It’s not as fast-paced as some of the Resident Evil games, but the ‘creepy old house’ vibes are genuinely unsettling – and there’s a demo you can try out first.
Well, that’s just typical–you wait years for a Resident Evil game to come along and then three of them turn up all at once. Capcom was one of the first big-name companies to release a game that ran natively on Apple Silicon, with Resident Evil: Village at the end of 2022, quickly followed by Resident Evil 4 earlier this year. The latest addition to the range is Resident Evil 7 Biohazard – which is actually the prequel to ‘Village’, as the games are being released out of sequence on the Mac (and it looks as though the next one to arrive on the Mac will actually be Resident Evil 2).
Like the other Resident Evil games, Biohazard needs a Mac with an M1 processor or later–Intel Macs aren’t supported, unfortunately–running macOS 13.0 or later. However, we were pleased to find that Biohazard is cheaper than the other games in the series, costing just $19.99/£15.99 on the Mac App Store. Even better is the fact that you can download the game for free, and run it in demo mode. This is called The Beginning Hour, as it acts as an introduction to the main game.
If you like the demo then you can buy the full game as an in-app purchase, and there’s also an expansion pack available for another $19.99/£15.99. Biohazard also runs on the iPad too, as long as it has an M1 processor and iPadOS 17, and even the iPhone, with iOS 17 and an A17 processor.
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Biohazard introduces us to Ethan Winters–who also appeared in Village–as he searches for his wife, Mia, who vanished mysteriously three years ago. Ethan receives an email from Mia asking for his help, and giving him an address in a swampy little backwater town in Louisiana. It all just gets creepier and creepier after that, as Ethan arrives at a rundown old house in a murky Louisiana bayou. This opening section of the game serves as a short tutorial, introducing the main controls that you’ll need to guide Ethan as he explores the old house. Capcom recommends a game controller, but it’s possible to play with a keyboard and mouse if you prefer, and there’s a Mac-specific manual on the Capcom website as well.
Biohazard has a reputation as one of the scarier entries in the Resident Evil series, and it switches to an isolated first-person view that helps to make every shadowy corridor seem even more oppressive and creepy as Ethan fumbles around in the dark. The first-person view also makes sense as soon as someone comes lunging at you with a knife for the first time, making the attack feel really in your face, and splattering the screen with blood as you try to hold up your hands to fend them off (and the plentiful gore and a sprinkling of F-bombs means that the game has a 17+ rating).
Foundry
The game also makes clever use of the found-footage genre of horror movies, as Ethan finds some old VHS tapes around the house that help to fill in some of the background–such as the fact that the old house is actually the home of the Baker family, whose son Lucas is described as “a bad seed”. You need to play close attention here as well, as the tapes sometimes reveal clues, such as a hidden entrance that takes you down into the basement of the house where you discover a blood-spattered laboratory with way too many body parts packed up in rubbish bags. And, rather than just passively watching the tapes, you can actually take some limited control over the person holding the camera, which allows you to look around and do some exploring. There’s even a strange kind of time-travel effect that you can use sometimes, as you can take actions during these video segments in the past–such as using a lock-pick to open a drawer–that have an effect when you stop the video and return to the present (where you’ll find that the drawer is suddenly now open for you).
This is one aspect of the game that can become a little frustrating at times, as there are quite a few puzzles like this that you’ll need to solve along the way. and you can sometimes find yourself repeatedly re-tracing your steps as you search for an item that you need in order to progress to the next stage of the game. This means that Biohazard doesn’t have the same fast-paced action as earlier games, like Resident Evil 4, but is really successful at piling on the tension as you explore the Baker homestead, and inch ever closer to discovering the biohazard of the title.
A change of pace for the Resident Evil series, Biohazard lacks the fast-paced combat of earlier games, but piles on the tension and atmosphere, and lands some really effective jump-scares.
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