Resident Evil 7 demo now spooking PC
BOO!
The Resident Evil 7 [official site] demo 'Beginning Hour' is now out on PC after six months of haunting consoles. RE7 looks a curious one, ostensibly returning to the series' roots in spooky mansions but with hillbilly horror and an Amnesia-ish, PT-y first-person style. Most of what Capcom have shown so far is set inside one derelict spookhouse, and now we can visit that place ourselves in the demo. Beginning Hour isn't the game's first hour but rather a mood-setting piece, confusingly. As our Adam has written, It's certainly interesting to see such a bloated series stripped back.
Swing by Steam to grab the Beginning Hour demo now. It's a 3.2GB download.
Capcom updated the console demo a few times with new areas and mysteries, but sadly we're missing out on that. Adam tells me this morning:
"It's a shame that with the demo coming to PC so late, we presumably won't get to the weird thrill of loading it up and knowing that something had changed. The domestic setting does a good job of making familiar things seem awful and the updates to the demo meant that even when you knew the location of every creaky floorboard and terrifying trigger, you could never be sure that something hadn't shifted, or been added, while you were away."
The demo's updates drifted away from pure hillbilly horror and slightly more towards traditional Resident Evil scares but that taking five months gave an interesting impression of the slow build that Capcom are supposedly shooting for in RE7.
I'm still not convinced that Capcom won't totally stack this and reveal that the Dulvey Haunted House was built by Bertie Wesker and his superpowered pals to test the BJ Virus or some other nonsense alluded to once in the novelisation of a cutscene seventeen games ago, then Bertie and the roiling mass of muscle that is Chris Redfield will spend four hours punching each other through walls. But if Resident Evil 7 can cast off a lot of the crushing weight of the series' history, this could be jolly exciting.
Resident Evil 7 is due to launch on January 24th, 2017. It'll cost £39.99/49,99€/$59.99. Oh, and Capcom have also revealed its graphics options for folks who love that stuff.