Resident Evil

The Spencer Mansion. This is where it all started, at least for Resident Evil fans. I was far too young to play the original Resident Evil, which came out in 1996 for the PlayStation – but I did play the remake, which was released on the GameCube in 2002. I’m pretty sure I didn’t finish it back then – I was barely a teenager at that point and the game stressed me out too much – but I distinctly remember exploring the sprawling, aristocratic mansion and nearly having a heart attack when a zombie dog smashed through a window into the corridor in front of me. More recently, I revisited the game – specifically, the 2015 HD remaster on the Xbox – with the aim of finally completing it with both characters, Chris Redfield (25, ex-Air Force pilot) and Jill Valentine (23, ex-Delta Force operator, and expert lock picker). As of this writing, I have beaten the game as Jill and I have started my Chris play-through.

Resident Evil Remake (or REmake, as it is often referred to by fans, which is great wordplay) is an incredibly tense and atmospheric game. Like earlier Resident Evil titles, the remake uses pre-rendered, largely static backgrounds – meaning all background graphics are calculated beforehand rather than at runtime. There are two main advantages to using this method. Firstly, it means that all of the GameCube’s power can concentrate on making the real-time part of the engine – i.e. the characters – look fantastic since the graphics processor doesn’t have to worry about drawing the actual ‘world’. Secondly, this method frees the game’s background artists from any limitations imposed by the console, e.g., the number of polygons they can use to model the scene or the size of the texture maps they use to ‘paint’ these models. Texture distortions have been used to fool you into thinking water is flowing and grass is blowing in the wind.

The main drawback with this method, however, is that the game camera is static. It cannot move smoothly around the world following the player – to draw each frame with such detail would be too slow. Instead, the view jumps from one pre-rendered position to the next as the player moves around. In a game like Resident Evil, this works perfectly in my opinion. The fixed camera angles only show you what the game designers want you to see. It’s almost as if the player is viewing the action through hidden cameras placed throughout the mansion. These pre-determined, often oblique camera angles can be disorientating, especially if you’re not used to them; occasionally, they even suggest that someone, or something, is silently watching you. Threats often lurk just out of view, unseen. Exploring a new area can therefore be disconcerting; your senses twitch madly as you tiptoe around, listening intently for the low, guttural moans of a zombie, or straining to see what might be hiding in the thick shadows ahead. You become paranoid. Will something smash through that window? Is there something lurking around that corner? Is that body on the floor really dead?

The tension and dread are heightened by the haunting, dynamic music, which adapts to the story’s pacing in real time. As you’re exploring a room, trying to solve a puzzle, the music is often soft and eerie, emphasising the sense of isolation, loneliness, and unease the player will undoubtedly feel. But sometimes the music will swell to an unbearably chilling crescendo that signals the entrance of a new monster. Even the door-opening animations, which play when moving between rooms, elevate the anticipation of what lies on the other side. Will the door open into a ‘save room’? Or will you be thrust into a corridor with a zombie right on the other side?

The story of Resident Evil starts with Team Alpha of Raccoon City’s Special Tactics and Rescue Service (S.T.A.R.S) travelling by helicopter to a remote part of the Arklay Mountains, outside the fictional Midwestern US town known as Raccoon City, where several people have recently disappeared without a trace. Once on the ground, the nightmare quickly begins as Team Alpha stumbles across a pack of grotesque, half-rotting dogs ripping apart a dead body. Chris, Jill, and the other members of Team Alpha (including Albert Wesker, the captain, and Barry Burton, the weapons specialist) turn on their heels and run towards a dark, deserted mansion where they hope to find refuge. It’s then your job to take control of your chosen character, find a way out, and discover what’s going on here.

It quickly becomes clear that something awful has happened in this mansion because shuffling through the dimly lit hallways are ravenous zombies, eager to feast on living flesh. Although the occasional cutscene moves the story along, much of the background is revealed, slowly but satisfyingly, through photos, letters, diary entries, and other records strewn throughout the mansion, often scrawled by the desperate and the dying.

The Spencer Mansion was the brainchild of prominent New York architect George Trevor, known for his labyrinthine floor plans and elaborate locking mechanisms. After Oswell E. Spencer outlined wishes for his own private getaway in the backwoods of the Arklay Mountains, Trevor visited Spencer’s office in 1962 with a collection of impressive design plans that were ultimately approved. Despite a last-minute change in construction company and minor alterations to the designs, construction went ahead without major issues.

The mansion, which has two floors above ground and one below, radiates Gothic opulence; it is lavishly furnished, filled to the brim with expensive art pieces, paintings, and sculptures. The estate also covers many acres of garden landscape, expanding into the forest and housing two small graveyards. Behind the mansion is a large crypt; underneath it, there is a maze-like network of abandoned mining tunnels – perhaps a major influence in Spencer’s decision to build his home here.

From the outset, as you tentatively explore the first few rooms and claustrophobic corridors of the Spencer Mansion, you can feel the building radiating an uneasy and unnatural kind of energy. The labyrinthine passageways, hidden rooms, and trick-locks all seem unsuitable for human habitation. You eventually discover the horrors that you encounter – zombies and other hideously mutated abominations – are the product of scientific experimentation and manufactured viruses rather than supernatural forces. So, although the mansion isn’t haunted in the traditional sense, it definitely does seem to be trying to kill you. In fact, the mansion is rigged with traps throughout; it was purposefully designed and constructed to be malevolent.

