Resident Evil 7: 9 Past Mistakes Capcom Have Already Fixed

8. Going First-Person Restores The Tension

Resident evil 7
Capcom

Remember those first tentative steps you took through the dank and dusty corridors of the Spencer Mansion?

The distant moans of off-screen undead as you willed yourself through each creaky door evoked a sense of uneasiness that Resident Evil hasn't managed to replicate since due, in part, to the increased freedom afforded by a 360-degree camera and a renewed focus on action.

The fixed camera of the original games owed a lot to what made the series 'scary' in the early years, its restriction on what you could and couldn't see at any given moment the perfect tool to generate fear. With a third-person perspective clearly no longer suitable for the survival horror genre, the switch to first-person has near-singlehandedly resurrected the suspense that was once lost.

What you can't see is always far more terrifying than what you can.

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Contributor

Joe is a freelance games journalist who, while not spending every waking minute selling himself to websites around the world, spends his free time writing. Most of it makes no sense, but when it does, he treats each article as if it were his Magnum Opus - with varying results.