Video Game / Resident Evil 7: Biohazard

aka: Resident Evil 7

Evil Comes Home

"Welcome to the family, son."

— Jack Baker

Resident Evil 7: Biohazard ^note Stylized as RESIDENT EVII. biohazard in Western countries and BIOHA7_ARD resident evil in Japan is a First Person Survival Horror game and the sixth Numbered Sequel in the Resident Evil franchise (and eleventh mainline entry), developed and published by Capcom for the PlayStation 4, Xbox One and PC. The game is also the first in the series to have full support for VR platforms such as PlayStation VR.^note PSVR currently enjoys a 12 month exclusivity-deal for the game starting from it's release date.

RE7 was originally shown off as a 2015 VR tech demo known as Kitchen, which introduced the new RE Engine, before it was revealed at E3 2016 as the latest Resident Evil. A demo, titled Resident Evil 7: Beginning Hour, was made available to PlayStation Plus members on June 13, 2016. It received two updates: the Twilight Update on September 15, 2016, and the Midnight Update on December 3, 2016. It was later released on Xbox Live on December 9 and on Steam on December 18. The final game was released on January 24, 2017.

Set after the events of Resident Evil 6, a man named Ethan Winters has made the trip to a foreboding, derelict plantation mansion belonging to the Baker family in Dulvey, Louisiana to look for his wife Mia, who went missing in 2014 and was pronounced dead after she wasn't found. After three years, the supposedly dead Mia sent Ethan a message telling him to come get her, along with an address for the Baker house. Unfortunately, the estate is crawling with mutant creatures, and there is more than meets the eye with Mia and the Bakers.

Previews: Tape-1 "Desolation", "Lantern" Gameplay, Tape-2 "The Bakers", Tape-3 "Resident Evil"

After release, the game received several additional story scenarios and minigames as DLC:

• Banned Footage Vol. 1:
  • Nightmare: Clancy finds himself locked in the basement of the Baker mansion with Jack Baker and an army of Molded after him, and must scavenge whatever materials he can to build weapons and booby traps in an effort to survive until dawn.
  • Bedroom: Clancy is held as Marguerite's prisoner, and must find a way to escape his bedroom before Marguerite catches on to his plans.
• Banned Footage Vol. 2:
  • 21: Clancy is captured by Lucas this time, and is forced into a deadly game of blackjack with another of Lucas's victims.
  • Daughters: Zoe Baker must try to escape her family after the presence of a strange little girl suddenly drives them mad.
• Ethan Must Die: A new game mode where Ethan must navigate the mansion relying only on whatever randomly placed items he can scavenge, all while avoiding numerous booby traps and Molded.
• Jack's 55th Birthday: It's Jack's birthday, and Mia must scour the mansion grounds to find food to sate his hunger.

On December 12, the game saw a new "Gold Edition" featuring the DLC listed above, as well as:

• Not A Hero: Ethan may have saved the day, but Lucas Baker is still unaccounted for. Who can stop the Baker family's black sheep from causing any further trouble? Enter Chris Redfield: Agent of New Umbrella.
• End of Zoe: Exactly what happened to Zoe after Ethan left the Baker residence with Mia? And how does a man named Joe factor into the picture?

On May 24, Capcom released a Cloud Gaming version for the Nintendo Switch in Japan. A worldwide release for this version was announced in September 2022.

On March 2, 2022, it was announced that the game will be brought to the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S, with existing owners of previous generation versions eligable to upgrade for free. The PC version will be updated as well to take advantage of newer graphics hardware. The new versions and the PC update was released on June 13, 2022.

Most of the game's staff were also involved in the production of Black Command, an iOS and Android game that was released in 2018. As such, the Resident Evil collaboration event involved the presence of the Thor's Hammer shotgun.

A direct sequel, titled Resident Evil Village, was announced in June of 2020 and released on May 7, 2021.

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Resident Evil 7 contains examples of:

Previews and Demos

• 100% Completion: If you solve the optional notebook riddles in Beginning Hour, you'll be rewarded with the Dirty Coin, which can be transferred over to the main game. All it does is function as a "bonus" Antique Coin to put in the locked birdcages in case you miss one.
• A.K.A.-47: The handgun that you find in the bloody toilet after draining it in the demo is called the M19. This is likely a takeoff on the famous M1911.
• Arc Number:
  • In the Beginning Hour demo, the number of sightings of the ghost girl is 7.
  • There are 7 voodoo dolls hanging from the ceiling in the small cupboard.
  • The number of mannequins scattered around the house is also 7.
• Ax-Crazy: If the newspaper from "The Bakers" trailer is anything to go by... (The newspaper notes 20 people went dead or missing by the bayou; in blood red is the words MORE ON THE WAY.) In-game, the Bakers are a family of cannibalistic swamp rats who abduct people and hold them at their dilapidated house until the mold turns them into slimy black zombies. Jack hunts Ethan through the halls with an assortment of gruesome weapons and Marguerite wants to feed Ethan to her bugs, while Lucas lures him into a Death Course full of lethal Booby Traps. And when they don't have victims to play with, they turn on each other. All of them are only too happy to put the player through a wide range of gruesome first-person deaths.
• Be as Unhelpful as Possible: When Deputy Anderson arrives to the scene, he doesn't immediately believe Ethan is in danger and continues to question him, despite the looming threat of the Bakers lurking around. It also doesn't help that Ethan gives cryptic answers to the deputy’s questions and also admits he doesn’t own the place, so the deputy treats Ethan as a possible suspect. This is also the ensuing of reality, as victims of extreme psychological trauma can have trouble articulating exactly what happened to them.
• Blood from Every Orifice: In Beginning Hour, Andre is found impaled on a hook. When Clancy finds him and pulls him off, blood is seen gushing from his eyes and mouth.
• Bloody Handprint: In Beginning Hour, these show up on the locked door in the attic to give you an indication of how much progress you've made solving the riddles in the notebook.
• Body Horror: In the Infected Ending, if the guy you're playing as is scratched and infected by the monster in the basement, then as he tries to escape, his arms quickly go from healthy to black and crawling with Tainted Veins, and it gets to the point where it cripples him.
• Bragging Rights Reward: The Dirty Coin. It functions as an extra token in the main game to open the bonus cages, but it doesn't help you unlock things any faster than you normally would by finding every coin on Normal difficulty, and there's already one more coin than you'll need in the main game anyway. The only thing it's really good for is letting you skip the "Derelict House" tape, or allowing you to access one item on Madhouse slightly earlier.
• Call-Back: Once again, a playable character in a game vastly different than the others in tone and gameplay finds a pot of rotting flesh in a kitchen.
• Cat Scare: Quite a few in the demo. The melted baby doll which drops after taking the bolt cutters. The thrown mannequin after retrieving the Back Door Key. The mannequins on the second and third floors.
• Chekhov's Gun: The dummy finger. What was first thought to be a Joke Item finally gets put to good use in the Midnight update. Once you combine it with the object made of celluloid to form the Dummy Hand, you need to literally point it at certain objects in order to solve the Notebook riddles.
• Continuity Nod:
  • The demo has a handful of nods to previous games such as the lockpick, creepy female mannequins, and Sewer Gators, the name of the trio's ghost hunting show.
  • Near the phone in the attic there is a picture of a helicopter with the Umbrella logo on its tail.
  • In one of the newer trailers, when the character is going up the stairs, there is an old woman in a wheelchair slumped over like Ozwell Spencer.
• Creepy Cockroach: The dilapidated house is filled with cockroaches scurrying around. One even climbs onto your arm when you open up a pot of "mystery stew".
• Cult: The Baker family; Marguerite is hinted in the Lantern gameplay to be the matriarch of the cult. This is half-true: while they don't worship a god, they sure as hell worship Eveline.
• Decapitated Army: Averted. Eveline's death does nothing to stop the Molded or the Mold from replenishing their numbers, evolving into new forms, or hindering its spreading into the surrounding areas.
• Decoy Protagonist: The character you control in the demo is not the main game's hero. In fact, the events of both Beginning Hour and Kitchen are not present in the main game, as they are set before it.
• Department of Redundancy Department: In the "Twilight" update, the new phone call gives this line:
  Phone: All doors can be opened, otherwise they would not be doors. Although some doors should remain closed for now.
  • The game's name counts as well, being that it shares both the franchise's Japanese (Biohazard) and international titles.
• Downer Ending:
  • Played straight in the demo for the poor ghost-hunting trio. The fact that none of them are in the full version makes their fate even more of a downer.
  • The Infected Ending of the demo counts as this as well.
• Facepalm of Doom: In the Lantern demo. If Marguerite spots Mia, she will grab her and knock her out with her palm.
• Failed a Spot Check: After you've watched the tape, there will be a piece of paper in front of the TV that wasn't there before. How the demo character missed that is a mystery for the ages.
• Featureless Protagonist: All we really know about the demo's protagonist is that he's a Caucasian with brown shoes. Although the game's producer, Masachika Kawata, revealed that the model used for the demo protagonist is that of the main game's protagonist, Ethan Winters, minus the watch. So...even that is a wash and we're back to square zero.
• Foreshadowing: If you manage to escape the house, then the witnesses testimony is discounted as he had LSD on him. The main game reveals that it's not LSD. It's fungus from the house.
• Found Footage Films:
  • The video tape part in the demo invokes the found-footage horror film concept, including a basement scene similar to the ending of The Blair Witch Project.
  • The Found Footage films in the game are confirmed to play a big role in figuring out what happened at the house in the game.
• Game-Breaking Bug: There's a glitch in the Beginning Hour demo that prevents you from solving the third murder, thereby preventing you from finding the Dirty Coin to carry over to the main game. Solving the third murder requires you to attack a painting by the staircase, but sometimes the attack will not register and the next event will not trigger, which prevents you from moving on in the quest. There are workarounds, but they're a bit convoluted and require you trigger events out of their intended order.
• Giving Someone the Pointer Finger: A really weird example in Beginning Hour: To solve the Notebook's riddles, you need to use the Dummy Hand and literally point it towards spots where the 5 people mentioned in the notebook were murdered.
• Guide Dang It!: Deciphering the notebook riddles is fairly easy to do based on the clues they offer. Actually revealing some of these riddles, however, is shockingly unintuitive and can take hours of random experimentation unless you just look up how to find them. To give you an idea, one riddle only appears after you approach a doll on the ground from a precise angle, stop at it on a specific position, and stare at it while crouching for an exact period of time. ^note In order to get the literal last laugh, one way to do it quickly grab the attic key and the valve, but do not use it, go upstairs to pick up the phone, go back down the basement, and angle yourself near the doll to trigger the laugh.
• Hands-Free Handlamp: Played straight with Ethan's and Mia's lights. They're never shown to have one on them (and indeed the player has no control over it, the characters just automatically turn them on in completely dark areas), they can hold their weapons totally unencumbered by it, and the beam is always perfectly centered on the screen headlamp-style.
• Haunted House: In a return to basics. For the demo, you're only exploring the guest house. In the game proper, you're exploring the full dilapidated plantation estate.
• Homemade Flamethrower: Ethan can get a small homemade flamethrower named the "Burner", which is created by combining it's two separate parts, the Burner Grip and Nozzle respectively. It's most effective when taking on Marguerette and her insects, which coincidentally, where you acquire the parts to make the Burner when you get to her part of the Baker Estate anyways.
• Hope Spot:
  • Beginning Hour has finding the Back Door Key. Getting all the way to the back door results in the player getting grabbed and knocked unconscious by Jack Baker.
  • The Infected Ending has you reaching towards the attic window after your encounter with the Molded. If you went undamaged, then your character escapes safe and sound. If you got injured...
• I'm a Humanitarian: The Bakers, as shown in the Tape-2 trailer.
• It Can Think: Whatever these creatures are, it's very obvious that they are not stupid.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Pete in the Beginning Hour demo, in which he is initially presented as a egotistical knob who boasts about his "news anchor" job (he was actually just a weekend sub) and slags off Clancy when he's standing right next to him, as well as doing absolutely no prep at all, and then insulting the Bakers as hillbillies. However, after Andre goes missing, he refuses to leave without him, and when Clancy is tied up, he does his very best to save him, when he could very easily run away and save his own backside. Too bad that latter action costs him his life.
• Leaning on the Fourth Wall: The Tape-1 teaser is a lengthened version of the VHS tape that is briefly watched in the E3 gameplay footage, and was posted online concurrently with said trailer.
• Mind Rape: Eveline's victims begin seeing hallucinations soon after infection. This breaks away at their mental resistance, allowing her to take control.
• Missing Episode: Invoked in a way. The Kitchen VR demo, which was showcased during certain 2015 trade shows, had absolutely no in-game footage released to the public for a long time, only the reaction videos of the people wearing the VR headset. That said, the Beginning Hour demo does show footage from part of it, but it cuts off after Pete gets stabbed through the chest. It's since been averted, luckily, as the demo has been included in the first edition of the PSVR Demo Disc.
• More than Mind Control: According to lab documents in the game, Eveline needs to gradually break down the mental defenses of her victims before they're completely under her control.
• Multiple Endings: The Beginning Hour demo has 3 endings, as of the "Midnight" update.
  • Bad Ending: Find the tape, get the key to the back door, get jumped by Jack Baker as you leave. This is the most notable ending, since it was in the demo from the very start.
  • Phone Ending: For a certain take on "ending". When the demo launched, you could get one of three different phone calls from Zoe, depending on how fast you gained access to the attic, after which Jack Baker would eventually show up behind you and knock your ass out. A fourth phone call was added in the Twilight update, while this "ending" was taken out of the demo with the Midnight update.
  • Infected Ending: Open the secret passage, get the fuse and put it in the fuse box, go up to the attic for the basement key, then into the basement for the attic window key and get damaged by the Molded. The nameless sap tries to escape, but has been infected and is effectively crippled just as he reaches the window, violently trembling as Jack Baker approaches.
  • True Ending: Same as the Infected ending, but don't get hit by the Molded. The demo protagonist escapes relatively unharmed and even goes to the police about his encounter. Unfortunately, the cops don't find anything and the report is ultimately dismissed after they find LSD on the guy.
• Nothing Is Scarier:
  • The "Tape-1" teaser has you wandering through a rotting house where something has clearly gone very wrong. Though there are very threatening messages left behind and weird noises are heard, the player never encounters anyone.
  • If you follow the Bad Ending path, you can see Jack Baker walking pass across the hall from the door but when you look around, there is nobody there.
  • The woman in the wheelchair. Unnamed in promotional material, and given far less focus in teasers than the other members of the Baker family. She never speaks, and never actually does anything. She just remains motionless, staring at the player.
• Off with His Head!: In the Kitchen demo. Pete is decapitated by the monster, who proceeds to show you his head. The last thing in the demo is the monster wrenching your head backwards, followed by a cut to black.
• Old Save Bonus: When you solve the notebook riddles in Beginning Hour, the locked door in the attic opens to reveal the Dirty Coin. The Dirty Coin can be transferred over to the final game and functions as an extra coin to use with the locked bird cages containing weapons/upgrades.
• Painting the Medium: Once you find the VHS tape and stick it in the VCR, the demo shifts to the video itself and you play as the camera man filming the events that the main demo protagonist is currently watching (justifying the use of the first-person perspective). The "footage" is covered in video artifacts and washed-out colors in order to maintain the illusion of watching a VHS tape.
• Paranormal Investigation: The trio in the Beginning Hour demo are a take on this similar to Ghost Hunters or Ghost Adventures, albeit more amateur. Pity they walk into something far worse than spooky noises.
• Ramping: Tape-1 uses it to great effect.
• Rule of Symbolism: A late part of the story has the image of an enormous doll standing on top of a wooden chair at a family dinner, one chair kicked over, two standing subservient and one artificial.◊ It represents Eveline's entire worldview in a nutshell. She's the doll, the ruler of the Baker family despite being an artificial addition to it, and has kicked over Zoe's chair to take her place as their daughter. The artificial chair represents Lucas, as he is not under her control but still pretends to be.
• Shout-Out:
  • One of the TV crew members mentions an 'Amarillo' incident that was pretty bad. This is assuredly a reference to First Encounter Assault Recon's non-canonical expansion Perseus Mandate, in which Amarillo was a Noodle Incident where at most we can tell that one target for capture ended up dead by accident, and apparently getting dragged off by an invisible force and almost mauled by visibly invisible living shadows isn't quite as nasty. Richard Pearsey, one of the writers for Perseus Mandate, is a narrative consultant for RE7.
  • Seeing the bodies of the failed D-series bioweapons is somewhat reminiscent to the scene in Alien: Resurrection where Ripley sees the horrific remains of the failed clones that came before her.
• Skippable Boss: Molded in the basement, which can be defeated but the lights will go out and it disappears for the rest of the demo. In the full game, they are downgraded to being mooks or Elite Mooks.
• Small Name, Big Ego: The host of the Sewer Gators show "Used to be an anchor, dammit!" He was a weekend sub.
• Stringy-Haired Ghost Girl: A ghostly figure can be spotted appearing for a split second in the video tape portion of the demo, as seen here.◊
  • There are seven different ghost locations in all that randomly happen with each playthrough of the tape. All the possible locations are documented here.
• Suspiciously Similar Substitute:
  • While there are no zombies to be found, the Bakers are still mutated, savage, and consume human flesh. The third teaser-trailer does reveal what looks eerily like a zombie as well, although with no context to its appearance in the game.
  • The creatures in the basement, officially spoiled as being called "The Molded", look awfully similar to the Regenerators in Resident Evil 4, or the Ooze in Resident Evil: Revelations. Likewise, their apparent connection to the mutated fungus growing everywhere in the basement does invoke a certain similarity to the Ivys from Resident Evil 2, who likewise caused their lair in the lab to be overgrown by an immense mass of mutated vegetation.
• Useless Item:
  • The Dummy Finger and the Hatchet in Beginning Hour. The hatchet seems to have no real use other than to show off how the melee combat works.
  • The "Twilight" update added a few more. A key to the basement, handgun ammo, and a Dummy Hand. The basement door is still boarded up, there is no handgun to be found, and the Dummy Hand serves as something to combine the Dummy Finger with.
  • In the latest update after the PlayStation Experience 2016 titled "Midnight", there is still no apparent use for the Dummy Hand and Finger, because the protagonist can escape the house without needing them. In fact, all you need to beat the demo is the Attic Fuse, the Basement Key, and the Attic Window Key. You do, however, need the Dummy Hand in order to solve the notebook riddles and score the Dirty Coin.
• What Happened to the Mouse?: The fate of Clancy Javis after he gets knocked out in the demos is not revealed.
  • His fate is confirmed in the final game. Incinerated to a crisp by one of Lucas' traps before he could escape. But he does help the player indirectly from beyond the grave if you figure out why it happened...

