Resident Evil (1996) Review

The mansion is the achievement. Mikami built a horror game around scarcity and geography, so every locked door becomes a debt you carry and every cleared corridor becomes a route you memorize. Fixed camera angles were a hardware compromise that turned into a directorial weapon, because the game chooses what you are allowed to see and the growl offscreen does the rest. The tank controls are indefensible as ergonomics and close to perfect as tension, since turning around takes time you can feel draining away.

What has not aged is the resource math, the constant arithmetic of whether this zombie is worth two handgun rounds or a wide berth forever. What has aged catastrophically is the dialogue, delivered by a cast who sound like they were recorded in a stairwell on a lunch break, and the live action opening that plays like a student film with a fog machine. The zombie head turn in the first hallway remains one of the great reveals in the medium. Everything the genre did for the next decade was a response to this house.