‘Tis the Halloween season! And, once again, it’s not only a valid excuse to dress up as your favorite fictional or non-fictional cartoon-like character from whatever show that used to be on T.V. at one point that you used to like, but it’s also a time of smashing pumpkins all over the road, teenagers bumming candy off the elderly, and the usual lineup of awful – I mean, awful – spinoffs of your favorite Halloween classics.

And in the spirit of tradition that I’ve *checks past reviews*…loosely kind of done around here, today we’re going to be diving into what, literally, zDS has summed up perfectly when it comes to describing today’s said game:



- And he’s not f**king kidding. I mean, look at this gong-show:



That’s right! (Pray for me...) Today’s game and review is none another than the incredibly messed-up horror and comedy styling's of twentyfour24’s “Rezident Evil: It Is Escape,” a supposive tribute to the release of Resident Evil 7 and the Resident Evil series…(u-um…I think?)

Now, when it comes down to the actual Resident Evil series on my side of things, I’m a rather unknown when it comes to it. I mean, I know of its existence and some of the characters and things from word of mouth, or seeing various parodies of it mimicked on other forms of media and such, but I’ve never played any of the actual games over the years. The closest that I’ve ever got to it was watching my little brother play one of the games for the original Playstation when he brought it over from a friend’s place to try it out, and I would watch him play it a little bit, but that’s the closest exposure to the games that I’ve ever had… And, of course, I’ve never watched any of the movies - for obvious reasons - lol.

But luckily though, for this game, I don’t need to catch up on any story elements or consult a giant wikiboard to know what the hell is going on here, as this game is just fine enough to follow through for first timers of the series like myself. So I don’t have an excuse to run away from this one this time (unfortunately).

Anyways, this game initially caught my interest a few months ago…not just because of that smug face of Matt Leblanc plastered all over the place and the creator’s profile picture and the game’s thumbnail too, but it also represented something that’s been missing since the earlier days of the RPG Maker scene: and that’s basically these types of comedic-like games that don’t take themselves too seriously, have mismatching-like graphics and incredibly bad mapping too boot, almost minuscule-like gameplay, and not only are these games sort of bad but also sort of good in a strange kind of way. These were the types of games that were littered all over the earlier RPG Maker scene before some standard of quality on most sites were then issued. So it’s kind of neat to experience something akin to those days again by playing a game like this. It makes me feel quite rather nostalgic for the past.

Now, without any more additional delays - let’s get on with this and experience all the funnies that this game has to supposedly offer. It’s time to laugh again…!



The Story



Our story begins with a recap of events that tell that tale of special forces agent Jill Valentine and a computer technician named Tom that she befriends along the way during her investigation into a Umbrella Corporation laboratory. After some minor dealings with a right-winged doctor and a revived, giant T-Rex that’s looking for a Jill Sandwich, the pair managed to escape via train, that Tom apparently knows how to operate (for some reason), and are both looking to return to America to escape this retched hellhole that’s is known as Europe. But before they happen to do just that, the pair will not only have to battle with an army of monsters along the way, but they’ll also have to do battle against a group of Russian terrorists, bring a certain party member back from the dead, punch the ultimate dog right in its face, and eventually deal with a certain experiment gone horribly, horribly wrong…

From the moment that you boot up the game and watch the introduction play out and notice all the various grammar mistakes and improper use of dialogue throughout - you kind of know what you’re getting yourself into with this one... The story, the writing, the seriousness of it all…it’s all pretty much thrown right out the window here… In fact, the overall plot, while simplistic towards the start of the game and gives you a rather clear objective, ends up spiraling WAAAAY out of control with all these different ludicrous plot-points thrown in and ends up becoming something akin to watching a prevalent writer in his or her own field suddenly do a line of cocaine and just completely going off the deep end. In fact, the deeper you get into this game, the less and less it becomes a Resident Evil fangame and more something along the lines of its own merit that dives into the almost absurd. I honestly wasn’t expecting this... One moment I’m dealing with zombies and the next moment I’m some other Tom with dialogue I can’t even read because the textbox and text are all glitching in and out. And now I’m battling various politicians with brave deformities all over them. (O…Okay…)

I mean, as also one part comedy game, I should probably know better that something like this was probably bound to happen throughout the story. And for a while, yeah, some of these instances made me chuckle a little bit here or there. But what really bothers me is some of the grotesqueness of some of the subject matter that’s handled here. I mean…this game can get incredibly dark and incredibly morbid at times. I mean, it’s not just the dialogue itself, but some of the visual imagery here may definitely turn off some people from playing this game all together. I mean, you got dogs getting brutally murdered and sent out to die to clear out a field of landmines for you to cross through the desert; little children getting killed, or wagered on to fight to the death in a coliseum for the amusement of a crowd; one of the characters in the story performing necrophilia-like acts; and even this one scene which I found borderline disgusting:



There’s a certain area called “Glitter Heaven” that you can go to sometime later on in the game. It’s not required to finish beating the game, or anything like that, but you have the option to go there if you wish. Anyways, there’s this one room where you can enter that plays the Marle Theme from the game Chrono Trigger where you can then look up various profiles of girls that you want to reserve so you can basically f**k them. And they even have real photographs, too.