The reason why becomes clear later in the game. The true purpose of the mansion was never really to be lived in, but to act as a front, a facade, for a secret underground laboratory beneath the building. The pharmaceutical giant, Umbrella, has been performing illegal experiments in this lab for decades, creating an assortment of bio-weapons that players are forced to fight and flee from during the game: giant sharks, giant snakes, giant spiders… apparently, Umbrella likes perpetuating almost every last animal phobia. Although the mansion served as an executive guesthouse for Umbrella V.I.P.s and some senior research staff who lived on-site, it’s easy to imagine that it was primarily used as a ‘gate’ to keep out, or kill, intruders who might find the secret lab.

Many of Umbrella’s research staff and guards lived and slept in the dormitory, which can be accessed via an elevator in the mansion’s courtyard. Unlike the main mansion, the dormitories are a bit cosier and retain a lived-in feel. There is a recreation room here that would have distracted the staff; empty beer bottles lie strewn around, while a pool table indicates that a game was abandoned halfway through, possibly related to the gigantic, hairy spiders that now lurk in the room. In the basement of the dormitory, there is a huge water tank, where the development of aquatic B.O.W.s seems to have been conducted.

Another elevator in the same courtyard, this time hidden beneath a water feature, leads to the underground laboratory. Suddenly, the creaky old mansion doors in the loading screens are replaced by stainless steel ones. Rooms are no longer filled with priceless antiques, grand pianos, and marble statues, but by sterile medical equipment and computers. It is down here that many of Umbrella’s early heinous creations were born. Each underground level is equipped with state-of-the-art facilities, and, for added security, some of the laboratory layout features accessways not included in George Trevor’s original schematics.

Whatever happened to George Trevor, by the way? Well, you learn his fate through different discarded diary entries as you explore the mansion. It seems that Spencer used the mansion to trap Trevor and performed horrific experiments on his wife and daughter. The building’s enigmatic foundation, its secret passageways, and locked doors turned against their creator – and Trevor, in his attempt to escape, became lost somewhere in an unfinished area of the house, falling down an inescapable pit. It was there that he discovered a gravestone upon which his own name was inscribed. Spencer couldn’t afford to let the one other person who knew all the building’s secrets live. Once the mansion had been completed, he always intended for Trevor to die in it, to tie up loose ends.

In more recent times, in May 1998, there was an outbreak of the t-Virus; it leaked from the underground lab and quickly infected the entire estate. The virus also spread beyond the mansion, for reports of grisly ‘animal attacks’ and mysterious disappearances in the Arklay Mountains soon reached Raccoon City. A couple of months later, in July 1998, S.T.A.R.S. was dispatched to investigate these odd incidents, and many of them ended up inside the Spencer Mansion, where they were attacked by the multitudinous creatures that now dwelled there.

Just like George Trevor’s death, however, this was all planned. As you learn quite late in the game, S.T.A.R.S. is actually being deliberately eliminated as a test of Umbrella’s bioweapons. But I’ll get to that another time.

So, what did I think of returning to the Spencer Mansion for the first time in nearly a decade? In short, it was great to be back. I had a blast trying to navigate its maze of shadowy corridors, dodging zombies, and racking my brain to see if I could remember how to solve some of the game’s ridiculously obtuse puzzles. The backgrounds may be pre-rendered, but Capcom’s clever use of light and shadow brings every dingy room to life. The whole mansion and its surrounding environs are drenched in atmosphere. Dim, moody lighting and richly detailed textures give the game a heavy, claustrophobic feel. Candles flicker and the shadows of trees dance across the walls. Tiny insects swarm around the glow of a bulb. Mist envelops a moonlit path. A grandfather clock ticks the seconds away, unnerving against the dead silence. REmake masterfully has you in suspense every time you sit down to play, especially at the higher difficulties. Every threat seems meaningful because both protagonists can only carry a very limited number of things (Jill eight items; Chris a mere six), and they both move fairly slowly (there’s no ‘sprint’ button in this game), so you always feel quite vulnerable. Make the wrong choice or take too long on some objectives, and you may pay for it with the death of a comrade, who might have helped in a later boss fight.

The navigation can be frustrating and cumbersome due to somewhat robotic, laborious character controls. At times, you can find yourself flailing back and forth between different static camera views, not quite able to go in the direction you want, or running up against walls as if you’re on a treadmill, with zombies descending upon you. You sometimes feel like you’re fighting the game as much as you’re fighting the undead. For some modern gamers, it may make REmake an impenetrable, archaic beast.

But if these things sound like criticisms, they’re not – at least, not to me. A big part of the game’s oppressive tension comes from limitations placed on the player. The mercilessly limited resources, the inscrutable puzzles, the unintuitive controls, the awkward mobility, the fixed camera angles that obscure enemies and important details – they all work to amplify the unease and generate the fear. There’s nothing quite like the feeling of dread at the prospect of having to backtrack across half the monster-filled mansion to pick up an essential item with only a few bullets remaining.

It may be a remaster of a remake of a 1996 game, but Resident Evil HD still holds up. The scares, puzzles, and atmosphere of the Spencer Mansion are as potent as ever.