Main Game

• Acceptable Breaks from Reality:
  • To increase the size of your Grid Inventory and avoid Critical Encumbrance Failure, you pick up and wear multiple backpacks. Yes, multiple backpacks. Even better, they only add four slots, which is easily filled by a shotgun and a grenade launcher. This could be explained away as Ethan merely discarding his old backpack for a new one that can hold more items, but he’s never seen visibly doing this nor getting rid of the old one.
  • Each type of firearm in-game uses generic ammo that fits all guns within its own type. For example, “handgun ammunition” works for all handguns except the .44 magnum. Apparently the Bakers had multiple store-bought munition boxes lying around that happened to contain different calibers within each one.
• Action Survivor:
  • Unlike most previous Resident Evil games, which predominantly featured player characters with some form of law enforcement or military background, the player character of Biohazard — Ethan Winters — is an ordinary civilian with no combat training. However, he does manage to handle the various guns in the game well enough to at least suggest it isn't the first time he's ever picked one up (he’s implied to be from Texas after all).
  • Mia is a Damsel in Distress, but does manage to at least keep herself from suffering too much. Because she's actually working for a shady bioweapons dealer and well trained with firearms in her playable segment later in the game. Her initial Damsel in Distress role is in fact due to Eveline's mind control capabilities.
• Actionized Sequel: Inverted. Resident Evil 7 is a hard swing back into the survival horror genre.
• Advancing Boss of Doom: The second phase of the final battle sees Eveline's face lumbering toward Ethan in a small attic he can't navigate around. If she gets close, she'll eat him alive. Shooting her in the face will push her back, and enough damage will segue the phase to the outdoor battle.
• A.K.A.-47: Most of the guns found in the game use cut-down versions of their real-life names. The M19 is a 9mm M1911 instead of the standard .45 ACP M1911 ^note Although oddly, its magazine capacity is 7 rounds like the .45 ACP model's default magazines instead of the 9mm's 9 round magazine. That said, it's notably beat up enough that the lower magazine capacity may be what's wrong with it., the M44 Magnum is a .44 Auto Mag, the MPM Pistol is a Makarov PM (it was also called that name in Resident Evil: Revelations 2), and the P19 sub-machine gun is a PP-19 Bizon-2. The oddballs out are the shotguns: the M21 is a stacked-barrel shotgun of unknown make/model, while the M37 is a Remington 870 with the forend of an Ithaca 37. Averted with the G17, which is a commonly used abbreviation for the Glock 17 ^note Unusually for a police sidearm, it has a civilian restricted-capacity 10-round magazine rather than the standard 17-rounder., although its appearance is changed from the real handgun to skirt around licensing issues, borrowing the fatter grip angle and scalloped slide texturing from a Diamondback DB-series pistol.^note The Glock company is famously strict about protecting their brand identity; if you're going to change the name of their product, they expect you to change the likeness, too. This may be why the magazine capacity is different.
• Aerosol Flamethrower: The game's flamethrower weapon, the Burner, is an improvised number that is essentially a rig to automatically depress the nozzle on an aerosol can while lighting the fuel on the attached pilot light.
• All for Nothing: In the end, the serum which Zoe built and put all her faith and hope in - one that she had Ethan risk life and limb to gain ingredients for - turned out to be ineffective at being a permanent cure and only delayed the inevitable. In the Canon Ending, if the player administered it to Mia, Eveline re-infects Mia into the Hive Mind at the shipwreck in order to talk to her and punishes Zoe by calcifying her in the swamplands - proving that a D-type serum was weak against a superior E-type like Eveline herself. The only real use that the serum had was to defeat Jack's second form, though he's able to return from that too as the Swamp Man in the End of Zoe DLC. Ethan had no choice but to defeat Eveline in order to free everyone from her Hive Mind.
  • Then Village reveals that Eveline’s conscious managed to survive within the Mold that Ethan’s body was made of, not to mention there is another megamycete that Eveline herself came from originally. This new one also acts like a massive databank similar to Eveline that contains the consciousnesses of everyone that's ever been infected with the mold, including those who died. While the destruction of Mother Miranda’s megamycete later ended her threat, the fact that she had been involved with the original Umbrella opens up the possibility of other megamycetes existing, not to mention it’s possible that Eveline lives on in Ethan’s daughter Rose, who also inherited her father’s Mold - though to what extent remains to be seen.
• The Alleged House: The Baker's house was damaged by a hurricane beforehand, but the conditions of the living space decreased significantly when Eveline infected the family with the Mold. Rotten food in the refrigerator, disgusting Mold covering rooms and furniture, holes in the building, and a severe lack of cleanliness and hygiene in the household, the Baker house is a Homeowners Association’s nightmare.
• Ambiguous Situation:
  • The game is a little contradictory about whether the molded are fungus-infested zombies created to be the "drones" of the Hive Queen's family, or if they're actually a sort of fungal golem. In the guest house at the prologue, you can find a document with a list of names of people who've died or "turned" after exposure to the Mold. Likewise, before your first encounter with a Molded, you find a note on a whiteboard talking about successful and failed transformations, a topic repeated in the incinerator room. Finally, when you return with the D-Series Arm, you find Deputy Anderson's head, partially transformed into a Molded's head, in the trailer fridge. However, in the salt mine lab, you can find a part of a Research & Development Report that notes Eveline has the ability to form "organisms" by manipulating the mycelia (fungal filaments) she has extruded and allowed to grow across her environment, which are explicitly referred to as "the Molded". Files in the main game and the Not A Hero DLC confirms at least some of the Molded in the Baker mansion were once human transformed by Eveline once they don't satisfy her as members of her "family".
  • Lucas' indirect murder of a childhood bully. The only hard evidence that it actually happened is Lucas' diary saying so, but you find no remains in the attic where he supposedly died, and nothing indicates anyone else in his family (including Zoe) noticed the smell of a decaying corpse near his room.
• Anachronism Stew:
  • Although the game is set in 2017, there are equipment and technology related oddities that make it hard to decide whether the Bakers happen to be outdated or the developers were going for a deliberate aesthetic appeal. Overall, there seems to be an idiosyncratic mix of more modern technology such as smartwatches; laptops; and the Internet, alongside distinctly late 70's-80's aesthetics like cassette decks; tube televisions; VHS tapes; landline button-dialing phones, and muscle cars.
  • Despite the year being 2017, the footage from the ghost hunter team is viewed via a VHS tape, even though Clancy is recording everything with a modern head-mounted video camera. It’s possible they rigged together their own design, using the VHS-quality as an aesthetic choice for how viewers watch their footage, but it’s never stated in-game why they do this.
  • Ethan decides to bring a paper print-out of the email Mia sent to him while she was under the influence of Eveline to recruit a new “father” for her family that brings him to the Baker estate, although the presence of an email proves the existence of the Internet; most people would keep this on their smartphone. Speaking of phones...
  • There are no cellphones of any kind to be seen in the house’s present time. Not smartphones, not flip phones, not even a 90's-era brick-with-an-antenna neglected somewhere amidst the copious debris of the Baker estate. In fact, all of the phones featured are not only landlines, but 80's-90's era corded button-dialers complete with flashing light when the phone rings. The only two times they appear, they appear either outside the house or before everything went to hell. In the End of Zoe DLC, Zoe talks to Ethan at the end of the DLC using one given to her by Chris Redfield, plus in the Daughters DLC Lucas can be seen using a smartphone as well as at the begining of Not a Hero, where he is seen receiving a call from an unknown bio-terrorist organization that he’s doing business with.
  • Circling back to the Internet mention, there are no computers seen on the Baker estate. In-game we only see the laptop on-board the tanker Mia uses to broadcast her warning to Ethan and Lucas's laptop as well as smartphone, seen in his bedroom and lab during the Daughters and Not A Hero DLC respectively. This may be because the family are Off the Grid with terrible cellphone reception, so they use landlines.
  • Another interesting piece of technology is the Codex, the nifty smartwatch Ethan wears to monitor his vital signs which originally belonged to Mia, who used it in order to track down Eveline as well as traces of her Mold and D-Series-related paraphernalia. The game has a licensing deal with Pebble, and the Codex takes the shape of the ill-fated Pebble Time 2. Interestingly enough, even though most smartwatches require a connection to a smartphone (via Bluetooth) in order to access some of its features, a major selling point of this specific model of Pebble would have been its lack of requirement of a phone connection in order to use (some of) its smartwatch features that other smartwatches couldn’t, which may be an explanation for the game's notable lack of cell/smartphones. That being said, in today’s time and day real life smartwatches do exist that are advanced enough to make and take calls without needing to be synced with a phone connection, like how Chris Redfield calls Ethan’s Codex to tell him to use the Albert-01 armed with RAMROD ammunition that dropped from a helicopter to kill Eveline’s mutated form.
  • Despite the appearance of a laptop which can send modern digital video over the Internet as well as emails and smartwatches, the go-to video documentation format in-game is old VHS tapes, and there are no high-definition/flat-panel televisions to be seen in the Baker estate. Instead, the game features old-fashioned box and tube televisions with VHS players attached to them. Even though Clancy presumably uses a modern, head-mounted camera, the camera somehow produces VHS tapes for playback. Also, Ethan utilizes cassette tapes (on Madhouse difficulty) and cassette recorders to save his gameplay progress. It’s a step-up from the ink ribbons and typewriters of past entries to the franchise, yet an odd choice in a game that features more modern technology.
  • Some footnotes can be made about the vehicles seen and the weapons used; both sets feature both distinctly retro/vintage-styled pieces as well as more modern ones. In the gun category, Ethan can wield a G17 (the Glock 17, originally designed and initially manufactured in 1982) alongside a M21 shotgun (which takes the form of a much more old-fashioned twin barrel, break-action shotgun) as well as using homemade pieces such as the Burner Flamethrower and the Grenade Launcher. The post-game weapon unlocked after beating the game for the first time, the Albert-01R, takes a more modern approach in comparison to the other weaponry on display. As far as vehicles go, we see a distinctly 70's-era muscle car (possibly modeled after the car seen in Evil Dead) alongside a modern looking police cruiser (though it’s seen further away from the house and out of focus).
  • The outdated technology and run-down property is Truth in Television for a lot of small, poor rural towns in the US even today. Cell reception in these areas is often minimal or nonexistent, plus people without much money aren't going to be buying modern computers and smartphones when internet infrastructure in the area is equally poor. You will often see old cars in these places as well.
• An Arm and a Leg:
  • Mia saws off Ethan's left hand with a chainsaw in a cutscene near the end of the prologue, only for Zoe Baker to staple it back on at the start of the first act.
  • Jack or a blade-armed Molded can potentially hack off Ethan's right leg, after which he can retrieve his leg and heal the wound. When Ethan does so, he simply jams the stumps of his severed leg together, drenches it in the chemical, and he's good as new within seconds. This is because Ethan has been infected with the Mold, but he's only progressed to the "mid-stage" degree of infection.
• And Now for Someone Completely Different:
  • The main protagonist, Ethan Winters, is an entirely new character without any connections to the established plot. A necessary side-effect of the game returning to RE's horror roots, since the series regulars have taken enough levels in badass by now that it would strain plausibility to put any of them back into the role of an overwhelmed Action Survivor. Near the end of the game you also switch to playing as Mia for a section of the game after Ethan is captured by Eveline.
  • When playing the tapes, you also shift to whoever is recording them for the duration. Though if the trailers and what happened to the people in the demo's tape are anything to go by, there's probably a reason why you're finding the tapes after the fact. The playable characters in the tapes are Clancy and Mia.
• Anti-Frustration Features:
  • The Fat Molded are the strongest and deadliest regular enemy in the game and the only one to have a ranged attack, but wherever they show up there's nearly always some kind of prominent obstacle to hide behind so you can avoid their toxic spew.
  • Madhouse difficulty allows you get your mitts on the Grenade Launcher and both shotguns a good bit earlier, and offers purchasable upgrades to defense and offense (with some extra coins to help afford them) that aren't available on the other two modes. Equipping both of these upgrades brings your damage metrics to about where they are on Normal difficulty, which is a bigger help than it sounds like.^note Unfortunately, it'd take 35 coins to unlock every cage and the most you can possibly get is 33 or 34, so you'll have to forgo one locked item, no matter what. A contrast to Easy and Normal modes, where you end up with one or two extra coins after collecting and using them all.
  • You can discard items to free up your space in your inventory, but doing so prevents you from picking them up again. Weapons and plot- or puzzle-important items such as keys can't be discarded to prevent the game from being unwinnable, while unlockable goodies will magically return to the item box if discarded, so you can freely ditch them anytime you need to make room.
  • When the player interacts with a shadow puzzle, they're actually seamlessly warped to a separate room in the game map that imitates the space in the main map, and the real puzzle is located in the duplicate space. This safely isolates the player so they can finish the puzzle without having to worry about enemies interrupting or pressuring them to solve it quicker.
• Artifact Title: Averted for the first time since the first game, at least in non-Japanese countries: Resident Evil 2 through 6 have taken place in a variety of different locations. This game, much like the first game, takes place in a single house, and boy, is it ever evil. What's more, there actually is a specific evil resident: Eveline, the bioweapon responsible for everything.
  • What's more, is that End of Zoe manages to make sense of the title of Biohazard; By the time Joe manages to get to the edge of the Baker estate to rescue Zoe, it is shown that Blue Umbrella has completely sealed off the area with large barriers due to it being an actual biological hazard, as the Mold has wound up covering the entire forestland in the area.
• Artificial Stupidity:
  • The enemy AI has some pathfinding issues when it comes to cramped areas. Take this Let's Play video for example, where Jack attacks the shelves instead of moving around it, leaving him open to the player's pot shots.
  • Jack can somehow lose sight of you if you were to hide from him at the dining room door. If you hide near the dining room door, Jack will head towards the door in front of him if he spots you, and somehow lose the sight of you.
• Artistic License – Biology: After Ethan finds a note that lists the ingredients for the serum as cranial nerve and peripheral nerve, for some unexplained reason he decides the latter specifically requires the nerves from a hand. With humans, peripheral nerves is everything beyond the brain and spine. Granted, another note found nearby that particular note specifically mentions an arm.
• Artistic License – Art: When the crew’s camera shuts off, it goes to a technical difficulty screen and plays the tune of an Emergency Broadcast System alert, which only occurs when the government sends a signal to televisions, phones and radios-not when an individual camera is damaged.
• Artistic License – Geography: There aren't a whole lot of subterranean structures in South Louisiana thanks to the omnipresent flooding hazard, so the basements and cellars on the family property shouldn't really be present. There actually are underground salt mines in the region, as salt domes are largely impermeable to water. It's possible that the close proximity between the Baker estate and the nearby salt mine made the land stable enough to allow the construction of the basements and cellars, especially since part of the guest house basement is connected to it. Artistic license is still taken when you consider how their backyard is literally right next to the bayou. Houses there are usually built off the ground for a good reason.
  • It should also be noted that plantation houses were built on plantations. Plantations were large areas of farmland (hence "plant"-ation) and could not be located so close to wetlands.
• Assimilation Backfire: Initiating Ethan into her "family" backfired when she discovered that he didn't want to be her "daddy" at all and started to fight back.
• Ate His Gun: During the garage battle Jack eats the deputy's gun that Ethan was holding, which horrifies him. Jack then shoots his own brains out, right after having finished being blown up in a fiery wreck, simply to prove how screwed Ethan is.
• Attack Its Weak Point:
  • Jack can be stunned momentarily if you shoot/slash him enough times, giving Ethan some much needed breathing space. An efficient (if dangerous) way to save on bullets is to slash his knees with the pocket knife while crouching when he moves up to strike at you and/or slash his face after he swings his weapon, albeit if you stay close to him for too long he’ll either swing vertically if you remain crouching or pick you up and throw you around.
  • During the cage match duel with chainsaws, striking Jack's head with your chainsaw will stun him via the Mold in his body releasing itself to heal him, giving you the opportunity to overwhelm his Healing Factor by shredding him apart with your chainsaw. Actually hitting his head is tricky though since he’ll block your headshot attempts with his chainsaw shears, meaning you have to strike at his head after he tries to ram you or after smacking him with one of the hanging corpses in the arena.
  • During the fight on the docks, you must shoot out the huge, bulging eyes covering his twisted, overgrown fungal form.
  • In Marguerite's second boss fight, she takes more damage and is staggered if you can hit her in the womb/hive area, i.e. the crotch.
  • Given the number of closeups the game gives of the Swamp Man's face, his mask is his weak point. Deal enough damage and you'll break off the mask, revealing all that's left of Jack Baker underneath.
  • In the final battle, Evie's only apparent weak point is her face, and even then it can be difficult to tell if you're actually damaging her or just annoying her until you get the Albert-01.
• Autobots, Rock Out!: Lucas blares some heavy metal over the speakers when he forces Ethan to fight the first Fat Molded in the game.
• Awesome, but Impractical:
  • The unlockable Albert-01R pistol is easily the strongest of the handgun varieties and it's a beast with enhanced handgun rounds, but its usefulness is somewhat hampered by a pitifully small 3-shot magazine capacity, heavy recoil and long reload time, so you'll need to have perfect aim and hope those three headshots did the trick, because if not, it's time to run. The gun's size also makes it block a large amount of your field of vision when Ethan is idly holding it.
  • The bonus Circular Saw is extremely useful most of the time, but it is still a melee weapon and if it's generally a bad idea to get in an enemy's face at all, you won't want to try using the saw on them either. This goes triply for Madhouse mode, where Molded enemies aren't as easily stunned by the weapon and can still attack you while you're slicing them up unless you point that sucker straight up and go for the head.
  • The 44 Mag is the most powerful weapon in the game, able to instantly kill most enemies on any difficulty with a headshot. Shame you'll only get to fire it 10ish times if you make sure to check every nook and cranny for it's wellhidden ammo. Unless you have infinite ammo unlocked (I.E. you've already beaten the hardest difficulty) and intend to use it, your antique coins are better spent on other upgrades.
• Back from the Dead: After having to fend for himself against Mia, Ethan's (unknowingly) accidentally killed by Jack and resurrected by the Mold.
• Bad Black Barf: During the segment late in the game when you're going through the ship as Mia, three years ago, you encounter Alan, your partner, whose infection is more advanced than Mia's. He calls Evie a bitch, and in retaliation she accelerates the growth of Mold within him. He pukes up blood, then black Mold, then dies.
• Bait-and-Switch:
  • The game has a fairly massive one at the beginning. You're shown a video of Mia sending you a message which tells you to stay away and is clearly panicked. Ethan, however, just seems to be reacting to the fact his wife is alive versus calling the authorities. Only later do you realize Ethan hasn't seen the video at all and Mia never sent it. Instead, he received a much-much calmer e-mail.
  • The entire game itself can be this in another perspective. At first, it seem to be a supernatural Survival Horror game until you get terms like "E-Series" and "D-Series". Until you reach the tanker where you find out Mia's real job was to transport Eveline, an E-Series BOW, to Central America until she goes berserk and kills everyone in the tanker. She also kickstarted the plot and infected many people as the Molded and turned the Bakers into superpowered cannibals and lured Ethan, Mia's husband, to Dulvey just so he can be her "father".
