While we know there surely will be a sixth Resident Evil, set for release this November, details about the game are hard to come by. The only solid indication of its premise and hints about its gameplay come from a short reveal trailer released earlier this year. There’s been a lot of debate about exactly what this trailer shows, and the usual internet-based attempts to scrutinize every frame of footage as if it were a heavily coded secret message direct from Capcom. Unfortunately, the trailer is pretty much all anyone has to go on, so we might as well let the speculation commence.
There are basically two camps (aren’t there always?) when it comes to breaking down this trailer. Naturally, they watch the same three minutes of video and drawn entirely opposite conclusions from it. On one hand, we have the folks who scream that RE6 is obviously the death knell of the entire series, another slasher shoot-em-up not fit to wear the shoulder-boards of a “survival horror” game. And in the opposing corner, there’s the group that sees it as a clear return to the series’s creepy, man-alone, scare-you-silly roots, viewing the entire enterprise with great hope and wonder. It’s the classic glass half-full/glass half-empty proposition, except the glass is undead and partially filled with human blood. Anyway. Both sides claim ample evidence to support their perspective; like short little movies, whatever is shown in a trailer can be twisted and rationalized to mean essentially whatever you were hoping it would mean in the first place, provided you try hard enough. So, who is right, and who is completely insane? Let’s go to the video tape.
In the beginning, we learn that President Benford was all set to come clean about the whole Raccoon City virus thing that has basically screwed up the entire world for the past five Resident Evils, except he somehow gets turned into a zombie, and Leon S. Kennedy (whose name fits so well into that Billy Bragg/Woody Guthrie track off the Second Mermaid Avenue album, and I would totally vote for him) has to pop him. Mostly what you notice, though, is how everything is all spookily lit and slow-moving and tension-ratcheted. The emphasis is definitely on one character facing off against a whole horde of the undead. Part of the game apparently takes place in a town called Tall Oaks, which gets totally wiped out by the virus and zombified – as one character puts it, “Raccoon City all over again!” – so right there you’ve got a couple heroes versus 70,000 undead. Bad odds! Scary odds. All of the scenes from that portion look suitably horror-movie creepy: the shadows of a zombie horde cornering Leon in a tunnel; big empty echoing halls filled with dark corners, from behind which enemies will presumably jump; a bus stalled in the rain, surrounded by zombies groaning for flesh. It all looks pretty classic. It’s nice to see an apparent re-emphasis on the old, staggering, flesh-eating zombie types.
The levels involving Chris Redfield and his squad of soldiery fellas look less outright creepy, although they still look pretty darn outnumbered. Most of his action seems to take place in a city that is not really Hong Kong, but close enough to suit the premise; all those neon signs and skyscrapers cut down on the potential for good old gothic horror, so it’s not that surprising to see this part of the game looking more fast-paced with bigger, quicker-moving enemies. This is still kind of a toss-up, though. On the other hand, it does look a bit run-and-gun. However, being part of a small squad of soldiers, cornered and hopelessly outnumbered by uncountable lumbering monstrosities, has plenty of fright potential in and of its own right. And another heartening detail is that the vast majority of the trailer takes place at night (the opposite of Resident Evil 5). Night is much scarier than daytime, it’s a fact!
The camp that decries RE6 as just another Gears-of-War-esque baddie slaughterhouse does have a few good solid points in their favor. Primarily, there’s a new character introduced in the trailer, a crew-cut blond dude who is apparently some kind of ex-mercenary (this comes from a line of dialogue where he says “I was better off as a mercenary.”) And he has special blood that everybody wants. Nobody knows exactly why; maybe it tastes like Twizzlers or a cherry Slushie. Maybe he’s totally immune to any of these (ahem) “bio-terror outbreaks” that keep happening all over the world. Or maybe injecting yourself with his blood gives you superpowers. That last one actually seems like the most likely possibility, given that what we mostly see him do in the trailer is completely destroy enemies without a weapon. He has some vicious movies and three- or four-layer-thick combos that look slightly beyond the range of what we’d normally call “human.” We still don’t know who the heck he is, but this dude is lethal, and the best argument that RE6 is going to be all about clobbering time, largely ignoring the scary.
So who wins in the end? Who knows. Come on. Am I some kind of wizard who can divine the entirety of a game’s plot and mechanics from two hundred seconds of video? I am not that kind of wizard, no. But I will say I’ve fallen into the “good” camp here. One, it looks like there will be at least some parts of the game that are properly creepy and that I’ll enjoy playing with the lights off. And two, I like levels set in Hong Kong, or pseudo-Hong-Kong. So I’ll remain unabashedly in the glass-half-full-of-human-blood camp, at least until the playable demo comes out later this year.