In Resident Evil 7, you find the first tape upstairs. It rests in a lonely corner, a nearby lamp illuminating its resting place in stark contrast to the syrupy darkness overtaking the rest of the room.
You take the tape downstairs, to a television hissing with static, and slide it into the VCR. The camera zooms in, the world goes grainy, and you're somewhere else. You're someone else, too: a camera man, following a hacky TV show host and his assistant as they explore a creepy Louisiana plantation that you, as protagonist Ethan Winters, have wandered into in search of your missing wife Mia. A lot of players will naturally pause here, thinking they're watching a cutscene, before they realize that they're actually in control. This moment, stuck between past and present, toying with the player's sense of control and perspective, is Resident Evil 7 at its best.
Which is saying something. *Resident Evil 7 *manages to build on the roots of the venerable survival-horror franchise to deliver an exercise in sustained tension. By switching the perspective to first-person—the series has depended on the third-person view since its 1996 debut—RE7 crafts an experience that keeps one foot in abject terror and one in B-movie laughs. From its opening unhinged riff on Texas Chainsaw Massacre to the more traditional bulk of its gameplay, it's an eerie, consistently entertaining puzzle box drenched in Southern gothic dread. And the videotapes are the stroke of genius that turn that puzzle box into a tesseract.