• Belated Happy Ending: The DLC campaigns wrap up the fate of several of the characters, resulting in a noticeably happier ending. Lucas is finally stopped and definitely killed by Chris Redfield, and Zoe is saved from her infection by her uncle, Joe Baker. The best part is that this confirms the Bittersweet Ending mentioned below is canon over the Downer Ending.
• Big Bad: Eveline, the bioweapon who can control people with a Hive Mind.
• Big, Screwed-Up Family: The Bakers. In addition to the whole "mutated/possessed cannibals" thing, the Tape-2 trailer shows at least one, Lucas, is a Psychopathic Man Child who throws food at Ethan at the table, Abusive Parents when Jack punishes Lucas by brutally stabbing him through the arm with a butcher's knife. Also, Jack shouts at Marguerite and even threatens to backhand her at one point. Turns out, it's because Eveline made them that way. They were a normal family until the Bakers found Eveline at the tanker and things went downhill from there. They still had their dysfunctions - for example, Jack is implied to have been an alcoholic who wasn't above lashing out or overreacting when he thought others in the household were out of line, and even at his best, Lucas was always sullen, impudent, and immature - but... well, how many families don't?
• Bittersweet Ending: The Good Ending: Eveline is finally defeated, Jack and Marguerite Baker are finally free from the Hive Mind's control and Ethan and Mia are rescued by Chris Redfield and a now reformed Umbrella Corporation. However, Jack and Marguerite are now dead along with the deputy and the Sewer Gator crew (to say nothing of Eveline's numerous other victims before the events of the game), Zoe is left behind, while Lucas has disappeared and is now at large. Thankfully, as noted under Belated Happy Ending, we have the DLC campaigns.
• Black Dude Dies First: Technically he's the Bakers' last chronological victim, but the policeman who shows up to investigate what's going on is black, and is the first character to be killed in front of you.
• Black Sheep: Lucas Baker is indeed a bad seed of the Baker family. As a child, he locked a boy who bullied and insulted him in his attic, presumably until he died. Now he has graduated to engineering elaborate death traps. Before Eveline came, he basically was a moody teenager living with his parents and doing his own thing in life. After Eveline came, he got a lot worse from her influence and at the time when the game happens, it is revealed that he is actually Not Brainwashed, unlike his parents; he has cut a deal with The Connections to find a way to sever him from Eveline's control without alerting her, but he keeps up the facade of serving her because she allows him to kill with impunity. Despite this however, he still possesses regenerative abilities as evidenced by his first appearance, and still sees as well as interacts with Eveline's hallucinations.
• Bland-Name Product: While they did sneak a real, branded bottle of Louisiana Hot Sauce in there (see the Trivia tab), you can spot some knockoff regional brands among the clutter in the Baker house such as empty bags of Chipp's (a take on Zapp's Potato Chips) and discarded drink cups that obviously bear the same design and color scheme that Whataburger uses. Dulvey Beer is likely a riff on Abita, a Louisiana-based brewery that's managed to get some decent market penetration even outside of its home state. Less regional are the cans of "Meat" that are clearly designed to look like Spam.
• Blocking Stops All Damage: Ethan can use his bare forearms to decrease incoming damage from things like claws, fangs, acidic vomit and hands larger than his own torso. He still takes Scratch Damage, unless Ethan has both the Essence and Secret of Defense items, a specific set of unlockable "manuals" in his possession.
• Blown Across the Room: The gimmick phase before the final boss fight sees Eveline suffering a Villainous Breakdown, blowing Ethan across the room with Razor Wind to keep him from injecting her with a serum.
• Body Horror:
  • Ethan gets his left hand chopped off with a chainsaw by Mia early on; it's later stapled back onto the stump by Zoe. Although it somehow regained full articulation and functionality, it still looks pretty messed up and he spends the rest of the game pouring antiseptics on it.
  • Some enemies are also able to outright chop off Ethan's leg, which doesn't kill you outright. Instead, you get a chance to grab your own limb and put it back on by using a Worst Aid potion to feed the Mold in him and make it fill up his wounds with regenerated tissue.
  • Ethan's hands will show wounds based on the latest thing he's taken damage from.
  • The cryptic "D-Series" body parts that Ethan has to retrieve look like mummified bodies dried to the point where they're losing their human shape. As it turns out, they really were once human beings, not some weird biological entity resembling a human. They were a part of the experiments that The Connections conducted on young girls in their infancy to make them in to fungal B.O.W.s, and the failed D-Series resulted in all the little girls turning into these twisted forms.
• Book Ends:
  • The final battle with Eveline takes place in the first area visited in the first demo and part of the main game.
  • The very first line we hear from any of the Bakers, way back in the demo is "Welcome to the family, son". The last thing Joe says to his brother Jack in End of Zoe is "This is a farewell from the family, brother!"
• Boom, Headshot!: The fastest way of disposing of the Molded, with the exception of the Fat Molded, is to shoot them in the head.
• Boring, but Practical: The enhanced handgun rounds. Your pistols aren't as much fun to use, but if you have decent aim, the stronger ammo can take out ordinary Molded in as little as one or two headshots, freeing up your heavy-hitting weapons to use against special enemies and bosses.
• Boss-Altering Consequence: During the fight against Jack in the garage, you can hit him with the car if you grab the car keys and turn it on. However, if you're not fast enough, he will instead get into the car and try to hit you with it. Either way, Jack will eventually hijack the car and crash it, setting himself on fire.
• Boss in Mook Clothing: The Fat Molded, ceremonially christened as "Fat Man" by Lucas, are the toughest and worst non-boss enemies that Ethan can face. Especially when they come in pairs.
• Bowdlerise: The Japanese version of the game heavily censors everything surrounding the death of Deputy David Anderson, from his head remaining intact after Jack's assault, to a Polaroid of him with an "X" on it replacing his decapitated head in the fridge. Other minor details like the blood on disembodied limbs being recolored were also changed. To add to this, there are two Japanese versions of the game: a "normal" version that was heavily censored and an 18+ "Grotesque" version that, while Bloodier and Gorier than the "normal" version, is still censored.
• Bragging Rights Reward:
  • You unlock Infinite Ammo by beating Madhouse mode. If you've beaten Madhouse, you've conquered the worst stuff the base game can possibly throw at you and clearly have no need for Infinite Ammo. That said, it's still great to have for the Catharsis Factor, and it helps with speedruns by cutting out the need to scrounge for ammunition.^note Though players just looking to unlock everything are well served to know that clearing the game inside of 4 hours without Infinite Ammo is much easier than taking on Madhouse without the Circular Saw, X-Ray Glasses and two Defense scrolls.
  • The Walking Shoes. The game itself points out how they only increase your walking speed and don't help you to run any faster, meaning that players who are in a hurry are better off not wasting a valuable item space on these things, because walking with the shoes is still significantly slower compared to simply running where you need to go.
• Brick Joke:
  • The infamous Dummy Finger from the Beginning Hour demo comes back during one of the VHS Tape flashbacks.
  • Early in the game, you can find a note from Jack asking where his mower is. Later, whilst hiding from Jack in the basement, you stumble across the very same mower that he was looking for.
• Bullfight Boss: Part of the second fight with Jack is dodging his charges, then giving him a good chainsawing when his guard is down.
• Call-Back:
  • The game's first playable area has Ethan get out of a car to explore a brown rural village in daylight. Soon after, he is accosted by an enemy wielding a chainsaw.
  • There's yet another shotgun trap. Although this one just locks you in a room rather than try to kill you.
  • Your primary antagonists are impossible to permanently kill, but can be stunned or driven away with weapons.
  • In the final battle, a helicopter conveniently drops a special weapon needed to kill the boss.
  • Madhouse is basically a Harder Than Hard version of Arrange Mode.
• The Cameo: The one who supplies the weapon needed to kill off the final boss, and subsequently meets the player in the ending, is Chris Redfield himself.
• Cannibal Clan: The Baker family are all cannibals.
• Car Fu: During the fight in the Garage, you have to get into Ethan's car and run Jack over to defeat him. If you're not careful, Jack will get into the car and try to run Ethan over.
• Chainsaw Good: A chainsaw is temporarily available as a weapon during the fight against Jack, where both of you wield chainsaws against each other. It also seems to be insane Mia's weapon of choice. One of the unlockable rewards is an oversized circular saw.
• Chekhov's Gunman: At the beginning of the game, Ethan finds a photo of an old woman with "E-001" written on the back. At the time, this holds little importancebut when Ethan visited the area again near the end of the game, he finds this photo again as a clue to who she really is.
• Chest Monster: At the Old House, some crates have giant insects inside instead of items. Taken even further at Lucas' party, which has exploding item crates.
• Clothing Damage: Jack's shirt will reflect whatever injuries you deal to him and is completely burned away in an explosion, although it somehow magically fixes itself when he pops back up in Madhouse mode after the garage fight. His pants, on the other hand, are somehow completely invulnerable. Although his extracted model shows that his pants are indeed a separate layer/item like his shirt is and he does have underwear on, it's likely that Capcom wanted to spare the player the scenario of fighting Jack in just his briefs. Likewise, if Ethan's leg is severed and then reattached, his character model accurately shows the right trouser leg cut off at mid-calf for the rest of the game.
• The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard: If you don't hop in Ethan's car quickly enough during the garage fight, Jack can somehow get into it, start it up, and easily run him down, even if you already grabbed the car's only key.
• Continuity Nod:
  • In the main hall of the Bakers' house, one can find a picture of the Arklay Mountains that was taken in 1991, seven years before the events of the first game.
  • Jack apparently contacted Trevor and Chamberlain Contruct to remodel the Baker mansion. "Trevor" was the name of George Trevor, who built the series' mansions. However, the Baker mansion reconstruction happened in 1992. Trevor himself is long dead at that point in the timeline, but his company continued in business for decades after his disappearance.
  • In the game, there's an article written by Alyssa Ashcroft covering missing people in the Bakers' mansion, meaning that she canonically survives the events of Outbreak.
  • A magazine article reveals it's been 16 years since the Raccoon City Incident.
  • A book found inside the Baker's main house can be partially examined. Its title is The Unveiled Abyss and it was written by Clive R. O'Brian.
  • In the main hall, there is a door that requires three Cerberus heads that opens the front door. A similar one with the same required parts in the Salazar castle in Resident Evil 4.
  • A memo by The Connections, the company that created Eveline, mentions "H.C.F.". H.C.F is short for Hive-Host Capture Force, a group of soldiers under the command of the late Albert Wesker, as an affiliated ally. H.C.F. was Wesker's private army in Code Veronica.
  • The ultimate weapon you receive during the final boss fight, Albert-01, appears to be Wesker's Samurai Edge pistol with a modified silencer attached.
  • In the ending, Ethan is rescued by Chris Redfield, who is working for the Umbrella Co. company under orders from the BSAA.
  • The theme that plays near the end of Mia's segment on the tanker is a low-key Dark Reprise of the tanker theme from Resident Evil 5.
  • A small one, but the sounds used with the keypad in Lucas' trap house are the menu highlight sounds from Resident Evil 2 and Resident Evil 3: Nemesis. Even the color scheme used on the keypad matches that of the classic menus.
• Controllable Helplessness: The end of the "Happy Birthday" tape lets you control Clancy as he inevitably burns to death.
• Creepy Doll: These are everywhere, in all shapes and sizes, may it be children's toys, mannequins, hunting trophies, the Molded or even The Bakers. The doll diversity gets to the point where the Baker estate is essentially one giant creepy dollhouse. They even got added symbolism due to the true nature of the Molded's origin.
• Curb-Stomp Battle: Pre-infection, the Baker Family didn't stand a chance the moment Eveline woke up in their house, infecting and integrating them into her Hive Mind within minutes of her introduction.
• Cutscene Drop: Jack's infamous "Welcome to the family, son!" introduction occurs in the largest room of the attic, so if you "killed" Mia in an adjacent room or corridor, you'll both somehow teleport back into the main attic space when the cutscene begins.
• Cutscene Incompetence: Ethan in gameplay is slower than most enemies, but at least capable of blocking attacks well with his bare hands and recovering quickly from the blows he takes. Ethan in cutscenes gets tossed around like a ragdoll, taken by surprise constantly even when he should know better, and generally stumbles around even in the face of danger. This reaches insane levels of stupidity in a section in which you're put into the same trap as someone else whose fate you've watched in a VHS tape and, despite knowing for a fact that something is going to explode (due to having seen it happen on the tape), Ethan decides to stand still next to that object.
• Damn You, Muscle Memory!: Madhouse mode changes up enemy spawn points and item pickups. For example, the number of Antique Coins is increased from 18 to 33, and collecting them is now required to obtain the scorpion key.
• Darker and Edgier: And Bloodier and Gorier. Other than a few brief Shout Outs, the series' traditional, uniquely Japanese campy schlock is nowhere to be seen, and unlike previous numbered games, this game has almost no humor outside of Black Comedy bits. Nothing Is Scarier is used in full-force, and you see a police officer get the top of his head sliced off with a shovel. Not to mention Ethan gets his hand cut off by a chainsaw by a crazed Mia.
• Deadly Game: Lucas often forces his still-living kidnapping victims into these, treating it like some sick spectacle with him as a game host.
• Death Trap: Lucas loves these, and his section within the Baker home is filled to the brim with them, forcing Ethan to navigate them in order to reach him. Not A Hero likewise has him implant these around the mines to stop Blue Umbrella from coming after him.
• Deep South: The Tape-1 trailer implies the game takes place in the Bayou, and it's later announced to specifically be an abandoned plantation in Dulvey, Louisiana.
• Defeat Equals Explosion: Once the Fat Molded finally goes down, they blow up in a final ditch effort to take their killers down with them.
• Deus ex Machina: One, surprisingly enough, relevant to gameplay and not just story: while most Resident Evil games contain healing systems that are beyond illogical, 7 provides an in-game explanation by way of the in-game mold that gave the Bakers their superhuman strength and durability.
• Despair Event Horizon: Zoe crosses this if Ethan cures Mia, despondently yelling "there won't be anyone left to help!" when he claims he'll call for rescue before departing.
• Developer's Foresight: Jack will taunt you if you run out of ammo. While he's doing so, you can switch to a loaded weapon and point it at him: he will stop mid-taunt and let out a surprised gasp.
• Devil in Plain Sight: Upon seeing a picture of pre-infection Lucas for the first time, the first thing that goes through Ethan's mind is how much he wants to punch the guy. As it turns out, Lucas seems to be the only character in the game who was genuinely evil rather than a product of tragic circumstances.
• Didn't Think This Through:
  • On your last boss battle with a heavily-mutated Jack, Zoe tells Ethan to use a cure on him, which Ethan questions, but does it anyway. Then not less than 30 seconds later, she expresses dismay when Ethan tells Mia and Zoe there's only one cure left.
  • Lucas made a VHS tape documenting the solution to his Birthday deathtrap puzzle and didn't even bother changing the combination of the lock that the video tape shows the combination for. Sure enough, Ethan gets his hands on the tape and bypasses all of his traps, including the combination lock. This tape is also in Lucas' bedroom attic, which he directs you to go up to for a keycard.
• Didn't We Use This Joke Already?: After Ethan already got his hand chopped off, Capcom subtly acknowledges through Lucas complaining about his hand getting chopped off as well that this already happened.
• Diegetic Interface: Resident Evil's traditional health system, green/fine yellow and orange/caution and red/danger, is displayed via a "codex" attached to Ethan's wrist, which is basically a heart rate monitor.
• Difficult, but Awesome: The .44 Auto-Mag pistol. Ammo is extremely rare and unaimed shots are so inaccurate that they'll go wider than the onscreen target reticle, but if you take care to aim properly for the weak points, it can devastate regular enemies and stagger bosses with just one or two shots.
• Disc-One Nuke: Two in fact, one of which requires getting the Dirty Coin from the demo but the other is available for anyone. The former allows you to more easily open up the bird cages for their upgrades (and is a massive ammo-saver on Madhouse since it can net you both the Scorpion Key and the Assault Coin before your second fight with Jack). The second is the Broken Shotgun, initially meant to just be a placeholder so you can use the M37, but after you defeat Jack, you can use the repair kit hidden in the yard to immediately repair the Broken Shotgun into the M21 which, while it has only half the capacity of the M37, is significantly stronger due to its tighter spread.
• Disproportionate Retribution:
  • Eveline makes Alan, one of her Parental Substitutes, puke his guts out and die a horrible death after he calls her a bitch.
  • Lucas lures a bully into his attic and starves him to death, all for calling Lucas a "crazy head".
• The Dog Was the Mastermind: The seemingly harmless old, catatonic woman in a wheelchair that you come across several times throughout the game turns out to be the true form of Eveline, the Big Bad who appears as a young girl due to her hallucinogenic powers.
• Doing In the Wizard: It's revealed that the seemingly supernatural events seen in the demo and the main game are the result of Eveline's ability to induce powerful hallucinations via psychotropic pheromones.
• Door to Before: You'll find quite a few of these around the house. Unlock a couple of them and you can move between save spots in a matter of seconds.
• Downer Ending: The Bad Ending: Both Mia and Zoe die and even though Ethan escapes with his life, he sounds more broken than ever.
• Duel to the Death: Jack's second boss fight involves him breaking out his chainsaw shears and encouraging you to pick up the (ordinary) chainsaw nearby.
• Dungeon Bypass: This is actually the intended solution for Lucas' "Happy Birthday" puzzle. You're supposed to watch the VHS tape of Clancy attempting to solve it so you can find out the combination for the final lock and completely avoid all of Lucas' traps.
• Eerie Pale-Skinned Brunette: Eveline has brunette hair and creepily pale skin. At least her younger form, anyway. So does Mia when she's possessed.
• 11th-Hour Superpower: You get to fire the last shots in the last boss-fight with a superpowered pistol called Albert-01. Plus, you keep a replica version for a New Game Plus.
• Elite Mooks: The blade-armed Molded have more health than the regular ones, do more damage, and can even deflect bullets by using their blade as a shield.
• Establishing Character Moment: The dinnertime scene is a deliberate and efficient one for all three main members of the Baker family. Featuring Marguerite trying to sweetly cajole Ethan into eating her cooking and then flipping out when he refuses, Jack shouting her out of the room and threatening to backhand her for the outburst after having sawed off Lucas's arm ("again") for throwing food, and Lucas leaning in to watch excitedly as Jack tries to cut Ethan's mouth open; it sets them up neatly as, respectively, a Mood-Swinger Evil Matriarch, a domineering and abusive Ax-Crazy patriarch, and a sadistic Manchild of a son.
• Every Car Is a Pinto: Downplayed. If Ethan tries to use his car to run down Jack and "succeeds", Jack will peel away the roof and force him crash it all around the garage, ending with ramming it into a wall with I-beams hanging down from the ceiling in front of it. An alternate version has Jack either rip you out of the car or get into the car himself and spin donuts until crashing the car himself. The car catches fire and explodes soon after that.
• Expy: The entire Baker clan is essentially what Leatherface's family would've been like if they all had superhuman strengths to go along with their depraved, cannibalistic lifestyle.
• Extremely Short Timespan: The entire game takes place over the course of one very long night, starting just before sundown and ending at sunrise. As an average playthrough can be roughly 9 or so hours, this is in relatively real time.
• Failed a Spot Check:
  • Whenever someone's hunting for Ethan, they don't do a very thorough job (though that's probably a good thing). Ethan can hide in some pretty obvious places and go unnoticed because no one ever checks these nooks. You can also open doors near an enemy and they won't bat an eye at it, even if they're right in front of the door. invokedOf course, given that the Baker's are under the effects of a psychotropic mold (thereby having their perceptions altered), it makes sense that they wouldn't be playing with a full enough deck to be very thorough.
  • Averted with a vengeance in the "Bedroom" DLC, where Marguerite will notice if something is out of sorts in the bedroom she has Clancy trapped in whenever she comes back in.
