Resident Evil (1996)

“Welcome to the mansion of bad voice acting and worse life choices.”


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🎥 Let’s start by showing y’all the trailers shall we?

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🧾 Non-Spoiler Plot Overview

So here’s the setup: you’re part of the STARS team (basically SWAT with cooler patches) sent into the creepy Spencer Mansion after people go missing. Turns out the place is infested with zombies, mutant dogs, giant snakes, and whatever other nightmares Umbrella cooked up in their evil science lab. The whole thing is survival horror boiled down to locked doors, limited ammo, and typewriters for saves. You wander hallways, solve puzzles, and pray the next corner doesn’t have a zombie ready to chew your neck off.


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👥 Character Rundown

Chris Redfield – Big muscles, tiny inventory slots. Dude can fight but apparently can’t carry more than a lighter and two herbs at once.

Jill Valentine – “The master of unlocking.” Basically easy mode. She can carry more stuff and has a bazooka. Jill’s the smart choice if you don’t want to cry.

Albert Wesker – Sunglasses at night, indoors, during a zombie outbreak. Already suspicious. Plays the “trust me, I’m totally not the villain” card and fails spectacularly.

Barry Burton – The king of bad dialogue. “You were almost a Jill sandwich!” He’s a walking meme before memes were memes.

Rebecca Chambers – Rookie medic who just kinda… pops up sometimes. Sweet but not very useful.



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⏱️ Pacing / Episode Flow

The game moves in that stop-start rhythm: explore a little, solve a puzzle, backtrack, fight one big monster, backtrack some more, unlock a new wing, repeat. It’s slow at first, almost boring, until you realize every single hallway is now burned into your brain because you’ve walked it 300 times while dodging the same zombie. The pacing ramps up with each big reveal, though — you start small with dogs and zombies, then end up with Tyrant, the lab, and explosions.


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✅ Pros

Atmosphere is thick as hell. Creepy mansion vibes, ominous music, fixed camera angles that make you paranoid.

The tank controls suck, but they also make encounters way scarier.

Iconic monsters: zombie dogs jumping through windows, the giant snake, hunters — all nightmare fuel.

Jill sandwich. Enough said.

Limited ammo and saves actually make you sweat. Survival horror at its purest.



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❌ Cons

The voice acting… oh my god. It’s legendary in how bad it is. Sounds like everyone’s reading off cue cards after three drinks.

Tank controls will make you want to punt your controller across the room.

Backtracking galore. If you don’t like running laps through the same hallways, you’re gonna suffer.

The puzzles sometimes feel like they were designed by a drunk architect.



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💭 Final Thoughts

Resident Evil 1 is clunky, awkward, and dated… but also a masterpiece of survival horror. It basically invented the formula: ammo scarcity, creepy setting, B-movie dialogue, and just enough mystery to keep you pushing forward even when you want to quit. It’s equal parts frustrating and iconic, and it birthed a whole franchise of nightmares.


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⭐ Rating

I’m giving Resident Evil (1996) a 9/10. Not perfect, but revolutionary and unforgettable. It’s cheesy, scary, and maddening in equal measure — and that’s why it works.


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⚠️ Spoiler Warning

Alright, if you don’t want the undead beans spilled, stop here.


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🩸 Spoilers

So the game kicks off with that infamous FMV intro — bad acting, awkward cuts, zombie dogs attacking, everyone runs into the mansion. You pick either Jill or Chris and go exploring. Barry saves Jill with that whole “Jill sandwich” nonsense, Chris has less help but more pain.

As you dig deeper, you find out this isn’t just a haunted mansion — it’s Umbrella’s science project gone wrong. Experiments everywhere. The giant snake fight, the plant monster, hunters that decapitate you, it just escalates. Zombies stop being the big problem pretty fast.

Wesker, shocker, betrays you. He’s been working with Umbrella the whole time, and his big plan is to unleash the Tyrant. Spoiler: Tyrant doesn’t listen, stabs Wesker, and goes berserk. You fight it, escape to the courtyard, then to the lab, and just when you think it’s over, Tyrant busts out again on the rooftop. Cue the rocket launcher final showdown (because what’s a 90s game without a rocket launcher finish).

You blow him up, escape in a helicopter as the mansion explodes, and that’s it. Credits roll. Zombies everywhere, Umbrella’s still evil, but hey — at least you survived the night.