News
Sounds Like There’s Going To Be A Little Dark Souls In Our ‘Resident Evil 6’
For the unfamiliar, in Dark Souls your world runs parallel to the worlds of anyone else who is playing the game online. This means you’ll occasionally see the specters of other players running about your world, and it also means that every so often a malicious player (read: total dick) will invade your world with the singular goal of kicking your unsuspecting ass. From the sound of it, the newly announced Agent Hunt mode for Resident Evil 6 will play out a bit like that. In it, up to two players can invade a world and proceed to try and ruin that person’s day. More after the break!
As a Hunter, you will take control of one of the many C-virus induced abominations and use your new powers to break the will of other players. This works in any game that has the option selected, so if you don’t want to fight real people, you won’t have to. This means a full game can have two player-controlled J’avo pitted against two player controlled agents (Jake and Sherry, Chris and Piers, Leon and Helena). I don’t know about you, but this sounds way better than Capcom’s tepid excuse for a versus multiplayer in Resident Evil 5. Craving more details? But you’d like to know exactly how this works? Well, ok.
First, you need to complete the campaign of the character you’d like to unlock the Agent Hunt mode for. After that, when you create a session you will have the option to allow/not allow the mode. If you choose to allow it, player Hunters will be able to see your session and infiltrate it as an enemy character. Not all of the stages will be available to Hunter–I imagine it wouldn’t be terribly fun roaming the empty halls of the university building, watching Leon and Helena chat it up from the relative safety of a shadowy corner of the room, now would it?
Say you go after the agent(s) and you immediately get your ass kicked. It’s your first time playing, no big dealsies, it happens to everyone. If/when it does, you’ll just respawn as another J’avo in the area, and when you do the shame of your previous death will only add fuel to the fire that is your hatred for the other players. It’ll keep you fighting until you finally taste the sweet nectar that is the blood running through the veins of the agents. When you finally kill them, it’s done. You’ve done what it was you set out to do. Now you can either savor your victory, or start over in another game.
It’s a neat idea, and one I welcome with open arms, knowing it replaced the Versus mode. What about you? Does this sound like good fun, or would you rather go at it alone?
Resident Evil 6 releases on October 2 for the PS3 and Xbox 360.
Feel free to delicately toss Adam an email, or follow him on Twitter and Bloody Disgusting
Let’s start with the good news. Lockbox looks far better than its misleading marketing materials suggest, a supernatural horror movie so darkly lit and color graded that you’ll have to squint your way through jump scares. It’s also anchored by reliable genre performers. That’s also about where the good news ends with this rote adaptation of Knifepoint Horror Podcast story “Winthrop.”
The empathetic Carla Gugino gives her all as Ellen, a saint of a woman with boundless patience who takes on life’s hard luck with a kind smile. After giving up her career as a fashion designer to become caretaker for a dying mother, she’s then forced to reinvent herself once more when her caretaker role ends. That catches us up to the events of Lockbox, where Ellen is asked to take in a cousin she hasn’t seen in quite some time who’s dealing with severe PTSD.
Just as Ellen finally establishes a real connection with Winthrop (Lou Taylor Pucci), it’s interrupted by the arrival of peculiar neighbor Vahna (Katharine Isabelle), who spells clear trouble. When Vahna shows up dead, it sets in motion a supernatural battle of possession.
Image Credit: Aura entertainment
Director Daniel Stamm (The Last Exorcism, Prey for the Devil) and screenwriter Justin Yoffe approach Lockbox in the broadest of brushstrokes, dooming it from the start with clunky storytelling and woefully underdeveloped themes of heady topics like PTSD. Winthrop is a character that comes loaded with emotional baggage and trauma that’s piled on throughout his tragic life, but much like its title, his interiority and history are treated like a tightly guarded secret meant to prolong the supernatural mystery.
The problem here, though, is that Lockbox is too sparse to sustain mystery at all, and it instead robs Winthrop of characterization. It winds up trapping the talented Pucci without anywhere to go, toggling between wounded animal and mentally disoriented.
From there, Lockbox bounds through plot developments without any sense of stakes or purpose, peppered by a smattering of haphazard paint-by-numbers jump scares. The only unwavering constant is Ellen’s resolute faith, and Stamm seems to leave it entirely to Gugino to guide confused audiences through this inconsequential story right up until its supernatural climax.
Image Credit: Aura entertainment
To give more credit, Lockbox at least injects an unconventional exorcism here; just don’t expect much in the way of explanation. When the film finally reveals the meaning behind its title, it dangles a fascinating carrot it has zero interest in delivering. More than a severe lack of fleshing out its characters beyond plot drivers or devices, this faith-based flick also seems terrified to offer any worldbuilding whatsoever.
Yoffe’s script stretches the short story beyond its means instead of fleshing it out, and Stamm fills out the gaps with cheap CGI scares and overwrought performances; Isabelle’s Vahna is beyond cartoonish in her villainy. It’s also pretty nonsensical, treating only Ellen’s faith with the utmost sincerity and largely squandering its typically reliable talent. So much so that the final imagery, pure sunkissed saccharine sentimentality, leaves you with the feeling that this horror movie might be better suited as an entry in Chicken Soup for the Soul.
Lockbox releases in select theaters on July 3, 2026.
You must be logged in to post a comment.