• Fan Disservice: Marguerite's second boss form. Her vagina has effectively transformed into an insect hive. Get used to looking at it because it is also her Weak Spot. Bonus points for the creepy, almost sexual moaning sounds she makes while she's spawning more insect nests.
• Festering Fungus: A heavy layer of disgusting black mold covers significant sections of the Baker house, and some of the Molded can be seen growing out of them. Some of the originally relatively clean areas will even have thick layers of fungus grown out of nowhere when the player returns after progressing through much of the game. They are symbiotically linked to Eveline and is the source of her powers.
• First-Episode Twist: It's fairly hard to talk about the early game without mentioning that Mia gets possessed by...something (later revealed to be Eveline's handiwork) and tears off Ethan's left hand with a chainsaw. Don't worry, you get it back.
• First-Person Ghost: Averted - if you look down, you'll see Ethan's feet, and if you do so while crouching, you'll see his knee.
• Fling a Light into the Future: By recording all of his horrific experience at the hands of Lucas, Clancy inadvertently manages to provide Ethan with the means to escape the no-win scenario that killed him.
• Foreshadowing:
  • Very early in the game, you can find a picture of the unnamed old woman, with the phrase "E-001" scribbled on the back. This is meant to warn the player that the old woman is in fact the Big Bad Eveline, who is the first of the "E-series" bioweapons.
  • In her first message to Ethan, Mia mentions hating her "babysitting job", a euphemism for taking care of Eveline.
  • Some of Mia's lines when she attacks you in the Guest House are "it's my job, must contain outbreak", "must burn it all down", and "they're relying on me, everyone's relying on me", hinting at her role as part of The Connections.
  • You can find photos of a helicopter and one is written that it's been up for a few days. The helicopter turns out to be an Umbrella, Co. helicopter investigating the area.
  • Looking at the photos reveals that NONE of them show "Granny". The Bakers with two children can be seen, a photo of adult Lucas, of Zoe, and of little Eveline. Which makes sense since she hasn't been that old until recently and is certainly not a family member.
  • Inside the trailer is a letter. One part mentions "Should I run? No, I can't. I'm dead, if she finds out.", alluding to the Zoe ending.
  • Occasionally Jack can be heard muttering "Shut up, just— just shut up", even though no one is saying anything. He's likely talking to Eveline (whom Ethan cannot see yet at that point) giving him commands which he doesn't want to follow but has no choice because of the infection.
  • In the Abandoned House, next to the fake altar, one can find a diary about Marguerite getting an X-Ray, tying back to the doctor letter found in Grandmother's room, foreshadowing that Marguerite is the grandmother of the setting and "Granny" doesn't belong.
  • In the "Happy Birthday" tape, Clancy picks up a straw doll with a note with the word "YOU" written on it. In order to solve the puzzle, Clancy has to burn the doll to obtain the Dummy Finger. Solving the puzzle ultimately results in Clancy being burned alive.
  • Also in the "Happy Birthday" tape, the puzzle contains two combination locks. The game lets the player brute force one, but the other the game refuses to let Clancy interact with until he learns the combination. Players who pay enough attention to each individual step of the puzzle will realize the process of learning this lock's combination is what rigs the puzzle to burn Clancy alive in the first place, and when Ethan does the puzzle, the only way to survive is to skip learning the combination.
  • One of the things Jack says while hunting you is "I'm going to squash you like a bug! I hope Marguerite didn't hear that..." Guess what Marguerite uses to attack you?
  • One for End of Zoe: The only members of the Baker family who appear in Ethan's mind after he's been captured are Zoe and Jack, hinting that Jack is still alive, and Lucas isn't as infected as the others think.
  • The newspaper shown in the credits sequence mention "There is some indication the use of the mold could revive the recently deceased." As revealed in Village, Ethan was killed by Jack and revived by Eveline's mold.
  • Given how violent Jack and Lucas can be with one another during their disagreements, you shouldn't be surprised that Lucas isn't actually in lockstep with the brainwashed family. There's also the fact that for how childishly insane he is, Lucas demonstrates the lucidity to create mechanical constructs no average-minded person could successfully build, let alone a crazy hillbilly.
  • When Jack and Marguerite talk about "her" gift, they treat it as a miraculous blessing and with complete adoration towards her. When Lucas talks about it, he only plays up how great it feels and how he refuses to go back to the way things were. This is another major hint that Lucas is free from the Hive Mind the rest of his family is stuck in.
• A Form You Are Comfortable With: Eveline and other A-E series bioweapons are made to resemble young girls to garner trust and sympathy, thus making it easier for them to manipulate people. Even though Eveline has rapidly aged to be an old woman, she still appears as a little girl in hallucinations.
• Four-Temperament Ensemble: The Baker family has four main members. Among them, bitter Jack is the Melancholic, temperamental and fiercely defensive Marguerite is the Choleric, childish Trickster Lucas is the Sanguine, and Only Sane Man Zoe is the Phlegmatic.
• The Fourth Wall Will Not Protect You: As a way of heightening the sense of danger, enemies can reach past the subtitles in VR mode.
• Fragile Speedster: The crawling Molded don't have as much health as the regular kind, but move faster and can even jump around, behaving similarly to Lickers.
• Funny Background Event: If you peek through the lattice on your first visit to the second-floor balcony, you can see Marguerite outside searching the backyard and hear her complaining about Ethan.
• Gas Leak Cover Up: Following Eveline's demise and the relocation of Ethan and Mia Winters in Village, a news clipping found in the Winters' new home and the Baker Incident Report curated by Zoe Baker herself reveals that the BSAA had collaborated with the Dulvey County Sheriff's Office to cover up the horrors that took place on the Baker estate as accidental deaths caused by a hydrogen sulfide gas leak that claimed the lives of the Baker family and their victims; nonetheless, despite there being evidence to the contrary, the general public eventually moved on from the Baker House Incident andaccepted this explanation after initial suspicions of a cover-up.
• Genre Shift: The game shifts from the fourth through sixth titles' third-person survival action gameplay to first-person survival horror exploration.
• Ghost Ship: A wrecked derelict ship is found and is a major location of the game. The Connections had special agents Mia Winters and Alan Droney board the ship as passengers to take Eveline to the Central American branch. Mia and Alan were to be her Parental Substitute until they get there. However her power goes out of control and overran the entire ship by vomiting endless numbers of mold and infected most of the personnel on the ship. Mia is the only sole survivor of the shipwreck which was found by Lucas, who told his parents. They then took in Mia and Eveline until she took them over, setting the events into motion.
• Giant Mook: The Fat Molded are the largest and toughest Molded, and are generally used as mini-bosses. A special King Mook 12-foot tall version is fought as the final opponent just before the final confrontation with Eveline.
• Gone Horribly Right: Eveline was created by the NEXBAS (Next-generation E Xperimental B Attlefield Superiority) Initiative as the ultimate subversion agent; a B.O.W that could blend into the background with its human-like appearance, all whilst dispersing fungal spores that can be used to either generate expendable soldier-units or take control of the enemy's soldiers and civilian population. It worked wonders... a pity they couldn't control her.
• Good Parents: The Bakers were a normal family before whatever caused them to go insane occurred. The Bakers taking in of Eveline is what caused them to go insane, but they did so out of the goodness of their hearts, which makes them an interesting case of Tragic Villain. No Good Deed Goes Unpunished, indeed.
• Gotta Catch Them All: The Antique Coins and Mr. Everywhere bobbleheads, which have associated achievements/trophies for finding them all. The coins have two of them - one for collecting all 18 on Easy or Normal difficulty and one for collecting all 33 on Madhouse difficulty.
• Greater-Scope Villain:
  • The Connections, who developed Eveline as a bio-weapon, only to lose her in the bayou where she was found by the Bakers.
  • A file found implies H.C.F^AbbreviationHive-Host Capture Force is still active after Wesker's death in Resident Evil 5. Meaning not only was Wesker himself working with them, he was responsible for the collaboration - meaning that even after his death, Wesker's shadow hangs over the franchise still.
• Groin Attack: During your fight with Marguerite in her second boss fight as a mutant B.O.W., shooting her womb-hive cuts off any attempt by her to spawn a wasp nest on a wall, which summons wasps to attack you if you get too close to the nest.
• Guide Dang It!:
  • Finding the Antique Coins and Mr. Everywhere Bobbleheads is quite a frustrating experience; the Bakers plantation is so large, dark, and full of clutter that they can easily slip by unnoticed. Fortunately, the Psychostimulants power-up is a huge edge in finding them for those who don't want to resort to guides.
  • Guarding is given only a brief button prompt snippet in the first batches of combat. What game doesn't tell you is that it lets you escape grabs and attacks that would normally be fatal, different weapons block different amounts of damage, and that timing your block also affects how much you take. Considering the game falls back onto vague status updates for health, it's functionally impossible for the normal player to realize any of this - but blocking attacks is essential to surviving Madhouse difficulty.
  • Speaking of which, you can parry Jack's massive chainsaw shears with your own chainsaw, which allows you to stab him in the face. Repeat your parries can help end the fight.
  • You are expected to find a tape in Lucas's room that teaches you the password needed survive the Death Trap he puts you in later on (in the tape, you explore the death trap as Clancy the "proper" way, which ends with him getting incinerated. Poor guy.) However, it is fully possible for a player to miss the tape and enter the death trap without the knowledge they need to not die. Luckily A:the game autosaves before you enter and B:you can learn the solution as Ethan just like you can as Clancy, but it can be frustrating to be stuck in a "mandatory" death because you overlooked a tape earlier on.
• Hand Cannon: During the final battle with Eveline the B.S.A.A. tosses Ethan a special handgun called the Albert-01 to kill her with. The handgun is in-fact Albert Wesker's Beretta 92FS "Samurai Edge", customized to use RAMRODS rounds for dealing with Bio Organic Weapons. It can be unlocked later as a standard handgun that uses 9mm rounds, but deals roughly the same damage as the Magnum, though it carries a measly three rounds in its magazine for balancing purposes.
• Happy Ending Override: As Resident Evil Village reveals, the infamous "Welcome to the family son" knock out that Jack gave to Ethan? It killed him. Considering his Super-Strength ^note Which allows him to almost effortlessly break Ethan's limbs and neck, not to mention outright casually crashing through solid brick walls like they are made of cardboard, it's no surprise that a "Hey, You!" Haymaker and then a curb stomp to the head killed a normal human being rather than knocking him out.
• Hard Mode Perks: Beating the game on Madhouse difficulty unlocks Infinite Ammo.
  • The mode also gives you the grenade launcher MUCH earlier on (as soon as you unlock the cerberus door to leave the house for the first time in fact). You'll need it. There are also more bird cages with upgrades to be unlocked, though this means you'll have to scavage for coins more and one mandatory key is also located in one of the cages, making finding a few coins mandatory.
• Harder Than Hard: The Madhouse difficulty. Ethan takes more damage from enemies; health regeneration is either slowed down considerably or outright disabled; enemies are stronger, faster, much more durable, notice you almost instantly, appear in greater numbers, and their spawn points have changed; autosaves are almost completely turned off and manual saving requires finding cassette tapes to use, just like the ink ribbons and typewriters from the earlier games; item locations have changed, there are even less items to find in the field, and more coin cages to unlock, meaning that Madhouse increases the number of antique coins you can find. If you haven't already mastered the arts of nailing perfect headshots and utilizing the defense mechanic going in, you're certainly going to have both down pat by the time you successfully beat it. The reward for beating Madhouse difficulty, however, is infinite ammo, which may or may not help out for future playthroughs.
• Healing Factor: The Bakers have one. Case in point, Jack gets set on fire and still keeps going like it's nothing. On another note, the Tape-2 trailer shows Lucas getting stabbed in the forearm, then cut off. Jack does it again in the Vol. 5 trailer, taking point blank shots to the torso, and then rising back up within a minute. Said trailer is called "Immortal" for a reason.
  • Jack chops Lucas's left arm off at the dinner party. Lucas responds with "God damn, old man, not again!" with only mild annoyance and the arm has grown back when Ethan meets Lucas again.
  • Ethan may have been given accelerated healing too. On the one hand, he can still be killed; on the other, he survives having his hand cut off and reattached, and there's an actual play mechanic in the game for reattaching your limbs if they get severed. Easy and Normal difficulties even have a limited health regeneration system, although it's disabled for Madhouse difficulty.
• Heal Thyself: All Ethan has to do to recover damage is just pour some medicine on his arm and he's right as rain. Justified as he's a Zombie Infectee infected with the very same Mold that infests the Bakers, granting him a chemically-induced Healing Factor by feeding the Mold in him with the highly nutritious herbal contents in the "medicine" to regenerate more tissues.
• Healing Potion: The miraculously strong mixture Ethan can use is so efficient it can reconnect completely severed nerve endings. Subverted, in that the herb-mixture itself is actually utterly useless and only capable of providing the Mold in Ethan with the required nutrition to start regenerating new tissues when sploshed over his wounds.
• Heel–Face Turn: The ending implies this for the new Umbrella Corporation organization introduced in Umbrella Corps, since they're working with Chris Redfield now. According to Not a Hero, Umbrella reformed into a PMC dedicated to stopping Bioterrorism, kept the name as a Mark of Shame, and has no connection to the organization introduced in Umbrella Corps.
• Hillbilly Horrors: The main antagonists are a clan of nigh-indestructible redneck cannibals.
• Hoist by His Own Petard: Eveline's Rapid Aging and Power Incontinence are both the direct result of her killing her handlers, destroying the tanker, and enslaving the Baker family. These actions ended up cutting her off from the medication she needed to keep her powers and their side effects in check.
• Hope Spot: Very early in the game, you find a note showing a list of people who either turned into the molded or died while captured, except for Clancy Jones who has an "L" next to his name, implying he survived and is in hiding. That "L" did not stand for "Lost".
• Humanoid Abomination:
  • Something is seriously wrong with the Baker family. They take gunshots and explosions and overall injury and treat them as little more than an annoyance and the way they move at times borders on the unnatural, like when Jack gets shot and temporarily killed. Jack and Marguerite especially get worse in this regard as they mutate, the former becoming a deformed, leech-like swamp monster with eyes all over his body and the latter transforming into an insectoid abomination with lanky limbs, a deformed abdomen and the ability to crawl up walls and ceilings like a spider.
  • The Molded—those weird, black, clawed creatures—come very close too. Despite having a humanoid appearance, some of them clearly aren't once human since they grow themselves out of the mold.
  • Although out of all of them combined, the one that truly stands out is Eveline, for she is the one who infected the Baker family, has power over the infection itself to the point that she can project it from her body to attack people, and then eventually mutates into a horrific, slimy tentacled beast with a deformed face and the size of the mansion itself.
• I Cannot Self-Terminate:
  • Jack shows he can shoot himself in the head, but since he has a Healing Factor even that won’t stop him for long. Later, this is played straight when Zoe tells Ethan to use the serum to kill Jack. He stops fighting back, which is Foreshadowing that he wants you to kill him with the serum since the Mold placed him under Eveline's control, who has no interest in losing a valuable member of her "family".
  • The serum that Zoe creates that she thinks could free them from the Mold's Hive Mind fails, forcing Jack into pleading to Ethan to kill Eveline in order to end their suffering once and for all.
• Idiot Ball: The "Happy Birthday" VHS tape allows Ethan to bypass Lucas' Unwinnable by Design deathtrap, but he only finds it in the attic of the Bakers' house because Lucas sent him up there to find and retrieve a keycard in the first place.
• I Lied: Any time Lucas claims to his Death Trap victims they'll make it out alive should they win. Eventually, he'll just kill them regardless, as seen with poor Clancy.
• Impaled Palm: Ethan gets a knife in his left hand the first time he meets possessed Mia. She also stabs him with a screwdriver through the same hand before slicing it off entirely with a chainsaw.
• Implacable Man:
  • Compared to the past enemies in the franchise, the main enemies of RE 7 are...three members of a single family. However, they happen to be horribly tough, such as how Jack Baker survives getting set on fire before the car which set him on fire explodes and putting a pistol in his mouth and pulling the trigger.
  • The previews show several attempts to escape from Jack Baker. Any time Jack is attacked, he simply laughs it off and mocks the player for trying to kill them with whatever they were using.
• Impossibly Cool Weapon: Jack will eventually pick up what can only be described as chainsaw shears in your second fight with him.
  Jack: Groovy.
  Ethan: That is not groovy!
• Infinity +1 Sword: The circular-saw, which you are rewarded with if you complete the game in under 4 hours on any difficulty. Sure, it forces you to get up-close and personal, but on it's first cut it deals a horrifying 300 points of damage; as long as the Attack-Button is held-down, it deals a further 200 points per-second of damgage. For a point of reference, Albert-01, the best pistol in the game, deals 200 points of damage on a single successful headshot. This not only guarantees you can turn any non-boss enemy into literal meat-sauce in seconds, but can let you potentially grind Jack Baker into toothpaste before he can even grab his chainsaw scissors in your iconic second-last boss fight with him. The cherry on top of the cake is that it takes up only one item slot in your inventory, and never needs reloading. Oh, and you also recieve the X-ray glasses, which gives you a constant radar of all nearby items, as a part of your successful Speedrun reward package.
• Item Crafting: Present, as almost always in the series. There's only 8 items that can be quick-crafted: handgun ammo, enhanced handgun ammo, first-aid medicine, strong first-aid medicine, Burner fuel, psychostimulants, flame rounds, and neuro rounds. Unlisted combinations are upgrading handgun ammo and using a "separating agent" to take the chem fluid or strong chem fluid out of a consumable item. Normal handgun ammo can be converted into enhanced ammo by combining it with gunpowder, but you only get 5 enhanced rounds for every 10 normal rounds.
• Ironic Nursery Rhyme: The game uses an altered version of "Go Tell Aunt Rhody" as Eveline's motif. The melody of the song happens to be also used for a Japanese nursery tune known as "Musunde Hiraite", making it a recognizable choice for both Japanese and English-speaking audiences.
• Jump Scare: The game has plenty of moments that got players to jump out of their seats. Most of the time is the sudden appearance of a Baker family member ambushing Ethan. Jack has at least three, not counting his sudden appearances if you happen to walk right into him while exploring the area.
  • The first time happens if he catches you wandering around the halls near the kitchen after he spots you. If you turn down a hallway, he'll suddenly burst through the wall without warning to get at you.
  • Following his fight in the garage, he will suddenly grab Ethan as he tries to make his escape, despite having just been shot and cut to pieces, then immolated by the car explosion; more shockingly, he then proceeds to blow his own brains out.
  • Finally, not long after the fight in the garage, when Ethan's investigating one of the restrooms and getting a medallion from the bathtub. Right as he leaves, Jack barges into the room and neck lifts him, giving Ethan a closeup of his face still regenerating from the gunshot wound Jack gave himself, then proceeding to throw him backward.
• Just Eat Him: During the final battle, Eveline will attempt to eat Ethan, and can kill him this way if the player messes up.
• Kaizo Trap:
  • Lucas likes to craft these for his own sadistic pleasure, and you need to use a form of In-Universe Save Scumming —playing a VHS tape where you take the role of the last victim to die in it— to be able to cheat your way around his trap.
  • Madhouse mode has one more cruel little trick up its sleeve after you finally defeat the final two Fat Molded; there are three very easy-to-miss explosive tripwires strung up across the ladder out of the salt mine.
• Karma Houdini Warranty: After the trap that was meant to kill Ethan malfunctions, Lucas leaves the scene in a huff and doesn't appear for the rest of the game. Chris Redfield steps in and makes sure that Lucas doesn't get away in Not A Hero.
