To be frank I hate survival horror. Zombies don’t do it for me. I got recommended this game as “well made” and “tests your decision making skills”, and my backlog was running thin so I said sure, what the hell, let’s out-decision-make some zombies.
20 minutes of intro and 8 hours later, my mind is blown. I can’t remember when was the last time a game has gone full “let’s see you think your way out of that, tough guy” on me like that. The closest thing I can think of is the later floors of Slay the Spire, and even that doesn’t quite capture the full extent of the mind fuckery going on during every second you spend at that police station.
Where do you go now? - Everywhere’s interesting, but you need to decide where’s the best payoff, and go for it. You have a small and meager bag, so what are you taking with you? - Every item is useful and important, but you need to separate the nice-to-haves from the got-to-haves. Crap, this seems like a bad situation - do you tap into your pile of 7 shotgun shells you’ve accumulated with infinite patience for the past 3 hours? You’re going into a new zone, are you really feeling brave enough to go it minimal with a gun, a knife and a healing item, and hoping for the best? But on the other hand if you burden yourself with a grab bag of supplies ‘just in case’, what are you going to do when 20 minutes into your excursion you run into a large critical item in the middle of nowhere, and then you have to decide which one of your precious pieces of survival equipment goes in the trash? Or are you going to backtrack all the way to the nearest safe room to deposit items then all the way back – which is an infuriating experience, incurs the risk of running into various costly surprises on the way, and most of all is an admission that now you’re paying the price for your weak risk management aka cowardice? How do the alchemical properties of red pot plants play into this decision? What room was that safe in again? Integrals, matrices, cosines floating around your head…
If you’re the kind of player who can appreciate an experience like that, I really can’t recommend this game enough. After the police station it gets more action-y, but those 8 hours alone make the game worth it.
I likely would have enjoyed it far more without the automated adjusted difficulty, which mostly just ended up being that the game recognized I had too much ammo on me, so zombies took more shots to go down. It was quite noticeable. Unlike Resident Evil 3 that followed it, the adjusted difficulty would only subtract things from you rather than give you things when you needed them, which made me dislike it more. I searched for mods that would remove this part of the game, scrolling past a handful of mods to enhance the wet t-shirt effect on Claire, but I couldn’t find any mods that would solve this problem for me at the time. I did enjoy it plenty despite this though.