured and probably infected. We see Clancy Jarvis (the cameraman in the first video) fail Lucas’ escape room game in another. In the Banned Footage DLC, we see Clancy again (though we don’t yet know he’s the same guy from the other tape) barely survive different tortures inflicted by the Bakers. It’s all kinds of tense because, as we learned early on, people in these tapes are not safe.

I absolutely love these tapes as a framing device because, again, they remove that unconscious sense of comfort and feeling of invulnerability. In the tapes, your character is vulnerable! Their story can very well end right then and there, and there’s nothing you can do about it! Admittedly, this would be frustrating if things worked this way for Ethan in the main game, but in these little side stories we get that same awful sense of helplessness that comes with watching a traditional horror flick. Only, instead of just watching the character on the screen make a horrible mistake, you’re the one causing it!

This, I think, is what Supermassive Games was trying to do with Until Dawn. That game’s characters can very easily die if you make the wrong series fo decisions, and those deaths do come as a shock. However, since you do have a choice as the player, and players tend to want to get the best outcomes no matter what, those deaths aren’t scary so much as they are frustrating. Here though, since the stories in the tapes mostly don’t affect the main one, Capcom could (and did) kill off several of the characters, and it worked! The whole of the game got heavier because of them, even though Ethan still had the traditional plot armor.

I guess I’ve kind of been hoping to see something similar show up in the subsequent Resident Evil games or in a competitor. But, unfortunately, I don’t think anyone’s realized the impact that the VHS tape framing had on the experience. Ah well, I suppose there’s always going back and trying again for a good ol’ Halloween spook, right?

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How did you feel about the VHS tapes in Resident Evil 7? Were they scarier than the main game? What’s another game mechanic or framing device that really upped the scare factor for you?

Image captured from official announcement trailer