• Kick Them While They Are Down: If you've managed to temporarily put Jack out of commission, you might want to refrain from continuing to attack him while's he unconscious. He will not like it.
• Kill It with Fire:
  • The burner makes a good tool against Marguerite's swarms.
  • Funnily enough, most of the fire in the game is extremely picky in what it burns and what not - good thing too, or a boss fight in a dilapidated wooden house where the burner is the weapon of choice would not be much fun.
  • Marguerite’s main weakness is fire, plus her insect swarms/nests must be killed by burning them to death with either the flame sprayer or a fire round by a grenade launcher. Since the flame sprayers's damage output isn't impressive against normal Molded enemies, it's advised to get the most out of the flame sprayer while fighting Marguerite and her insects to conserve ammo for your other firearms.
• Kill the Ones You Love: Subverted. When Mia gets temporarily taken over by the mold and attacks Ethan, he apparently kills her in self-defense with the axe, which clearly shakes him up horribly. Then she cuts off his hand with a chainsaw and he gets mad, though he's still clearly upset about hurting her. Ironically, the same Mold that makes her feral also gives her super-regenerative abilities which save her life, so when he finds her again later in the game, he has a chance to administer a cure and rescue her. Played straight if the cure is given to Zoe instead.
• Lampshade Hanging: This game loves to poke fun at some of the classic entries' mechanics. Upon solving a nonsensical puzzle to open a hidden door, Ethan will comment "Who builds this shit?" and upon receiving a knife, he'll comment "What am I gonna do with a knife?"
• Late to the Tragedy: Played with; By the time Ethan shows up, it's obvious something bad has already happened. However, it's only when he's there at all that the tragedy continues. Justified because, while it's never outright stated in the game, Eveline had learned of Ethan's existence and tricked Mia into luring him to the plantation. Eveline wanted to make Ethan a part of her "family", so it makes more sense that the tragedy doesn't really continue until he's actually there.
• Laughing Mad: Jack and Marguerite Baker both cackle insanely as they chase Ethan around the household.
• Leaning on the Fourth Wall: Mia chops off Ethan's hand in the guest house, and later when the Bakers are having dinner, Jack chops off Lucas's hand, with the latter shouting "Goddamn, old man, not again!"
• Let's Get Dangerous!: When Ethan finds a handgun in the guest house, he quips "Okay, fine", now realizing the danger he is now facing.
• Literally Shattered Lives:
  • When Ethan manages to kill Jack and Marguerite, they solidify into a white, chalky substance and then crumble into dust. This also happens to Zoe if you choose to cure her instead of Mia. An R&R Report file states that this is normal behavior for a truly killed host of the megamycete.
  • Like her mother, Zoe calcifies into white mold and crumbles to dust after Eveline murders Zoe if you use the remaining serum on her in the non-canon ending.
• Living Weapon: Eveline, an E-series Bio Organic Weapon.
• Major Injury Underreaction:
  • Ethan is...remarkably calm and lucid after having his left hand cut off early in the game. Even stranger is that the stump just stops bleeding on its own after about a minute. The most likely explanation is that Ethan has already been infected by the Mold, which gives an enhanced Healing Factor. Although in the Japanese dub, he's a helluva lot more emotional.
  • Some enemies are also able to outright cut off Ethan's leg, and his reaction to putting it back on, soaking it with a herbal-concoction before testing his foot out and seeing it still work, is simply a confused "what the fuck?".
  • After being brutally stabbed and cut in the arm with a butcher's knife in one of the trailers, Lucas simply whines a little and seems more annoyed than in pain. In the final game however, the same scene has Jack saw Lucas's hand clean off, with Lucas still having the same reaction (or lack thereof). It helps that the Healing Factor for the Bakers is made explicit, which is emphasized by Lucas having his hand regenerate as if nothing happened.
    Lucas: God damn, old man! Not again!
  • At one point, Lucas pulls his own fingernails out to showcase his regeneration abilities, something so painful that it's used as a torture technique. It doesn't seem to bother him in the slightest; his voice doesn't even waver as he does it.
• Market-Based Title: In all regions, both the Western "Resident Evil" and Japanese "Biohazard" series names are present, with one market's main series name serving as the subtitle in the other market's title. The Logo Joke, where the number seven is squeezed into the title, even works in both regions (with the Roman numeral "VII" being highlighted in the last three letters of "EVIL" and a Hindu-Arabic "7" being highlighted in the "Z" in "BIOHAZARD").
• Meaningful Name: The fungus-creatures; the Molded. Per the game's designer, it's referencing how the Bakers have shaped or created them — however, it's also a reference to their fungal nature.
  • The Madhouse difficulty: the game is so stacked against you that you have to be a series veteran to beat it.
• Meat Moss: The Mold. When not outright hostile, it appears as the black, repulsive, stuff growing on the walls in certain areas, serving as spawning-points for the Molded. Even worse, it is still spreading through the estate as the night carries on.
• Mercy Kill: Jack asks Ethan in their final conversation to free his family from Eveline and considering that he's a part of the Hive Mind and the physical body of him and his family (bar Lucas) are dead, it's likely he knew that killing Eveline would kill him as well.
• Mooks: The Molded serve this role, being the game's disposable bad guys.
• More Teeth than the Osmond Family: The Molded have this going in the most grotesque way imaginable.◊
• Multiple Endings: It only boils down to one choice: either give the vaccine to Mia or Zoe. If you give the vaccine to Mia, she survives while what happens to Zoe is revealed in the End of Zoe DLC; if you give the vaccine to Zoe, they both die.
• Musical Spoiler: There is occasionally a soft but shrill strain used to announce that you're Being Watched by E-001.
• Mythology Gag:
  • The moldy gators are ones to the Sewer Gator boss from Resident Evil 2. Even their boils recall that boss's suppurating blemishes from the t-Virus.
  • Eveline's final form bears a remarkably uncanny resemblance to Carla Radame's C-Virus-induced mutation. Carla can even produce humanoid monsters like the Molded from her newfound biology just like Eveline.
  • The first phase of the final battle against her hideously mutated form is a blatant Call-Back to Morpheus' final battle in the rather obscure Resident Evil: Dead Aim. Just like Bruce, Ethan's back is pushed directly into a wall as an eldritch-like mass of biomatter advances upon him, and only shooting the face will cause it to temporarily retreat backward.
• Neck Snap: Yet another way for Ethan to bite it, if Jack manages to get too close while Ethan's health is in the red. Jack first breaks his arm at the elbow, just to rub it in.
• Next Sunday A.D.: The "Happy Birthday" video tape claims to have been recorded not too long ago, on June 2nd of 2017 — about 6 months after the game's release. Judging by the date on the "Mia" VHS and her e-mail message, the main game itself appears to take place on July 19 of 2017.
• Nigh-Invulnerable: Jack takes a car exploding around him as a minor annoyance. Eventually, with Zoe's help, Ethan concocts a serum that permanently puts them down. He also completely acknowledges his own toughness by taunting the player, both in words and actions. He even shoots his own head off just to make a point. In fact, Jack is so incredibly hard to kill that getting his entire upper body blown off does not stop him.
• Nightmarish Nursery: Several rooms of the Baker property have been converted into an extended bedroom/playroom for Eveline, the resident Creepy Child. By the time you get there, it's totally unlit, the toys are crawling with black mould, and the atmosphere is nothing short of terrifying. Plus, Marguerite keeps her altar hidden behind the bed, using Eveline's "gift" as a makeshift shrine. Turn around quick enough as you leave, and it becomes clear that Eveline has been watching you for every second you've been in here.
• No Good Deed Goes Unpunished: The Bakers were your normal happy family (minus Lucas’s sociopathic tendencies), but when Jack and Lucas rescued many survivors of a shipwreck the Baker family (minus Joe) came into contact with Eveline, who promptly Mind Raped them into being her surrogate family and turned them into monsters in the bargain. Only Zoe avoided this fate initially, later succumbing to Eveline’s power and crystallizing after entering a comatose state.
  • Zoe is instrumental in helping Ethan create the serum that counteracts Eveline's infection. In return, Ethan either gives the only remaining serum to Mia, abandoning Zoe to her fate; or if he gives the serum to Zoe, it ultimately proves ineffective and Eveline murders her, though this is the non-canon ending.
• No Name Given: The police officer who shows up midway through exploring the first house is never referred to by name in-game. The credits reveal it to be David Anderson.
• No Ontological Inertia: Once Marguerite is dead for good, her nests shrivel up and crumble to dust.
• No Peripheral Vision: See "Failed a Spot Check". If you are speedrunning, and you run past Marguerite, chances are she will not see you unless you are directly in her line of sight. Subverted in Madhouse mode, where she will instantly notice you if you stand around like a sore thumb.
• Non-Action Guy: Zig-zagged with Ethan. He's very physically strong, being able to destroy boxes with what amounts to a punch with the knife, and he's able to swing body bags surprisingly far in a boss fight and completely block a chainsaw from damaging him by blocking right as it's about to hit him, yet he suffers majorly from Cutscene Incompetence and is unable to run at more than a light jog. The latter in particular is damning, as some enemies are far faster than him, yet he refuses to increase his speed despite his life being more at risk if he doesn't.
• Not Brainwashed: The Baker family are Brainwashed and Crazy and actually in a state of deep suffering, fully aware of the pain they cause but unable to resist. However Lucas turns out to have escaped the control of Eveline, and his torment stems from being a genuine murderous psychopath even before all of this. He hangs around for the perks.
• Nothing Is Scarier:
  • At one point in the game, when you head to the second house, there's something in the distance. When you return, it vanishes.
  • Several times you can hear the presence of another person in the room but when you look around, there will be nobody there.
• Oddball in the Series: Unlike previous games, this game has a rather simple structure compared to the other games. In the other games, Puzzles has a simple trial and error where if you couldn't figure out the puzzle, you can simply retry and needing where to go if you got lost. This game has less complicated puzzles and you are often guided on how to reach point A to B. From 0 to 6, you are often given alternate costumes by beating the game or infinite ammo for your trouble. This game however does not give you alternate costumes, but it does reward the player should you beat Madhouse mode.
• Offscreen Teleportation:
  • The Bakers engage in this as they always manage to get ahead of you to wander in new areas. A particularly blatant example is in the attic after the fight with Mia, where Jack will appear behind you literally out of thin air, as long as you do not have your back against a wall.
  • How the grandmother gets around the house is anybody's guess, and as Ethan go through the house, it seems increasingly unlikely that Jack or the Molded would be moving her. For example: the first time he sees her is just after "dinner", sitting with the rest of the family. After Ethan escapes from Jack, she then vanishes from the kitchen, only to reappear at the top of a flight of stairs despite being in a wheelchair. When you catch her humming after coming out of the basement, you can leave the room, come back and she'll already be gone.
• Ominous Obsidian Ooze: Many locations are covered in thick sheets of black, oozing mould, and also creates Mushroom Men comprised of tangled ropes of fungal matter. Worse still, it's also capable of infesting people like the Baker family, enhancing their strength, driving them insane, and rendering them subservient to Eveline, who emits this stuff by nature.
• Once More, with Clarity:
  • Well, more like "Once more with delusions". Near the end of the game, Ethan returns to the main house. Now that he can see the hive mind's visions, he re-experiences Mia attacking him, but sees Eveline commanding her to do it.
  • The opening scene is played twice with context in the second time, though the second time it is shortened. The context of the opening scene is that Mia recorded the message three years ago aboard Eveline's transport tanker, and her work described in her first video was actually keeping a B.O.W. in check.
• One-Hit Kill: There aren't many, but they are present. For instance, that charge attack Jack uses with his special shears opened wide? Say goodbye to your hands and your head if you don't duck in time (and that does mean "duck," as blocking won't help) and he connects with it.
• One-Liner: Ethan's response to seeing an old woman turn into a shrieking monster with grotesque stretched limbs that crawls on all-fours into a tunnel? "What the fuck? That's special."
• Outside-Context Problem: For Ethan, finding his wife going crazy and trying to kill him is this. Followed by the Baker Family and their intentions to kill him. Then there's the Molded, a moldy zombie-like creatures, which were created by Eveline.
• Permanently Missable Content: There are several "cut off" points where the player can't backtrack, which means any files, Antique Coins or Mr. Everywhere Bobbleheads they missed can't be picked up again. The worst cases of this have to be Antique Coins #1 (in a locked drawer in the guest house you can only open through the VHS tape), #15 (under some pipes in a dead end whilst Mia is crawling through vent) and #16 (completely hidden underwater near a ladder Mia must climb to reach the interior of the wrecked ship).
• Plot Hole:
  • Mia's tape contains one. While dodging Marguerite, Mia sees Eveline- in her child form- calling out to her across a gap. The problem with this is that Eveline has already been aged into her "grandmother" form by mid-2017 (when the tape was filmed). Thus, Eveline appearing as a child in this tape should be completely impossible, since its a video recording and not Mia's own perspective.
  • Lucas' Saw-esque trap that he calls "Happy Birthday" contains one. The puzzle requires you to light a candle and put it on a birthday cake with a bomb in it. However, prior to that, you are required to uncork a barrel full of fuel which soaks the room and catches fire when the cake explodes - locking the player into an inferno which kills them. The intended solution is for the Ethan to watch a video created by a previous victim of the trap, allowing them to bypass the need to open the fuel barrel, so the cake doesn't set the room on fire. The thing is, the video is shot on a head-mounted camera. One can Hand Wave it as the engineering expert Lucas figuring out a way to fireproof it if they want to, but still, it stands out that the camera wasn't destroyed in the same fire that not only killed the character wearing it, it burned his whole body to a skeletal crisp, as the player discovers while navigating the barn where Lucas has set up shop.
• Point of No Return: Just like the previous Survival Horror-centric games, once you fight a heavily mutated Jack, any weapons and items you skipped won't be recovered. Only the items inside the bird cages can be obtained unless you're low on Antique Coins.
• Police Are Useless: A cop shows up relatively early in the game to investigate the reports of odd going-ons at the Baker residence. Not only does he treat you like a suspect rather than a victim, but he ends up quickly getting killed by Jack Baker. The former is at least justified by Ethan's panicked behavior and the fact he admits to not being the property owner, which would make him a potential trespasser. Even though the window between them is covered in boards and barbed wire.
• Poor Communication Kills: When Ethan encounters the Deputy, he never once even thinks of showing the man his newly stapled-on hand to convince him that there are dangerous people in the house with him.
• Press X to Not Die: While the game will prompt you to press buttons for defense mechanics, there's one prompt where it's necessary: If you don't use the cure on the mutant Jack, he will tear Ethan's head off.
• Previous Player-Character Cameo: Chris Redfield shows up to save Ethan at the end of the main game.
• Punch-Clock Villain: Mia turns out to be working for a shady bioweapons developer, and was part of a team responsible for transporting Eveline to a prospective buyer when their ship crashed in the bayou, starting the whole mess. That said, she also genuinely loves Ethan, to the point Evie taunts her about it, telling her he doesn't love her, but she "can make him..."
• Purposely Overpowered: There's a reason why the chainsaw is restricted to the boss fight with Jack. The chainsaw can outright murder everything in short of bosses, and a timed good hit can decapitate a molded.
• Race Against the Clock: Ethan is unknowingly on one, as by virtue of being infected with the Mold, the influence of its Hive Queen grows more and more apparent the longer the night goes.
• Rasputinian Death: Jack gets burned extensively in an exploding car, and then sticks a pistol in his mouth and shoots himself in the Garage. In the Basement, Ethan then chainsaws some kind of tumorous heart until his upper half explodes. Then he comes back as a One-Winged Angel in the Boathouse; in this form, Ethan shoots out his myriad eyes, and then injects him with a fatal anti-fungal "cure". Then in End of Zoe, he comes back again; here, Joe first rips his head off in one encounter, and then finally seems to put him down by crushing his skull with a Megaton Punch at the end of a third encounter that also takes the top half of his body clean off — and then he gets calcified by the rising sun.
• Recurring Boss:
  • You fight Jack Baker multiple times throughout the game, with his later appearances growing increasingly mutated and inhuman.
  • Mia also attempts to kill you on multiple occasions, and you're forced to fight her to the death near the end if you chose to vaccinate Zoe instead of her.
• Red Herring: At one point in the game, Ethan finds the grandmother in what seems to be her bedroom, but it isn't. While there are hints that the real Grandma Baker may have lived with the family at one point, it's made very clear that that's definitely not her. Additionally, the presence of an old photo of Jack from when he was young would seem to imply that she's his mother, but not only is this not the case, Jack considers himself her father.
• Retool: RE7 returns to the basic "explore a haunted mansion" idea of the first game, while switching to first person survival horror gameplay.
• The Reveal: The grandmother is not Grandma Baker. She's Evie.
• Revisiting the Roots: This returns to the horror genre that the series was made famous for in the first three games, albeit in a different style to said three games.
• Right Hand Versus Left Hand: Despite being part of Eveline's Hive Mind and knowing her plans for Ethan to become her new "father", most of them still go against her wishes through their attempts of killing him. Jack out of jealousy, Marguerite out of her compulsive desire to protect her nest/altar from anyone — even her own family — and Lucas For the Evulz.
• Rule of Symbolism: The final boss fight takes place in the Guest House, which is fitting for a battle against Eveline, since that's who she really is in the Baker Family hierarchy- a guest.
• Running Gag: Throughout the premises you find semi-coherent angry notes Jack has left around demanding to know where his lawnmower is.
• Sadistic Choice: Because you had to use one of your two serums to kill Jack Baker, you are forced to choose whether to cure Zoe who had helped you through the game with hints or your beloved wife Mia. Choosing Mia is the canon decision, and leads to the Golden Ending in the "End of Zoe" DLC.
• Sanity Has Advantages: Jack may be an Implacable Man with Super-Strength and Super-Toughness, but many of his wild and haphazard swinging with the weapons he wields can be dodged by crouching right when he swings at you (albeit he wisens up if you stay crouched for too long, choosing to throw you around and/or head butt you). His sadism also leads to Ethan escaping several times when Jack could’ve finished Ethan off, which leads to problems when he overwhelms Jack’s Healing Factor for a short while during his second boss fight with a chainsaw, leading to Ethan killing Jack’s wife Marguerite and trying to escape with Zoe and Mia.
• Save Token: Technology in the Resident Evil world has evolved! Now instead of using archaic typewriters and ink ribbons to save your progress, Ethan can use the amazing new advancement of voice recording by using blank cassettes he finds with cassette decks! 2017 is a great time to be alive...
• Self-Mutilation Demonstration: Jack is aware he has a Healing Factor and is plenty happy to showcase it, such as sticking the deputy's gun in his mouth and shooting himself — blasting a good chunk of his head away — then surprising Ethan later by hoisting him up so he can see Jack’s perforated head knit itself disgustingly back together while he boasts.
• Sequel Hook:
  • Chris's appearance with the Umbrella, Co. forces at the ending is a complete mystery. We'll probably see more about it come the near future.
  • Lucas Baker is not dead. He is the main antagonist in the Not A Hero DLC.
  • The Connections, the company responsible for the inhumane experiments that created Eveline, is still at large.
• Sequence Breaking: Handled interestingly In-Universe with Lucas Baker's "party quiz," in a way that borders on Save Scumming. The puzzle itself is a Death Trap, where the only way to solve it "legitimately" results in your death. However, before you enter the puzzle room, you can find a VHS tape that records poor Clancy's efforts at getting through. Watching this lets Ethan skip the fatal parts of the trap, because he knows the code and actions he needs already. However, you can't sequence-break the trap within the VHS, as Clancy; the game simply won't let you.
• "Shaggy Dog" Story: The non-canon route ends on this note with Zoe. After defeating her father for the third time, if you choose to use the serum on her instead of Mia, it doesn't work and Eveline calcifies her while Ethan and her were trying to escape.
