I love the Resident Evil series, but over the last few years it’s been a difficult love to maintain. Sure, the “Revelations” spin-off series has been pretty solid, but everything else coming out of the franchise over the last decade or so has been some form of disaster. Resident Evil 5 was met with accusations of racism before the game even came out, there was the massively underwhelming “Operation: Raccoon City” and the unmitigated disaster that was Resident Evil 6. Then there was the blink-and-you-missed it release (and subsequent flop) of “Umbrella Corps.” So it was with much hesitation that I preordered Resident Evil 7. Honestly, the thing that swayed me was that Capcom heavily focused the advertising for the game around the idea that it was a return to series roots. So let’s find out if “7” is worth the wait, or if it’s another “Resident Evil” that’s D.O.A.

“Resident Evil 7” abandons the increasingly high-stakes action stories that the series has been focusing on since “Resident Evil 4.” Instead, this game narrows it down to a very, small personal sort of story. The game’s protagonist is a man named Ethan who has traveled to a rotting mansion in the backwoods of Louisiana after receiving an email from his wife who had been presumed dead three years earlier. After breaking into the mansion, Ethan finds out that his wife had been kidnapped and experimented upon. Then comes the family, who are like the family from “Texas Chainsaw Massacre” but with some sort of strange infection that allows them to mutate and regenerate, even regrowing missing limbs. After that, everything goes to hell and Ethan’s goal is just to survive and escape.

Resident Evil 7 looks fantastic. Right from the opening cutscene, the graphics are definitely on the high-end of realistic graphics, even compared to other contemporary high-budget titles like “Final Fantasy XV.” The color choice occasionally leaves a bit to be desired. There are some sections that have that early-XBbox 360 era problem where they tend to be a bit too brown in order to try to make it look realistic and worn. That’s really the only problem I’ve seen with it, though. The visual design is absolutely amazing. The Baker family is a perfect mix of normal and sinister looking, and the monsters like the molded are incredibly creepy looking. In fact, the molded are among the creepiest enemy designs that the “Resident Evil” series has ever seen. The menu design is also really well done, with a very sleek, minimalist approach.

Okay, it’s Resident Evil so I know you all have one burning question about the audio design: Just how cheesy is the voice acting? The answer is: very. More importantly, it’s cheesy in that way that happens when you’re obviously trying to be pretty realistic but then you don’t quite hit the mark. In other words, it’s just how the voice acting in a Resident Evil game ought to be. As far as the music goes, it’s the same sort of eerie, atmospheric music that you’ll remember from classics like the remake of the original Resident Evil.

Now the big question, how does it play? Well, it doesn’t play quite like the original Resident Evil games, but it also doesn’t play quite like the later games. Instead, Resident Evil 7 manages to strike a great balance, getting the positive aspects of both of these styles. The combat is more action-oriented like in the later series, but the bulk of the gameplay is exploration, puzzle-solving and dealing with a scarcity of resources. So, you’ve got the things that made the original games tense and horrific, while keeping aspects that made the later games more inline with modern expectations. So in the end you’ve got a tense, creepy game that is still thoroughly modern. Plus it’s a first-person game so the controls and camera angle finally make sense together.

I was fully ready to just write this game off, but Resident Evil 7 has shown that Capcom has listened to their fans and gotten back in touch with what made the series such an instant classic. If you like horror games, you will like Resident Evil 7. It is a nasty, visceral, and thoroughly creepy game. In other words, it’s everything that we’ve been waiting for out of the Resident Evil series for the last ten years.