This Week In Retro: Resident Evil Revelations (Patreon)

January 26, 2012: How does CAPCOM spell portable survival horror? R-E-V-E-L-A-I-T-O-N-S

by Diamond Feit

I've written a fair amount about the Resident Evil series at this point with good reason: The first game was an experience I'll never forget because it scared the hell out of me back in 1996. I wasn't alone: Strong sales of Capcom's groundbreaking "survival horror" title put the company well into the black, and executives at the home of Mega Man and Street Fighter realized they had a new franchise on their hands.

In the decade and a half that followed, Capcom churned out six mainline Resident Evil games, eight spin-off titles, remade the original game with all-new graphics, and churned out port after port of older entries onto newer consoles. Hollywood also jumped on board the gravy train, (loosely) adapting the first game into a hit movie along with three sequels by 2011. Whether your system of choice was the Nintendo Wii, Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, or even a mobile phone, anyone who wanted to play Resident Evil could do so.

More Resident Evil is an unequivocally positive thing in the world, but as the series expanded rapidly and reached a broader audience, certain core elements became less essential to the "brand." First to go was the atmosphere of overwhelming dread, as the escalating stakes of each new game demanded more dynamic action to keep up with the growing threat. Yet empowering players with bigger guns leads to more than just bigger explosions; it robs Resident Evil of the one-sided terror that made the series memorable in the first place.

Consider that the very first Resident Evil traps the player inside a house with limited resources and pits them against enemies designed to eat up their ammunition. Slaying just one zombie in the Spencer Mansion can take as many as nine hits with the default pistol, and picking up a fresh magazine only nets the heroes 15 new bullets. By Resident Evil 3, players are free to make their own ammo by combining different gunpowder formulas, and they win the climactic battle against Nemesis by firing a cannon the size of an SUV (In the 2020 remake, this is scaled up again such that Nemesis fills a entire room and Jill's railgun looks like it belongs on the back of a Transformer).

There is no edict mandating that a series cannot stray from its original template, but in the case of Resident Evil, the "survival horror" franchise celebrated its 15th anniversary with a handheld, arcade-style co-op shoot-em-up. Instead of focusing on calculated choices about fighting or avoiding zombies, gameplay now rewarded players for killing as many enemies as fast as possible. That's still fun, of course, but it's not exactly "horror" anymore.

It must be hard to create something that becomes so popular, it demands periodic adjustments to return to its roots. In 2011, Resident Evil 5 stood tall as Capcom's top-selling game of all time, yet fans and producers alike wondered if the newly action-oriented series could ever refocus itself on tight spaces and hard choices.

With the future of “survival horror” up for debate, Capcom revealed that Resident Evil Revelations for the Nintendo 3DS would represent a deliberate change of pace. Not only would it be the first wholly original entry in the series on a handheld console, Revelations steers the ship away from action and back towards tense exploration in cramped quarters. Specifically, this new story takes place out at sea on a luxury cruise liner, one infested with bio-organic weapons.

Set between the events of Resident Evil 4 and 5, Revelations brings back heroes Chris Redfield and Jill Valentine from the very first game. Now members of the Bioterrorism Security Assessment Alliance (BSAA), the two former small-town cops are hunting a terrorist organization known as Veltro. Their search leads them to the Queen Zenobia, a floating five-star hotel adrift in the Mediterranean. Unfortunately, by the time they set foot on deck, the only lifesigns on board are faceless, slimy husks shambling about.

Revelations tries hard to recapture the OG Resident Evil mood. The ship is perpetually low on power and everything is a mess, so the environments have a classic “faded glory” vibe. The Queen Zenobia should be a palace, and it likely was at one time, but now its fine china and high-class furnishings are all cracked and disheveled. Hallways and offices are littered with debris, and equipment key to operating the vessel has been smashed. It's a space that demands exploration, but very few discoveries are positive ones.

