10 Things Resident Evil 7 Must Learn From The Evil Within

2. Death And Checkpoints

To finish, a couple that are things Capcom need to learn from in terms of what not to do.

Death in video games is starting to become something more of a mechanic than just an annoyance that sets you back. Compare the stark contrast in Dark Souls and Shadow of Mordor, where making the trip back to your corpse yields rewards or actively changes the world around you - to that of Alien: Isolation or The Evil Within, where you're literally just being thrown back hefty chunks of time - the only approach to the challenge being to bash your head against it until you break through.

Trial and error has its place in games - just look at Super Meat Boy, Trials or Shovel Knight - but in these larger, more expansive and explorable titles, scouting a large area and collecting a number of items - maybe even watching a cutscene or two - only to then get torn in half by a boss that makes you do all of it again is just plain annoying.

Much of the checkpointing in Evil Within seems to represent Shinji Mikami treating each meaningful encounter like a 'scene' from a film; you've got things like introductory cutscenes, maybe a corridor-crawl, a start-point on the other side of a load-screen - all things that only serve to get in the way of the flow of the game.

If we must have trial and error in terms of game design on titles like this, at least have the area itself load back up instantly for another go.