For the next few days, I’m going to be playing Resident Evil 7 every day and writing my impressions and thoughts as I go. Obviously, what I write will be affected by the gameplay of the day, but I’ll also expand the scope of my writing from time to time as needed. For this introduction and first piece, it is clearly such a time.

I have a weird relationship with the Resident Evil series. I started with Resident Evil 4 on the Wii in middle school, at a time when I was definitely unprepared for the ceaseless tension and difficulty in the gameplay. Yet, despite leaving every play session as an emotionally exhausted husk, despite having to pause the game and organize the inventory every few seconds to give myself time to breathe, there was something perversely compelling about the experience.