Resident Evil 7 is a bit of a treat, really.

It’s still action-oriented survival horror, which becomes clearer and clearer the further you get through the game. But incredibly importantly, Resident Evil 7 is scary action-oriented survival horror. It understands pacing, letting moments breathe, and the idea that having weapons can make you feel more vulnerable, not less.

In a game where you have no weapons to defend yourself, you have only one or two gameplay options – run, or hide. These are fine to start with, but they get pretty boring if you’re trying to build a whole game around these two concepts. Games live or die on player interactivity. If you are asking a player to make the same kind of very limited decision every time an enemy shows up, your game is going to bore people. The game I’ve been playing through bit by bit for most of this year, Silent Hill, gives players a variety of weapons, a variety of enemies, and a lot of new experiences. It is a game that is forcing you to constantly assess your current loadout against a new threat, and in a game where avenues of escape that were available before are suddenly not available, you have to account for that too. These decisions are made at the micro-level, in split seconds, and yet are an incredibly important part of a game in the long run.

Resident Evil 7 is one of the few modern horror games I’ve played that understands this principle fully and completely. Guns are useful against a select few enemies, but are basically useless against Jack Baker, the mad patriarch of a strange, isolated house in the Louisiana swamps. Your gun, which is fairly effective against the rank-and-file enemies, suddenly feels like a peashooter, and it is all the more powerful for that, ironically. It can stun Jack, but never kill him while he is pursuing you through the halls of the house. I only wish Jack was a more prevalent part of the game – the bits where he is chasing you are too few, which is a shame, as they are dynamically scary and tense in a way many games fail to be. I’m hoping Resident Evil 8 has more chase sequences, and a greater sense of more constant danger throughout.

When you run out of ammo, too, that feels like your fault. The game hasn’t arbitrarily stripped away your ammo and said “no, you can’t defend yourself” – your lack of ability to defend yourself was caused by you. Now you have to run because you suck at shooting. That’s the beauty of a good survival horror – the onus is on you to survive, not for the game to arbitrarily slap a horror sequence in that subjects you to spooky gore or something cheap and nasty and low-effort. Sure, a game can take away your weapon for a little bit, and force you to adjust to life without a tool you’ve come to rely on; Silent Hill 2 does this, and Resident Evil 7 does this for a few small segments of the game too. The best moment where it does this is when you’ve just beaten a boss with a large and varied toolset, and are suddenly thrust back to basics. It’s magical – where you felt powerful and accomplished a few moments before, you are rendered weak once more, and you build yourself back up.

Ethan Winters is pretty slow, and feels pretty frail. He’s a regular guy fighting off a lot of crazy stuff over one night – he is a fantastic protagonist in that regard, the perfect vehicle for feeling weak, vulnerable and exposed in a place that feels strangely alien, despite being someone’s backyard.

Resident Evil 7 is many times scarier than the recent Resident Evil 2 and 3 remakes, primarily because you don’t feel able to fight everything. Both those games are a degree of action-shooter that 7 still (gratefully) isn’t. 7 might have a lot of shooting in it, but it’s a game that isn’t preoccupied with letting you kill everything that chases you, nor is it one that throws waves and waves of enemies at you (until the very end). Resi 7 is atmospheric, and it lets moments sit and rest. A decapitated corpse is an event you get to… savour, something that Capcom lets you soak in, in all its awful spectacle.

It’s tough to imagine Resident Evil 8 quite living up to the promise of this game. Resident Evil 7 is grimy and scary in a way 8 doesn’t seem to be. Whereas 7 was back to the roots of the action-survival horror genre, going lighter on the action in favour of horror, 8 seems a bit less preoccupied with the idea of isolation, of fighting against an entirely alien and terrifying environment. But hey, I could be surprised. For now, if you haven’t, Resident Evil 7 comes highly recommended as one of the best horror games released in the 2010s.

You can buy Resident Evil 7 on Steam here, and on the Microsoft Store here.