Disclaimer n' stuff etc: All of this is opinion. I'm not claiming this as definitive, objective truth. This is simply what I think, and you are free to disagree with it. Please refrain from getting upset/throwing beer bottles/insulting my mother if you do disagree with this. Finally, this contains minor spoilers for Resident Evil 1, 3, and the demos for RE7.
So Resident Evil 7 has been announced for some time, and has even gotten a couple of demos. The development team has confirmed that the demos are not indicative of what the gameplay will be like for the finished product, but are merely intended to give a sense of the direction that the team is headed in. To fully clarify, then, my entire argument that RE7 may be a step in the wrong direction is built simply on the "direction" that Capcom has chosen to take Resident Evil.
The demos have been praised by some as a move "back to full on horror" (quote directly taken from IGN). In essence, many of those who are excited at what the demo has shown believe that this is a return to form for the series, where Resident Evil finally gets back to its roots. Realistically, though, I don't think Resident Evil is or has ever been a particularly "scary" series. Most of the recent games have certainly chosen to focus on fast paced action over actual horror, but even the older games were never particularly scary. I realize this is a fairly opinionated measure, so I'll back it up by saying that along with playing the original titles myself, I've either talked to or watched several friends play through them for the first time, and none of them have felt that the game is a particularly scary title. This is fairly excusable; the old RE games suffer from a number of things that would undermine any real sense of horror, such as some incredibly cheesy dialogue, unintelligent enemy AI, and hardware limitations that keep enemies from following you through doors. Along with that, the game very rarely surprises the player without pausing the game and initiating a cutscene of some sort first. When a new enemy type or boss appears that could catch the player off guard, the game will usually stop for at least a moment to reveal it. The player has a second to consider how to respond instead of being forced to make snap second judgements, which takes the tension out of potentially scary moments. Perhaps the most glaring example of this comes from RE3, where, during several of the Nemesis encounters, the screen pauses for a few seconds and gives the player two choices as to what they could do (usually run/hide or fight), instead of allowing them to make those choices organically on the fly.
This isn't inherently a bad thing, however. While the older RE titles have never been particularly scary, they have been good atmospheric survival games. The older RE titles required players to use the limited resources at their disposal intelligently, or risk putting themselves in a severe bind later on in the game. All three of the initial titles (but most notably the first and third) excelled at creating an atmosphere of isolation. The games were never particularly horrifying, but they made the player feel like they were alone and needed to rely on their wit and smart usage of resources to survive as much as their combat skills. The heavy emphasis on puzzles and requiring the player to remember where to use items that they find later on underscores the focus on intelligence. The older Resident Evil games were, above all else, survivor games. They may have been called survival horror, but the horror is just a setup for the game, whereas the survival makes up the vast majority of the core gameplay.
RE7, meanwhile, is evidently inspired by PT and is actually...well...genuinely scary. The game is far more reminiscent of something like Amnesia than any past RE games. Once again, we don't know exactly how representitive the demo is of how the final product will play, but at the very least the new "direction" mentioned by the developers seems to be an actual horror game. On the surface, this might not seem like such a bad thing; even if RE has never really done horror before, it might be a good direction for the series to go in, and it certainly can't be worse than what we got with RE6. The trouble is, however, that the developers seem to believe that genuine horror was a major part of older RE games. As such, RE7 is meant to be reminiscient of older RE titles, which means that most of the major aspects of older titles are present as well. RE1 was cited by Koushi Nakanishi as a "huge influence" for RE7, specifically the emphasis on backtracking and puzzle solving with items you find by exploring elsewhere.
This is where problems start to arise: on their own, exploring/backtraking and horror can be great. Combined, however, they rarely work out. The reason for this is that, if your game is genuinely scary (as RE7's demos have been, at least in my opinion), then your game actively disincentivizes players from exploring. The truly terrifying horror games are ones that players almost feel like they want to escape from. You won't find first time Alien Isolation players going out of their way to explore parts of the Sevastopol when the Alien is lurking around, for example. People inherently do not want to spend an extended period of time in terrifying environments, and exploration, at its root, requires spending an extended period of time in an environment. This becomes a problem when the potential need for a large amount of backtracking is taken into account. For most of the playthroughs of RE1 that I got to watch, as well as my own, the players found many of the items they would need later on without actively having to backtrack for them. For instance, a friend of mine found the broken shotgun while he was musing around one part of the mansion before he ever got to the room that requires it. If the environments had been genuinely scary, however, he may have not gone out of his way to explore. Instead, he might have simply finished up the required business he had there and moved on. What this emphasis on horror does, among other things, is increase the potential for players to miss items that they would have found otherwise with a less oppressive atmosphere, and, as a result, require far more backtracking than before. And while I do enjoy backtracking to an extent, I can imagine that if I had to go back through the mansion and look for even the majority of items required for puzzle solving after finding the puzzle, I would have lost a lot of my motivation to play the game. This would apply tenfold if I knew I was going to have to return to a place that I knew was going to terrify me as well.
Ultimately, my concern is that of competiting mechanics. Past Resident Evil games, and the puzzle designs that were essential to those games, incentivized exploration. The atmospheric direction that is being taken with RE7 seems to heavily disincentivize exploration. While RE7 still may, and hopefully will, turn out to be a good game, I'm afraid (and isn't that fitting) that the competing emphases will make for a frustrating experience where players don't want to keep playing because they're consistently forced to backtrack through areas that don't encourage exploration. Hopefully this isn't the case, as the video game market is sorely lacking in both horror games and quality survival titles, and it would be great to see Resident Evil fill both of those gaps simultaneously.
