Editorials
5 Ways Capcom Can Save ‘Resident Evil 7’
Cut the Cutscenes. Slow Down on the QuickTime Events
Lengthy cutscenes are as part of RE’s legacy as corny dialogue, but even in a game where quick action is the main focus of gameplay, control was all too often taken out of the hands of the player. In RE6, trying to use a controller seemed to get in the way of all the cutscenes and button-mashy QTEs, which can be fixed fairly simply: Let players play the game.
To interact so infrequently with the controller strips the possibility of flow, wherein the gamer sort of loses contact with the real, physical world and becomes one with the on-screen experience. Part of the issue is that the makers of Resident Evil have always been very preciously attached to their own sense of storytelling, so they feel the need to set up scenes for the player, but it has gone too far. Make a product that is more interactive in all facets, or else find better ways of telling a story, and the result will be much improved.
To give an example, in one of RE6’s opening chapters, the player uses a series of QuickTime events to perform mundane tasks in between cutscenes, ostensibly to give the player a sense of ownership over what is happening. Ironically, it has the opposite effect, telling the player that her actions are only intermittently important, which also loosens the bond between player and game. The simple answer is to axe the QTEs but, barring that, make them infrequent enough that they feel integrated into the gameplay experience. This is an outmoded storytelling technique and needs to go now.
The trailer for Ti West’s upcoming adaptation of A Christmas Carol raised a lot of eyebrows when it dropped earlier this week. While plenty of folks initially dismissed Ebenezer as a derivative project meant to cash in on the recent wave of unnecessary prequels that expand the backstory of beloved characters (such as 2023’s Wonka), Charles Dickens’ original novel already made a point of exploring Ebenezer Scrooge’s origins in detail – meaning that this new film is likely just a particularly faithful adaptation of the source material under a different name.
Couple that with the fact that the movie is being helmed by a genuine horror auteur and I think it’s safe to say that the latest iteration of the first modern ghost story is in good hands.
That being said, one detail that immediately jumped out at me during the brief teaser (other than a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it nod to Johnny Depp’s iconic bedroom death scene from the original A Nightmare on Elm Street) is the fact that many of Ebenezer’s ghosts appear to have been directly lifted from the iconic John Leech illustrations that accompanied the first edition of Dickens’ novel.
Here are a couple of stills from the trailer compared to the original artwork:
The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come in ‘Ebenezer’ and ‘A Christmas Carol’
The Phantoms in ‘A Christmas Carol’ and ‘Ebenezer’
Marley’s Ghost in ‘Ebenezer’ and ‘A Christmas Carol’
Mainly working with old-school wood and steel engravings that would later be transferred to print, Leech was instrumental in crafting the iconic look of history’s most influential phantoms – especially since Dickens is said to have been deeply involved with the creation of these so-called “comic illustrations.”
And since the novel is commonly said to have popularized spiritualism in Victorian England, much of the ghostly iconography that we still see in genre media to this very day (including some of Ti West’s previous films) can be traced back to the author’s partnership with Leech.
Ebenezer won’t be the first A Christmas Carol adaptation to borrow heavily from these designs, but I can appreciate how Ti West is incorporating an important part of horror history into his latest film.
Ebenezer will be available in theaters starting November 13.
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