With all its superficial similarities to "classic" Resident Evil, Revelations upholds the "modern" player-friendly features that enable smooth, fluid combat. Players have full control over the camera, on-screen crosshairs allow for precision aiming, and our heroes remain mobile even when their weapons are drawn. The strict inventory limits of the past are much looser, as the only restrictions are quantities per item rather than items themselves. Players can carry three weapons at the same time, each with its own variety of ammunition, plus an assortment of sub-weapons and healing herbs. Storage crates are now weapon upgrade stations where players can freely swap between available armaments and attach "custom parts" to enhance their firepower, ammo capacity, etc.

By invoking the appearance of early Resident Evil titles but retaining modern action-game functionality, Revelations floats between the past and present, never committing to either approach. Combat in the original game was almost always optional, even when facing bosses, but in Revelations players are frequently trapped in an arena with no choice but to eliminate every monster before moving on. That's certainly nerve-racking and exhilarating, but it means that there's no real debate between fight or flight, an essential component of the classic series.

The episodic nature of Resident Evil Revelations also betrays its horror ambitions. As a handheld game, Revelations is broken into digestible chapters, since playing on the go often demands taking periodic breaks (especially given the notoriously short battery life of the 3DS, not to mention the taxing effects of its autostereoscopic screen). These predetermined stopping points deflate the tension of the game like letting all the air out of a balloon, preventing Revelations from ever truly recapturing the nightmare vibes of the older games.

Worse still, Revelations does not confine itself to a single setting, or even a single time period. Jill and Chris are back as protagonists, but they are traveling separately, and the action hops between their disparate missions as players progress through the story. There are even side-story jumps to supporting characters performing reconnaissance for our heroes, and flashback chapters which provide backstory to the Veltro conflict. Revelations' refusal to commit to its promised premise of "hero locked inside a haunted house" robs the experience of any sense that the Queen Zenobia is a real place, instead reducing the gameplay to navigating the same sequence of hallways over and over again. That's not exploration, that's just repetition.

I believe in judging works on their own terms rather than what I as a consumer want from them, but even in that light Resident Evil Revelations comes up short. Capcom's producers and promotional materials emphasized that Revelations would deliver a "return" to "pure horror," yet the finished product is a composite creature of what Resident Evil used to be and what Resident Evil had become after 15 years. Survival horror is not defined by tank controls or fixed camera angles; it's an atmospheric condition, one that exists when players feel threatened even as they are compelled to keep hunting for a way out. In Revelations, I never felt like I was looking for an exit, I just needed to find the next plot bauble to trigger the end of a chapter.

Resident Evil Revelations is not a failed experiment. It is a video game, one that I enjoyed ten years ago and still enjoy today. It doesn't live up to its own hype as far as recapturing the series' past, but it does deliver a quality action game wearing the skin of a horror game. The fact that it works on a handheld system, one designed to be carried around and played in a variety of settings, stands as a remarkable achievement.

A decade later, there's less pressure on Resident Evil to live up to any one group's expectations. The series continues to sell millions of copies whether it seeks to frighten players or scratch their itchy trigger fingers. The subsequent explosion of indie games also means that fans who do want a classic survival horror experience can find it elsewhere, right down to the tank controls and low-poly graphics.

Whatever I think of Revelations' hybrid nature, Capcom saw past the jokes surrounding its troubled launch and treated it as a proper Resident Evil game by quickly porting it to other platforms. Today it’s available on the Switch so it can be equally enjoyed at home in the dark or anywhere in the outside world—perhaps even on a boat, if available.

However, for maximum authenticity I recommend acquiring a launch-era 3DS and strapping it into a Circle Pad Pro (don’t forget the AAA battery). Be sure to push the 3D view slider all the way up; the inevitable nausea will only make the high-seas horror more palpable.

Diamond Feit lives in Osaka, Japan but is forever online, sharing idle thoughts on Twitter and playing games on Twitch.