• Shoot the Dog: No matter what the player feels like, Ethan seems to view putting down Eveline like this. Ethan feels sympathy for her due to her being raised from birth to be a weapon but ultimately injects her with the necrotoxin to save Mia, free the Bakers, and because she was too dangerous to keep alive.
• Shoot the Shaggy Dog: The first half of the game is built around finding the ingredients for a special serum Mia and Zoe need to cure themselves of Eveline's control. While the serum is successful at stopping Jack Baker by freezing his regeneration, it ultimately fails to cure either Mia or Zoe, and if you give the serum to Zoe, she attempts to leave the property and Eveline murders her. At the very least though, it does weaken Eveline's hold on Mia for a bit, preventing Eva from killing her outright.
• Short-Range Shotgun: The M37. Outside of bad-breath distance, its wide spread will make enemies flinch but doesn't do heavy damage. Averted with the M21, which packs the same punch at longer distances as it does up close. Both do equal damage at point-blank range, so a confident player may prefer to stick to the M37 for its larger capacity.
• Shout-Out:
  • At one point Ethan gets into a chainsaw duel with Jack in a barn amidst hanging sides of meat, just like in the finale of Motel Hell. Also, when Jack grabs his chainsaw, he shouts "Groovy!"
  • You can find several notes that have "DEAD BY DAWN!" scribbled across them, the easiest to catch is on one of the posters in Lucas' old bedroom.
  • Ethan's wife Mia shares her name with the protagonist of the 2013 remake, as well as her Deadite-like behavior when she's taken over by the infection.
  • The form of Jack's chainsaw weapon is essentially a giant pair of scissors.
    • On a related note, Jack has a special instant-kill attack with said weapon where he raises it up and charges at Ethan to cut his head off. It's remarkably similar to the famous jumpscare in The Exorcist III where the Gemini killer decapitates a nurse with some bone shears in the exact same manner.
    • Jack and Ethan's iconic duel is also a shout out to the Chainsaw-Swordfight between Chow Yun-fat and Lau Kar-Leung in the classic 1980's Police Action Comedy, Tiger on Beat
  • The position Andre is found in at the end of the "Derelict House" tape is a clear homage to The Blair Witch Project.
  • The achievement for killing an enemy with a Sticky Bomb is called "That’s a Spicy Meat-a-ball!"
  • Lucas invites the player to a "party" he's hosting. He even rigs a television to explode, just like The Joker did in The Visitor's Center.
  • The Bakers are a father, mother and son from southern Louisiana, have a Healing Factor that lets them be killed several times without dying, and enjoy inflicting pain on their victims as much as they do killing (and eating) them. Therefore, they're a zombie redneck torture family.
  • The passcode to Lucas's Party Room is 1408, unless the player already knows the code, in which case it'll magically change so it is not possible to skip that small part of the game.
  • Another Stephen King reference: By the creators' admission, they based Jack Baker's demented personality on Jack Torrance from The Shining, and named him in honor of both the character and Jack Nicholson, the actor who most famously played him.
  • Just like in the demo, there's a mention of an incident in Amarillo, a nod to F.E.A.R.: Perseus Mandate.
  • When Ethan injects Eveline with neurotoxin and her body begins to break down, she screams "Damn you! Damn you all to hell!"
  • An otherwise nondescript sticky note has the words "Don't be a Khezu!" scrawled on it.
  • One of the DLCs adds a mode called "Ethan Must Die".
  • The story revelations in the final act of the game take strong inspiration from First Encounter Assault Recon, such as fighting off hallucinations, finding out one of the main characters has a forgotten personal connection to the Big Bad, and Eveline's tragic backstory being very similar to Alma's from that franchise. Considering Richard Pearsey's previous work on F.E.A.R. this isn't surprising.
  • The ship unwillingly used to transport Eveline is called Annabelle, likely named after the infamous haunted doll of Annabelle.
  • Lucas' death traps are very similar to the ones from Saw; the skeleton-clown-robot in the Birthday section even resembles the clown mask used by Jigsaw.
  • The second fight against Jack has him and Ethan dueling with chainsaws in an underground lair filled with corpses - all of which is just like the climax of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2. The fact that Jack wields two chainsaws like scissors may be an unintentional one to Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance, specifically the villain Sundowner, whose primary weapon is, you guessed it, a pair of blades that he can wield like scissors.
  • The dinner scene that occurs early on in the game is likewise a clear nod to a similar scene with a tied-up protagonist being forced to dine with a family of cannibal hillbillies in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974). With the exception of the placements of the families' respective silent, wheelchair-bound eldest members (Grandma Baker is on the far left while Grandpa Sawyer sits at the head of the table in the Texas Chainsaw scene), the Bakers are even placed during the scene in a roughly-analogous way to the Sawyers.
  • During the barn fight sequence, Ethan yells "Fuck you too!" at Lucas.
  • The "Mia" VHS tape concludes with Marguerite cornering Mia and dragging her away from her camera, in a moment resembling the final shot of the classic found footage film [REC].
  • The shot of a wolf decomposing at accelerated speed in the "Go Tell Aunt Rhody" intro may be a referenced to a similar shot of a dead fox in the opening to True Blood, a series which is also about once-human monsters and seedy goings-on in small-town Louisiana.
  • The mold-encrusted walls as Evie's infestation intesifiies, particularly the industrial stairwell of the wrecked-ship, with victims trapped in the goo frozen in their final agonies like statues, bear an eerie resemblance to the resin-and-corpse-encrusted walls of the Aliens' atmoshphere-processor hive in Aliens
• Shown Their Work:
  • Aside from the whole "no basements" thing, the creators did a pretty good job of depicting South Louisiana's bayou country, and added a lot of details that those who've lived in or visited that part of the state will find familiar. In fact, there's bonus concept art in the game's sequel showing a windmill in front of the Baker house, which was removed after a research team for Capcom learned there aren't any windmills in southern Louisiana (not much point in milling when you can't grow any grain).
  • Ethan uses proper gun-handling skills ^note such as not waving the gun around without aiming, like many shooter protagonists do except for his tendency to keep a finger on the trigger when he's reloading. Mia makes the same mistake.
• Sighted Guns Are Low-Tech:
  • Averted with Ethan's aiming skills. Unlike other Resident Evil protagonists, Ethan doesn't appear to have any formal gun training ^note except for his habit of not pointing the gun at anything unless he wants to shoot., so he fires his gun from the hip with a wide targeting reticle. Taking aim slows him down, but shrinks the reticle and makes his shots significantly more accurate; he apparently is using the sights, but the camera doesn't use common ADS perspective when he aims, to keep from blocking the view of what you're trying to hit. Mia also has issues, as the recoil of the machine gun makes aiming extremely difficult.
  • Redfield uses the common contemporary aim down the gun sights view in the gameplay trailer of "Not a Hero".
• Slut-Shaming: Zoe is on the receiving end of this from Mia under the influence of Eveline, albeit posthumously since she already calcified Zoe.
• Soft Reboot: The game takes the gameplay formula of the franchise and deliberately scales back the game to a pure Survival Horror set in the first person. The story also has no obvious ties to the overarching plot of the franchise until the climax where Chris Redfield and Blue Umbrella arrive to help Ethan finish off Evelyn.
• Southern Gothic: A run-down Southern plantation... inhabited by superhumanly powerful cannibals and other such friendlies.
• Speedrun: Doing one is necessary to unlock the Circular Saw and X-Ray Glasses. A Downplayed Trope, thankfully, since the par time is 4 hours, which is quite generous and perfectly doable without requiring God-tier skills or exploiting various glitches.
• Spiritual Antithesis: To Silent Hill 2, another survival horror game about a man who lost his wife three years ago only to receive a mysterious message from her, drawing him to a remote rural location filled with monsters, all while frequently encountering a woman who looks like his wife but isn't who she seems. Whereas SH2 embraced the cold, foggy atmosphere of its series' New England setting and had a very esoteric plot that culminated in a Tomato in the Mirror reveal, RE7 is set in the Louisiana bayou in full hot, sweaty Southern Gothic mode and is much more straightforward with its characters and storytelling. This is on top of the differences between the two series in general, with RE always going for scientific explanations for its monsters while SH is rooted more in explicitly supernatural horror.
• Sprint Shoes: A downplayed example. If you break all 20 of the Mr. Everywhere bobbleheads in a playthrough, Ethan will unlock the Walking Shoes, which increases his walking speed, but not his running speed. They're still useful for speed runs since they make it a bit easier to bypass enemies and get around in general, though.
• Stupidity Is the Only Option: What is essentially the tutorial segment of the game throws a load of glaringly obvious red flags into the player's face on the way to the Baker house... and, well, prompts the player to move past them against any normal real-life human's better judgment. Strange old man crosses your path as a spooky ambient music cue plays? Don't mind that, keep Ethan moving. Mangled cow corpses styled as a gate? Yup, you need to crawl under that - press this button to keep on going toward whoever did it. Dead crows all over the place? An abandoned van with ominous messages written inside? A dead corpse floating in a flooded basement? Well, you still haven't found Mia yet! Keep going! Following these cues, Ethan must either be the most loyal guy alive, the stupidest, or both.
• Surprisingly Happy Ending: The canon ending. Despite the game being Darker and Edgier and Bloodier and Gorier, Ethan gets to have a happy ending where he's reunited with Mia once more. Though, he did go through absolute hell to Earn Your Happy Ending. When you take the DLCs into account, it's even happier; Chris hunts down and kills Lucas in Not a Hero, while Joe rescues and cures Zoe in End of Zoe.
• Suspicious Video-Game Generosity: The game regularly loads you up with extra ammo and crafting materials before boss fights. There's also a bit near the end of the section where you play as Mia where you find ammunition and Remote Bombs every few steps. Double Subverted when you switch back to Ethan, whose inventory is empty, only to find all of Mia's equipment in the next save room.
• Sympathetic Sentient Weapon: Eveline. She didn't choose to become a weapon out of some mad desire for power or vengeance. In fact, she didn't choose to be a weapon at all. She was made into a weapon while she was still a fetus. The "sympathetic" part is heavily downplayed, however, as rather than acting like a lost, confused child who doesn't know any better, she takes very obvious and sadistic glee in the suffering she dishes out, laughing and taunting her victims as she either brutally kills them or forces them to brutally kill others.
• Tap on the Head: Jack punches Ethan out with a haymaker, with the only negative effect being that Ethan is out for a few hours at worst. Though Village ends up revealing this is a Deconstruction: said haymaker didn't knock Ethan out, it killed him. When he "woke back up", it was actually him being brought back by the Mold.
• Tragic Villain: The Baker family. They took in Eveline after they found the tanker containing her out of the kindness of their hearts three years prior to the events of the game. Doing so led to them being driven insane by her powers and was what turned them into the monstrous cannibalistic family that Ethan faces off against.
• Translation Nod: Biohazard is the name of the Resident Evil series in Japan and Korea, so the Japanese title plays this trope straight, while the English title inverts it.
• Trash of the Titans: The Bakers' house is an absolute mess of clutter, with all manner of garbage and bric-a-brac piled all over. It's unclear how much of this has to do with their demented state and how much was there originally — old farm houses tend to be full of broken-down junk as a matter of course.
• Trial-and-Error Gameplay: Downplayed. The Birthday Room puzzle requires you to enter a code. If you follow all the steps to get that code, you die at the end of the room. This means you have to die at least once to move on. If you find one of Clancy's tapes, you can play through the room as him, meaning you don't get a game over when you die. But if you miss the tape, there's nothing stopping you from just playing through twice as Ethan.
• Tyke Bomb: Eveline was born and raised as a weapon of terrifying power to be sold to the highest bidder.
• Unintentionally Unwinnable: It's possible to get to the mook boss battle near the end of Not a Hero where you fight many Molded at once and not be able to complete it if you somehow wind up being one bullet short for handling the special Molded enemies.
• Unexpectedly Realistic Gameplay:
  • Ever wonder how none of the other main characters contract whatever super-contagious virus is about ^note Although implications are given that treating the wound with the health items in each game disinfects them and prevents the infection from getting too far in the bloodstream, it's never said outright? Well this time around, our leading man Ethan winds up infected with the Mold after touching Mia when he finds her in a cell. And the "Not a Hero" DLC shows Chris and the rest of team needing to wear protective gear such as gas masks to keep themselves from getting infected too.
  • At one point, Ethan attempts to use a chainsaw meant to cut wood on a rusted metal bar. The bar gives way, but so does the chainsaw, which breaks and is rendered completely useless after the cut.
  • In the first boss fight against Jack in the garage has either him or Ethan eventually getting into the car there, and trying to run the other person over. Trying to maneuver a car in a small space to hit someone on foot trying to evade turns out to actually be quite difficult.
  • The elaborate puzzle where Lucas kills Clancy and tries to kill Ethan shows that someone willing to build a Death Trap would not engineer it with an easy way of disarming it.
  • One of the bonuses you get in New Game Plus is unlimited ammunition for all your guns. However, since the Bakers are Made of Iron and implacable, it only gives you just enough of an advantage to run away and hide somewhere.
  • Killing Eveline doesn't get rid of the Molded or the mold that created them.
• The Unreveal: Lucas betrays the Connections toward the end of the 7 storyline, attempting to sell off his data on Eveline to an unknown buyer. Who this client is isn't revealed.
• Unwinnable by Design: Lucas Baker's most elaborate Death Trap, where the "player" has to complete the seemingly simple task of getting a lit candle on a birthday cake, albeit through the medium of a typical Resident Evil puzzle. In a case of Unexpectedly Realistic Gameplay, it's rigged that you can't solve it without killing yourself. At least, if you play it fair. The puzzle requires a passcode that you obtain from winding up a writing clown automaton, but the key to activate it is plugging up a barrel of oil that coats the floor and lights up when the cake, which is a bomb, explodes, turning the room into a blaze. Learning the password from Clancy's lethal attempt makes the key completely skippable and the bomb can be survived because the room won't be set on fire.
  • That trap could still be defeated through 'fair' means, such as brute-force guessing the password (so you never need the wind-up key, and thus never unplug the barrel), or simply plugging the barrel with something other than the key (ie: the clothes you're wearing) once the key is taken out.
• Video Game Flamethrowers Suck: Zig-zagged. The flamethrower's damage is pretty low against most enemies, so you'll generally be better off using just about anything else. But it's very useful in the area you get it for burning away hives and the various bugs that are trying to ruin your day. After you finish that area though, it's usefulness is rather limited.
• Villain: Exit, Stage Left: Lucas just leaves the Baker residence after Ethan manages to escape his death trap. He doesn't appear for the rest of the game after that.
• Villain Song: The game's dark version of "Go Tell Aunt Rhody" seems to be one for Eveline.
• Violation of Common Sense:
  • It's very hard to hit the weak points on Mutated Jack's underside while they're submerged underwater; the best weapon to use in this situation, strangely enough, is the flamethrower.
  • At the beginning of the game, there is a segment where Ethan's wife is clearly fighting against a compulsion to attack you, and at one point she tells you to run after throwing you through a wall. So naturally you should pick up the axe next to you and start hacking your wife with it.
• Vomit Indiscretion Shot: E-001 pukes up Mold irregularly due to her unstable nature, which is seen firsthand now and then.
• Wake-Up Call Boss: Your encounter with Jack in the garage is more of a battle for survival than any other encounter you'll have had in the game up to then, as you learn of his heavy resistance to bullets; knife slash wounds; and pretty much anything else thrown at him. Instead, players learn to find more efficient ways to deal with the nigh-unstoppable Bakers while conserving their scarce resources like ammunition.
• Wham Line:
  • After you kill Eveline at the end of the game, the soldier who tossed you the gun you used to finish her off approaches you, removing his helmet and introducing himself...
    I'm Redfield.
  • Lucas's final email to The Conspiracy reveals there's much more to "Grandma Baker" than meets the eye...
    "By the way, Evie's looking sick or something. Her skin is getting wrinkly and she's getting gray hairs. Is that supposed to happen? It's almost like she's getting old all of a sudden."
• Wham Shot: The ending cutscene features aerial views of the bayou mixed with shots of Ethan's rescue helicopter, including its Umbrella Corporation insignia.
• What Happened to the Mouse? In the main game, Lucas disappears without a trace after he is defeated, and in the good ending, no mention is made of what happened to Zoe after you leave her behind. Both characters return in DLCs.
• Where It All Began: The final segments of the game take place in the guest house where you first found Mia and in front of it during the boss fight against Eveline.
• Worst Aid: Ethan gets his hand STAPLED back on after Mia cuts it off. Granted, the "surgery" was presumably working in conjunction with his mold-based Healing Factor, but still. This even tops Resident Evil 2, when Ada treats Leon's gunshot wound by applying bandages to the OUTSIDE of his uniform.
• You Don't Look Like You: The man with the "Redfield" nametag that appears at the end is in fact, Chris Redfield. So extreme was his change from a dark haired, muscular guy with no outstanding facial features to a light brown, almost blonde, skinny guy with a big nose that fans were under the impression that it was some imposter claiming to be Chris, which Capcom Jossed. By Resident Evil Village, he was back to how he usually looked, with Capcom all but admitting they made a mistake.
• You Have to Believe Me!: A cop turns up to inquire about missing persons. Things might have gone smoother if Ethan had explained that he's one of those missing (even if it's not technically true), the owners of the farm are crazy and hey, here's a severed-and-reattached hand to prove it. Instead, due to his trauma (see: severed-and-reattached hand), he rambles on, tells the policeman he wouldn't believe Ethan anyway and demands his gun which the deputy is obviously unwilling to part with. Funny enough, this is almost the only part of the game where Ethan loses it.
• You Need to Get Laid: Lucas admits this about himself during the barn fight sequence. He tells Ethan he really needs a girlfriend, and asks Ethan to find him one. Also, in one of the notes in the Bakers' house, Jack mentions that Lucas brought three college girls who were supposed to be added to the family, but could not be converted due to being "rotten," berating Lucas for being an idiot for bringing them.
• You Shouldn't Know This Already:
  • When doing the "Happy Birthday" puzzle as Clancy, attempting to open the letter-based combination lock doesn't work unless you've learned it "properly," which makes sense, since it's a flashback/VHS recording — you have to do things properly, which means getting repeatedly injured and letting the floor get coated in oil. This is not the case when doing the puzzle as Ethan, which is precisely the point — having learned the code by doing the puzzle "properly" as Clancy, or doing it as Ethan and then reloading, you can easily skip ahead to the end, meaning the floor doesn't get coated in oil, meaning the room doesn't catch fire, allowing Ethan to survive. However, you can input the password as Ethan even if you never watched the tape.
  • However, entering the 4-digit passcode "1408" ahead of time to get into the puzzle area will make it an incorrect combination. You have to get through the barn and learn the correct code from Clancy's immolated corpse, no matter what. If you input "1408" before learning it, it'll change to a different code to be found.
  • Even if you know exactly where they are, the goodies pointed out in the treasure photos will only be there to collect once you've picked up and checked the photos that reveal them. Justified in that it's implied Zoe leaves them there for you as the story progresses, so they're not there from the start.
• Younger Than They Look: Eveline's true form is an old woman in a wheelchair, but this is because her unstable genetics result in her aging at a rate 25x faster than normal without regular injections of a stabilizing compound by The Connections. Also, because she's an artificial lifeform, she's even younger than her original child form would suggest. The infection isn't too kind on Jack, Marguerite, and Lucas, either, with the parents being in their early 50's and their son being in his early 20's... but their fading hair, exhausted and fevered appearances, and Lucas's receding hairline making each respective family member look about fifteen years older than they really are.

