Resident Evilwas always planned to be an isometric survival-horror thrill ride, right? Surprisingly, no. As reported byCBR, Shinji Mikami has revealed that he actually planned for a first-person game. Imagine that - the original Resident Evil as an FPS like Resident Evil 7.The problem was that the tech at the time couldn’t render at the detail desired, and so Resident Evil became an isometric affair for well over a decade. It wouldn’t be until the end of the PlayStation’s lifecycle that we’d see fully 3D environments done well, like with Alien: Resurrection.
Yet for those who can’t help but wonder about what could’ve been, there’s Nightmare of Decay.
Solo-developed by Checkmaty, Nightmare of Decay is what Resident Evil could’ve been, just with a pinch of Lovecraft thrown in for good measure. There’s no evil biotech company within these mansion halls. Ghosts, giant monsters that collect corpses for fun, and gaping interdimensional flesh holes with eyes that barter for body parts are all just a fraction of the horrors in store.
This is particularly impressive given the game’s brevity. Nightmare of Decay isshort. Really short. There’s a brief intro where you learn that someone is Nightmare On Elm Street-ing people into this mansion that has no clear escape. It takes less than twelve minutes before you’re thrust into the meat of the game, no delays or hand holding. Straight into the mansion lobby after a brief tutorial on zombie stabbing.
Yet you wouldn’t think that while playing it. Nightmare might just be one of the best-paced horror games of the year, if not of all time. The sheer rate of escalation is nothing short of thrilling. Nothing outstays its welcome. All killer, no filler.
RELATED:Before Far Cry, There Was Project IGI
To be clear, you still do everything like you would in a traditional Resident Evil game, just faster; puzzles that require collecting three items from simpler puzzles and combat arenas, combat spread across an expansive interior environment, encouragement to stay far away from enemies and only take calculated risks, and big bosses with huge health bars that require as much planning as they do careful positioning. Inventory management, a minigame that rewards you with extra ammo and equipment, limited keys and lockpicks; it’s all there, masterfully executed no less.
The way that Nightmare rolls out tutorials without you even realizing is superb. The deliberate, handcrafted nature of it all is just as charming as the retro aesthetic. It might look like you’re running around in a 90s FMV cutscene, but the game design is top notch modern thinking. Checkmaty clearly understands that while slower-paced combat and elaborate item hunts are key to the Resident Evil formula, limiting controls and drawn out gameplay isn’t.
That doesn’t mean that survival is easy in Nightmare. You have to line up sometimes half a dozen headshots with your pistol to take down a single zombie. Gauging the distance with your knife’s melee radius is actually more challenging in first-person, leaving you vulnerable to being grappled and eaten. The shotgun and dynamite are extremely useful, and their ammo is just as exceedingly rare. A room with four enemies is sometimes more unnerving than the actual jumpscares, or the slow-burn ones you might miss at first.
There are plenty of zombies, but more unique encounters might not repeat at all after they happen. I would love to say that’s the case for the gun-toting monks who can somehow fire faster and more accurately than you, but that’s not the case.
Most enemies and even the bosses are well designed, but the monks somehow manage to embody the “well, we need to escalate things with some action” mentality seen in your average horror sequel, which is weird because Nightmares has possessed suits of armor that would make way more sense. Demonic archers with slow fire rates would feel a lot fairer than these Friar Tuck gone full Evil Dead maniacal with their Glocks. Maybe if you could sprint in combat for longer than a nanosecond this could be compensated for, but you only have unlimited sprint outside of combat.
The zombies, on the other hand, are just so well done. They behave erratically, sometimes spinning in a circle as they struggle to get their bearings. These are undead corpses visibly struggling to function. I don’t know of another example of a first-person horror shooter trying to depict zombies in such a grounded way (let alone in a game with talking cats and flesh holes).
RELATED:Sackboy Is Coming To PC, But LittleBigPlanet Is What We Really Need
Nightmare would’ve been better off without the shoddy voice acting, which can breally undermine a deftly built up scary moment. It’d have been better to just not have ‘voice’ acting in the traditional sense at all, or actual vocal deliveries like in Nightmare’s recent peer in the indie horror space, Chasing Static.
That said, if the worst complaint a horror game can get is mediocre voice acting, that’s pretty darn good. With a free demo and a highly replayable campaign across two difficulty settings, a horde mode, and a randomizer - it’s the perfect bite-sized bit of zombie bashing to scratch that Resident Evil itch while we await Resident Evil 8: Village’s expansion DLC. And if you’re new to survival horror in this style, then this might well be one of the best ways to dip your toes into the genre. The controls are intuitive, the pacing is fantastic, and the price to entry couldn’t be lower.
Turns out Mikami-san had it right from the start - whether modern or retro, Resident Evil really does work great as an FPS.