Not A Hero

• Ability Required to Proceed: Chris has to obtain two different attachments to his mask (an air filter and night vision) in order to obtain the clown key that's needed to get to Lucas.
• And Now for Someone Completely Different: The DLC covers Chris as he transverses through the underground mines after Ethan defeats Eveline at the Baker guesthouse.
• Asshole Victim: A note in Not A Hero reveals Lucas killed off his Connections research associates by locking them in a cage with some Molded. While it's treated as a very horrible thing, as he notes they begged for their lives and pissed themselves, these are people affiliated with a bioterrorist organization and are in the know of both what's going on in the Baker house and Lucas' psychopathy. Needless to say, it's hard to feel too bad.
• Attack Its Weak Point: In the battle against him, Lucas' One-Winged Angel form has a big glowing weak point in his chest that opens up when successfully shooting any of his three faces.
• The Atoner: Veronica states this is the reason and why the B.S.A.A. is working with Umbrella. Chris understandably doesn't buy it and wouldn't think of working with Umbrella considering his issues with the company. She states all that's left is the name. The files state Umbrella became a PMC in 2007, just before Chris and Sheva killed Wesker.
• Big Bad: Lucas Baker assumes the role after the events of the main game, becoming Blue Umbrella's primary target of interest.
• Bond Villain Stupidity: Lucas gets the drop on Chris early in the story and attaches a time bomb to his hand, then lets Chris run around his base instead of detonating the bomb as soon as he's out of range. Later on Chris enters a room filled with mines Lucas could detonate, but he only does so if Chris tries to rescue his friend.
• Boom, Headshot!: Lucas is shot in the chest, which convinces him to go One-Winged Angel, which ends when Chris blows his head off completely.
• Can't Kill You, Still Need You: In Not A Hero, Umbrella sends Chris Redfield specifically to apprehend Lucas for questioning. However, Chris tries his damnedest to do so when Lucas kills four of his men. Unfortunately, he mutates to the point that the trope no longer applies, and Veronica changes the objective from capturing him to outright kill him.
• Cutting the Knot: At the end of the DLC, Chris is tasked with stopping the server to prevent the research data regarding the E-Type B.O.W. from reaching Lucas' buyers. Veronica suggests using transformer relays, but Chris fires gunshots at the server cords instead.
  Veronica: OK... that worked. Gonna be some pissed computer techs up here, but—
  Chris: Cry me a river.
• Depleted Phlebotinum Shells: RAMRODs (short for "rapid-acting mycetotoxic rounds"), which are special pistol ammo used to neutralize the white molded variants that are otherwise impervious to all other sources of damage.
• Difficult, but Awesome: Professional mode, to compensate for the fact that you start off with only a knife, introduces a mechanic in which Chris can stunlock enemies so he can deliver a Finishing Move. It's a good way to save ammo in the long run, but to actually pull off the stunlock requires having fast reflexes and watching your timing since it can only be done right when enemies are about to attack.
• Dressing as the Enemy: Lucas gets the drop on Chris upon first meeting him in Not a Hero by disguising himself as one of Chris' men.
• Failed a Spot Check: Despite hamming it up with psychopathy to avoid suspicion, Eveline completely failed to notice Lucas' blatantly suspicious acts of being above her control despite the degree of surveillance she casts over the Baker estate. Most egregiously, she didn't notice what he was up to in the Salt Mines, where he would meet Connections associates to disclose his findings. This went on for years.
• A Father to His Men: Despite working for Umbrella, Chris will do his damnedest to prevent any of his men from dying as much as he can.
• Finishing Move: Chris can pull these off on stunned enemies.
• Hopeless Boss Fight: The Mama Mold is encountered early on in Chris' campaign and will remain where it spawns, but it's scripted to be impossible to kill until the proper boss fight.
• I Shall Taunt You: Lucas jacks into Chris' communication feed a quarter way through the story, only communicating to him solely to fuck with his head or taunt him in order to break his spirit.
• I Surrender, Suckers: Lucas doesn't even make it to the end of his last-minute remorse psych-out with Chris before he's back to rubbing salt in the wound and signing his own death warrant in the process.
  Lucas: OK, OK—no more—alright? I don't have anything left.
  Chris: You won't get any sympathy from me, asshole.
  Lucas: I know. I know. I've done ... I've done terrible things. Horrible things. I killed your men. I tortured them...And I enjoyed every second, soldier boy.
• Kaizo Trap: Lucas sets one of the Blue Umbrella members in the middle of a room with trip wires all over the place. If you just navigate around them without deactivating them, Lucas will cause the room to explode.
• Karmic Death: After sadistically taunting, maiming, and killing everyone Lucas comes across, he finally gets what’s his when he targets Chris' men. Chris takes umbrage to this and proceeds to track his smarmy ass down and give him a shotgun lobotomy.
• Kill It with Ice: Played with in that Chris is forced to utilize this to flash-freeze the bomb strapped to his left wrist by dipping his left arm into liquid nitrogen in order to temporarily deactivate the bomb so that he can rip it off without it blowing up normally as the bomb can't immediately detonate when freshly dipped into the liquid nitrogen, throwing it away in the distance from him before it reactivates and explodes.
• Late-Arrival Spoiler: Chris' appearance as the protagonist of this DLC spoils his twist appearance at the end of the base game.
• Left Hanging: Averted. The plot line of Lucas is resolved in this DLC, ending with him dead and his research into the E-Type BOW destroyed.
• Non-Standard Game Over: Attempting to rescue the squadmate surrounded by tripmines while they're still active will result in a cutscene where Lucas turns the tripmines towards you anyway, which causes them to explode and get Chris Impaled with Extreme Prejudice. You've got to remember to go deactivate them first and foremost.
• Oh, Crap!: Lucas made the wrong assumption by thinking Chris died in his death trap. Minutes later when Chris reveals he's very much alive and a window is the only thing between them, he has the appropriate reaction. It's immensely satisfying after everything he's done.
• One-Hit Kill: In his boss fight, Lucas has a grapple attack that will do this to Chris if he didn't parry or block it.
• Operation: [Blank]: The operation to sanction Lucas Baker's arrest/death and seizure of his research work/documentation is known as Operation: Lurking Fear.
• Overshadowed by Awesome: There is no way a man with Lucas's build, even one empowered by the Mold, could ever hope to take Chris head-on unless he manages to surprise him. The first time, he manages to get the drop on him. The second time, Chris manages to kick and shoot him in the chest for his trouble.
• Percussive Maintenance: Chris' solution to stopping Lucas from sending out information? Plug the net server nearby with shotgun shells repeatedly.
  Veronica: OK... That worked. Gonna be some pissed computer techs up here, but—
  Chris: Cry me a river. What's the sitrep?
• Pre-Mortem One-Liner: Chris delivers a fairly satisfying one at the end of the DLC.
  Chris: Game Over.
• Redemption Promotion: (Blue) Umbrella is mostly made up of former members of the original company, including their military forces. Even though they still sustain a number of casualties, they generally fair a lot better in keeping things under control, making extremely effective anti-BOW weapons, and avoiding the disastrous outbreaks and near-Total Party Kills that were often the case with the original Umbralla Corporation.
• Remember the New Guy?: (Blue) Umbrella has been around since 2007 as a PMC company, yet no mention of it was made in 5, 6, or any of the games in-between.
• Reverse Grip: Chris holds his knife this way by default, though he holds it with the blade upwards when doing strong strikes.
• Screw This, I'm Out of Here!: Lucas decides to cut ties with the organization that made Evie and tries to send combat data of Eveline to an unidentified buyer. After which, he planned to flee to parts unknown with his newfound power.
• Suspicious Videogame Generosity: Whenever you come across a lot of ammo and grenades in one place (e.g. before fighting the elite bloated, entering the large vault, and before fighting Lucas) be prepared to use them.
• Timed Boss: In the second half of his boss fight, Lucas will uncontrollably unleash a Fog of Doom on a much more toxic scale than the White Molded, rapidly draining Chris' oxygen and giving him limited time to finish him off. There are two oxygen tanks on the walls to slow down the process, however.
• Time-Limit Boss: The Mama Mold intercepts Chris just before he can dunk the explosives on his wrist in nitrogen. The player has to quickly slay the beast before time runs out.
• Transformation Is a Free Action: After Chris mortally wounds him with a shotgun blast to the chest, Lucas undergoes a One-Winged Angel mold mutation. And this isn't quick either, he goes through a cocoon-like evolution. A Fade to Black suggests Chris stood there the whole time and just let it happen.
• Underestimating Badassery: Lucas severely underestimates Chris, a man who survived various BOW outbreaks and killed his longtime archnemesis Albert Wesker inside an active volcano. Tellingly, Lucas's Smug Snake status bites him in the ass when he tries to face Chris head-on — Chris shoots him in the chest for his trouble.
• Unexpected Gameplay Change:
  • Chris' campaign is heavily action-oriented in a return to the form seen in Resident Evil 5 and 6, such as finishing moves on stunned enemies while maintaining the game's horror atmosphere.
  • A small example is that, where taking aim in the base game just zooms you in and increases your accuracy without actually using the sights, in Not A Hero, aiming results in Chris using the sights.
• Walking Armory: Unlike Ethan whose running speed is legendarily pitiful, it actually make sense with Chris, since he possesses a handgun and a combat shotgun. Not to mention grenades. All the weapons on him would slow him down a bit.
• Your Head A-Splode: After mutating and being defeated by Chris, Lucas gets his head blown into meaty chunks and sludge courtesy of a point-blank buckshot blast to the head from Chris’ shotgun.

End of Zoe

• 11th-Hour Superpower: Near the end, Joe finds the Advanced Multi-Purpose Gauntlet, which lets him obliterate just about any Molded in his way with a Charged Attack and lets him finally put down Jack for good.
• Beat 'em Up: Joe's gameplay is basically a form of this- while he can stunlock Molded with his powerful punches, taking on a horde of them becomes a serious issue. He even has Combos.
• Big Bad: The Swamp Man is the most significant threat that Joe must contend with to reach Zoe. It turns out to be a severely Molded Jack Baker who's Back from the Dead. With everyone else dead, he's become a Dragon Ascendant and the Final Boss of the Resident Evil 7 storyline.
• Book Ends: Jack introduces himself to Ethan in the main game with "Welcome to the family, son." What does Joe say as he finally puts Jack to rest by the end of End of Zoe? "This is a farewell from the family, brother!" Fittingly, both sentences end with somebody getting viciously punched.
• Brick Joke: In the main game, Ethan once moved through a narrow passageway in the boat house that was filled with centipedes, something that caused even him to panic. Later, when Joe visits the same spot in his DLC what he sees instead is an all-you-can-eat buffet.
• Convenient Coma: Zoe falls into one after being left behind by Ethan and Mia (due to Eveline crystallizing Zoe) and remains in one for several weeks and most of the DLC. She only awakes when Joe injects her with a full dosage the cure that Umbrella made for her.
• Cutting Off the Branches: The original game's Mia ending is apparently canon, considering the events of this DLC.
• Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu?: Joe outright physically overpowered Jack four times and killed him twice, in their final confrontation doing this literally by smashing him apart with a fully charged blow from his Power Fist, killing him once and for all.
• Dramatic Unmask: Late into the DLC, Joe rips off the Swamp Man's "face" to reveal it was actually a mask, with the mangled remnants of Jack Baker's face underneath.
• Earn Your Happy Ending: Zoe is cured, Jack is finally free in death, and Joe manages to make it out alive as well. Plus, Zoe knows it was Ethan who saved her, and she thanks him in shock, allowing the two to be on good terms once more. All in all, considering Not A Hero, RE7 is probably one of the happiest mainline entry ending in years.
• Failed a Spot Check: The mold had been infecting the area for three years, but never once did Joe check on his immediate family to see if they were okay. Nor did he noticed Blue Umbrella's activities in preventing the mold from spreading further in the area. This is noticeable when he reacts in shock upon Zoe's state, and the Swamp Man being his brother Jack.
• Five-Second Foreshadowing: The Swamp Man's "Hey, You!" Haymaker in the church is a dead ringer for Jack's.
• Hollywood Voodoo: Joe can find "black magic" effigies that power up his attack power scattered through the swamp, although this is clearly a case of Gameplay and Story Segregation.
• I Gave My Word: When Ethan gives his word to Zoe that he will send help, Zoe disregards his words as she believes she's beyond saving. However it's revealed that he informed Chris and Umbrella about her, and they went to find her immediately. After Joe cures Zoe and Umbrella is able to restore her body, she receives a call from Ethan, who essentially says the trope name. Zoe is obviously touched.
• "I Know You're in There Somewhere" Fight: Joe tries this with his brother Jack during their final fight. Unfortunately, aside from his face; there is nothing left mentally of Jack, leaving Joe no choice but to put his brother down for good.
• Impaled with Extreme Prejudice: Invoked; Joe's throwing spears and stake bombs riddle an enemy with long, sharp shafts of wood.
• Interface Spoiler: If you save right after Joe washes up on the shore, then quit and reload, the loading screen will show Joe wearing the Advanced Multi-Purpose Gauntlet before he actually finds it.
• Lampshade Hanging: Joe delivers one of the best lines when things go south in the first half of the game:

Joe: Holy god, this is some horror movie bullshit.

• Left Hanging: This DLC ends the Zoe story thread from the end of the base game, with Zoe being cured and coming out alive.
• Life Drain: A special property that the Spirit Blade has; every time you cut up a Molded, Joe regains health.
• Mercy Kill:Jack's on the receiving end of this when Joe solemnly puts his now mindless brother down for good.
• Neck Snap: Joe can snap a Molded's neck and tear its head off in the process.
• No Good Deed Goes Unpunished: The game throws Zoe a bone and subverts this when she's freed of the Mold's influence, thanks to her uncle Joe Baker and the Umbrella members sent there to rescue her at Ethan's behest, proving to her he had every intention on making good on his promise to send her help.
• Percussive Maintenance: While trying to manufacture a cure for Zoe, the computer stopped about 90%. Joe's response is to whack it several times — and lo and behold, it finished.
• Recurring Boss: The Swamp Man, a horribly mutated Molded that seems freakishly human. Which makes sense, considering he once was.
• Roaring Rampage of Rescue: After Jack kidnaps Zoe and heads back to the main house, Joe goes into a Tranquil Fury fuelled rampage through the monster-occupied swampland to get her back.
• Shotguns Are Just Better: Double-subverted with Joe's shotgun. The only shells you get are the small handful that came with it, but so long as your aim is good and you get in close, every shell you have equals one dead gator, which equals one more spear you can hang onto, giving you a comfortable margin for error.
• Spoiler Title: Subverted! Zoe is cured by her uncle Joe and survives.
• Swamp Monster: The Final Boss is a Muck Monster called Swamp Man, who seems inspired by both Man-Thing and Swamp Thing. Is eventually revealed to be Jack Baker, undergoing mutation due to the Mold.
• Unexpected Gameplay Change: The developers most likely realized how underused the melee combat was in the base game, and so decided to make Joe beat the shit out of the Molded with his bare hands.
• Unlockable Content: Quite a lot, most likely to make up for the rather short run time of the DLC. After beating the Final Boss, you unlock a hard mode, a challenge mode to unlock another weapon, as well as the Double-Barreled Shotgun from the base game, the ability to take the Power Fist with you from the first item box, also getting dual Power Fists, and a knife called "The Spirit Blade" which can Life Drain.
• Voice of the Legion: The Swamp Man's moans are extremely hard to hear because he sounds like this, but it also helps to cover up the foreshadowing that he's Jack.
• Your Head A-Splode: Jack's brother Joe uses a fully charged Power Fist attack that smashes Jack's skull to a paste and blasts apart his upper body, leaving nothing but his legs.

Other DLC

• Absurdly High-Stakes Game: The premise of 21 - Clancy is forced into a game of Blackjack with one of Lucas' other victims, only losing costs you a lot more than chips in this scenario...
• Alien Sky: The sky is an hellishly unnatural shade of bloody red in "Ethan Must Die" mode, a not-so-subtle indicator of what the player is in for.
• Anti-Frustration Features: Bedroom is a room-escape scenario where the player has to reset or hide all altered puzzle items every time Marguerite comes to check up on them, so the game allows you to slip up twice before she kills you for the third offense.
• Aw, Look! They Really Do Love Each Other: Taking too long to escape in the Bedroom DLC leads to a dispute between Marguerite and Jack. The former will dart into the room to repeatedly stab Clancy, accusing him of being a home wrecker, while the latter calms her down and expresses his love for her. All of which is done as if she'd taken her frustration out on a rag doll instead of a human being.
• Bittersweet Ending: The "good" ending to Daughters has Zoe figure out Eveline's true nature and survive her infection with her sanity intact. However, she's still trapped in the mansion with her family and Eveline for the next three years until Ethan comes along...
• Bowdlerise: More minor than the censorship from the main game in that it's still fairly violent and horrific, but rather than losing fingers, Hoffman and Clancy have their fingers pulled back and broken instead in the Japanese releases.
• Bragging Rights Reward: What is this so-called "Grand Reward" you get for doing a No-Damage Run in the "Survival+" mode in 21? The room is filled with Mr. Everywhere statues for you to enjoy on future playthroughs. They do absolutely nothing.
• Chekhov's Gun: You're given the seemingly useless "Love your Enemy" trump card at the beginning of the final game in 21, which gives your opponent the best possible card for them to draw at the time. At the end of the game, Lucas cheats and uses two powerful trump cards, one that gives him a perfect hand, and another that raises each players bet to 100 while preventing you from drawing any cards, even via trump card. But as he already has a perfect hand, using the "Love Your Enemy" trump forces it over 21 and causes him to lose. Barring a scenario wherein you manage to beat Lucas via a large enough bet that the event where he cheats is not triggered, this is the only way wherein victory is possible; if the player uses that specific trump card before Lucas cheats, they've essentially lost the game.
• Continuity Snarl: Daughters show the Bakers being infected and turning into psychopaths the very same night they found Eveline. This goes against most files in the main game that explain the infection takes its time on the host, and that even in the fastest of cases it takes about three days for a host to succumb to complete submission of the Mold, while Marguerite supposedly resisted it for weeks—including long enough to be concerned about her symptoms, get an MRI, and learn about the fungus in her head. Since they seem normal again the next morning, it's possible the infection was ramped up for the first night alone before relaxing and developing more naturally afterward, but this is never confirmed and the events seem dissonant as a result.
• Creepy Centipedes: In the Bedroom DLC, a centipede crawls out of her mouth and into Clancy's when she catches him out of bed, instantly killing him. It happens again in the Daughters DLC as part of a Face-Revealing Turn that shows how rapidly Eveline has infected the family.
• Deadly Game: Lucas' game of Blackjack in 21.
• Evil Laugh: Lucas busts out a magnificently Joker-esque one in 21 when he draws the Desperation trump card while puppeteering Hoffman, which raises both players' bets by 100 and prevents anyone from drawing cards, turning the game into an All or Nothing scenario... one where the loser takes a buzzsaw to the face.
• Fighting from the Inside: In the Daughters DLC, she manages to take back control from Eveline for a minute or two and then tells Zoe to run while tossing her the car keys, all the while Marguerite struggles with Eveline's mental control in order to allow Zoe to escape.
• Fingore: In the 21 DLC, Lucas penalizes the loser of the card game by chopping off their fingers one by one with their wrist-mounted torture devices. Infamously, his proper introduction to Ethan sees him inflict this to himself, casually ripping out all his fingernails with a plier to brag about his Healing Factor.
• Foregone Conclusion:
  • In the Daughters DLC, we all know that in the canon ending, Zoe won't be able to escape the mansion.
  • Even though Clancy wins Lucas's demented version of Blackjack in 21, Lucas refuses to let him go and decides to play a different game with him. Which turns out to be the Happy Birthday room that ultimately kills Clancy despite managing to solve it.
• Harder Than Hard: The Ethan Must Die game mode is deliberately made to be like this, with Ethan having to survive a heavily booby trapped mansion by relying on whatever randomly determined items he can scavenge. Death is not only extremely likely, but expected...
• Hoist by His Own Petard: Fortunately, the traps can also work for the player, who can lure enemies to step through tripwires, set off exploding crates next to them and trick turrets into shooting them. Indeed, using the traps wisely may be the only way to get to Marguerite with enough ammunition left to actually fight her.
• Hope Spot:
  • Subverted in Bedroom. There are several instances where Marguerite comes to the bedroom to check on you, but you always get warning every time she's going to show up. But once you almost finished the level and you're in an adjacent room finishing the last puzzle at the time, she's suddenly already in the titular bedroom and there's no warning whatsoever, so naturally she attacks you when she figured out you're trying to escape. Thankfully, fighting her back is part of the level and once you have temporarily incapacitated her, you have the chance to finish your escape.
  • The bad ending of Daughters: Zoe manages to reach the van in the garage and tries to use it to flee, but is intercepted and captured by Jack and Eveline before she can start moving. She's promptly beaten to a pulp by her father, and (if the image of the whole family gathered around the table is anything to go by) is fully absorbed into Eveline's Hive Mind.
  • 21 has no less then three. Clancy beats Hoffman the first time and it seems Hoffman will die from shock and blood loss after losing his fingers. But Hoffman revives and demands another round. After winning against that and Hoffman is seemingly killed by electric torture, Lucas "puppeteers" Hoffman and forces Clancy into another round, this time with a saw involved. When Clancy wins and this really kills Hoffman, Lucas naturally doesn't keep his word to let Clancy go and decides to play a different game.
• Joke Level: Jack's 55th Birthday is a silly little timed battle game, focusing on gathering food across the mansion to feed Jack (in a party hat and clown nose), while fighting off Molded in silly hats for time bonuses.
• Just Before the End: The beginning of Daughters shows the Baker Family as they were before they became deranged cannibals, for a few minutes, at least. Once Jack brings Eveline home, he and Margurite are infected and transformed almost immediately.
• Moving the Goalposts: Lucas does this throughout 21 with his promise to Clancy and Hoffman that the winner of his "little game" of blackjack will get to leave alive. After Clancy wins the game, Lucas almost seems ready to let him go, as promised, but Hoffman gets back up and demands a redo, which Lucas happily obliges. When Clancy wins again and Hoffman gets fried, Clancy demands to be released again, but Lucas just uses the electrodes and a string & pulley system to "play" Hoffman and forces Clancy to play one final round. When Clancy wins that (in spite of Lucas stacking the deck against him), Lucas decides to give him an "extra reward" and make him play another game (the Happy Birthday room) instead of releasing him.
• Multi-Mook Melee:
  • Nightmare has Clancy locked in the mansion basement and forced to fend off Jack Baker and an endless stream of Molded until dawn comes.
  • Jack's 55th Birthday is another variation of this, with Mia trying to find food for Jack while fighting off endless waves of Molded.
• My Car Hates Me: Happens to Zoe in the bad ending of Daughters. She does get the car started but is immediately intercepted and beaten to a pulp by Jack as Marguerite and Eveline watch.
• Nice Job Fixing It, Villain: Marguerite unwittingly delivers a few of the items Clancy needs to escape in the Bedroom DLC through the utensils and tabletop stove she brings with her disgusting meals. Most notably is the fork, which is the only item available to Clancy that is capable of completing the snake's head in the Medusa silhouette puzzle in the adjoining room—indeed, it seems like the designated item from when the puzzle was created in-universe.
• No Good Deed Goes Unpunished: In the Daughters DLC, it is revealed that he found Eveline by going out in the middle of a hurricane to look for survivors of a nearby shipwreck. She promptly turned him into her raving, fungus-infested slave as her idea of rewarding a genuine act of heroism.
• No-Holds-Barred Beatdown: What Jack will inflict on Zoe if he catches her in the Daughters DLC and in the Bad Ending.
• The Password Is Always "Swordfish": The passcode to get into Lucas' computer in the Daughters DLC is the same passcode he uses to lock his smartphone. Zoe even mocks him for using the same passcode for his computer and smartphone.
• People Puppets: Lucas does this with Hoffman's unconscious body in 21 to force Clancy to play one more round, after the electrode torture in round two proves too much for him. Don't worry, he wakes up... just in time to get a buzzsaw shoved into his face.
• Press X to Die: In Bedroom, eating Marguerite's food harms Clancy. There's nothing stopping you from feasting to death.
• Room Escape Game: This is essentially what Bedroom boils down to, with Clancy having to both solve the numerous puzzles scattered around the titular bedroom to find an escape route while at the same time keeping his efforts hidden so Marguerite won't notice. If she discovers anything out of place, she'll harm Clancy - and outright kills him if this happens three times.
• Sarcastic Clapping: Lucas "congratulates" Clancy with a hearty round of this at the end of the 21 DLC. He follows it up by stringing him for another Death Trap that leads to his death.
• Schmuck Bait:
  • You can elect to eat Marguerite's nasty soup in the Bedroom DLC, and, of course, it kills you after three attempts.
  • A drawer in the Bedroom DLC won't open the first time you try, and the text suggests a strong pull will do it, inviting the player to try again. When they do and it opens, not only is there nothing inside, but the drawer jams and can't be closed. Since Marguerite will notice any visible change to the room when she returns and, for it, attack and eventually kill you because you've been out of bed, the stuck drawer will tip her off every time she returns and earn you a likely death. That being said, there is a dialogue option you can select afterwards that can quell Marguerite's anger. Pick a wrong option, though, and its still bad news.
• Self-Mutilation Demonstration: In the Daughters DLC Jack takes a large knife and cuts his chest whilst proclaiming that it's what Eveline wants him to do.
• Sequence Breaking: It's possible to skip the "Desperation" round of 21 by killing Hoffman early, so long as you draw enough bet-increasing Trump Cards.

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Go tell Aunt Rhody…
Go tell Aunt Rhody…
Go tell Aunt Rhody that everybody's DEAD.

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