And there are many other instances of disturbing-like content throughout this game as well. And I mean, yeah, I guess because of the zombie apocalypse and the fall of regulated rules and government that something like this would probably bound to happen in this type of world because of the sheer panic and chaos that’s going on; and, yes, in a sick twisted way, this type of shit is going on even as we speak in our modern society today. But the problem is, with this game’s current narrative, that there is no context here about the whole world going to shit and things like this happening throughout the game’s world to suggest this; it’s not really fully explained well, and I kind of wish it was… I know that humanity in a situation like this would probably do some pretty horrible things to each other in order to survive – and in one scene it’s kind of hinted at a little bit there - but to rape and kill children for sport and pleasure and expose dogs to acts of cruelty without context? I just don’t believe in a world like that's plausible. Maybe I’m thinking too hard about this…

Look, for a game that’s marketed mainly as a joke game, I found some of the subject matter here to be a bit on the tasteless side and really could have either been toned down or eliminated altogether. Not only that, but the story goes into such weird, strange uncharted territory that by the end of the day you really just don’t give two shits about what the hell is going on anymore and you simply just want to get the hell outta here. Hell, even the final boss comes out of f**king nowhere towards the end. You think Necron was bad in Final Fantasy IX!? Well - wait until you see this boss!

The Gameplay



For the most part, Rezident Evil: It Is Escape uses a pretty much standardized traditional RPG format found in most RPG Maker games. You’ll fight various monsters, mostly, through touched-based encounters with only having one playable character at a time, which means you’ll be mainly fighting on your own here. But not to worry, as Jill and Tom are more than capable enough of handling themselves just fine with their current repertoire of skills and abilities. In fact, they’re pretty much so capable enough that most battles here are a complete and utter joke in terms of sheer difficultly. Unless by chance you absolutely are horrible at RPG’s, or don’t have the necessary skills or equipment that you can find and get in this game rather easily, then you shouldn’t have much of a problem in this game. I actually, honestly, never even had to use a single recovery item in battle at all, this game is that easy.

First off, the money that enemies drop (not to mention their eyes and teeth as well) can be used to purchase new weapons at Chairman Wow’s and the spoils can be dropped off at the Church Of Dansom, which is located underground in the exact same location, by the way, to enhance your overall stats, like your HP and MP and gain access to various new combat skills. This game doesn’t have any traditional level-up’s, per say, so the only way you’re going to get any stronger is by finding these spoils to power Jill up to give her more of a fighting chance in battle. Enemies don’t respawn back after you kill ‘em either, so you can’t just win a battle and then come back to the same location again and fight to acquire more money and spoils. You basically have a limited number of enemies that you can harvest goods from, so you need to be somewhat careful about what you buy or acquire, but I definitely would recommend to pretty much beat-up on everything that comes your way to avoid having any additional headaches in the future, because there are some instances where, if you’re not prepared for some battles, you won’t be able to go back out and grind at all - so beware.

Luckily, though, every once and a while, and during certain boss fights, a mercy wheel will pop up (rather humorous, I might add) and will potentially grant you some devastating powers and some very useful attacks. Attacks like the Ghetto Blaster is one of the best healing moves that you can get in this game, and the Fancy attack does some pretty nice damage for little MP cost. Eventually, towards the end of the game, all of these powers will be available to you to wreck some havoc.

The battle system is relativity simple enough, and I think it does its job just about right. Although there’s not much in terms of actual equipment to collect, or any advanced battle strategies that you need to form, at least somewhat of an effort was put into the game to at least give it a bit of thought and variety in how it handles its combat. And although I would have liked to have seen more in that department, I’ve fine with what the game gives me here.

But if I have to praise at least one thing about this game and what it does extremely well compared to other games that I’ve played on here thus far - and it’s quite an admirable feet to boot for a semi-joke game - is the tons…and I mean, TONS of mini-games and extra goodies sprinkled throughout the course of your adventure. I mean, you have achievements that you can unlock that can give you extra cash and bonuses for completing them, such as beating a particular stage, finding a certain amount of particular objects, or even just opening a freakin’ door, lol; you also have a tank riding mini-game that you can drive around while shooting and mowing down various Russian soldiers that plays ever-so satisfying; a mini-game involving luring and capturing ghosts using a single roll of film; riding a FREAKIN' CHOCOBO throughout the snowy plains; shooting down various clones of Matt LeBlanc that controls and plays even BETTER than what Strangeluv could do in Spike Lee’s: The Twilight Zone, and many, many, many more.

While there are plenty of fantastic mini-games on display here, there are definitely a lot of oddity ones that definitely push the unsettledness factor…like the working out scene with Christian Bale, or the strange questionnaire one with Tom Gums, or some of the mini-games that you can even play in Bone Garden, which acts as this game’s equivalent to the Gold Saucer from Final Fantasy VII. There are also a lot of crudely-done quick-time events that pop up almost seemingly out of nowhere that can give you a quick game over if you’re not quick enough to press the correct key. And speaking of game over’s, this game does have a few cheap moments where you can get a game over and it’s feels like it was completely out of your hands. Like there’s this one quick-timed event towards the end of the game, that, I swear, I had to do six times over again because I wasn’t fast enough to push the enter key on time, forcing me to sit through the entire start-up screen again and again! And then there’s this one room in Glitter Heaven that if you accidently go into it the Flowerman will manage to kill you just for doing so.

And then there’s this mini-game:



This one – oh my god…this one! It’s one of those enter the right combination puzzles where you have to enter the right three numbered sequence in order to get through the door, and you would usually get some sort of clue, or hint, by hunting around and finding one. Well – guess what!? This room DOESN’T HAVE SHIT to tell you what to do...! You basically get a flat-out message telling you to guess what the answer is, and it basically just laughs in your face and calls you a moron! (What a dick!) There is a clock here that tells you a time that says 19:12 on it, but the right combination to open the door is 712, which, okay, the 12 at the end of it is correct for the last two digits and makes a bit of sense, but how do you get 7 out of 19? There’s nothing else in this room that gives you that hint - so what the f**k!? I basically was stuck here for a while until I had to open the source code up and figure it out for myself. This part sucks hard.

Despite some rough patches here, the gameplay itself is pretty enjoyable for the most part. Hell, there’s even some nice jumpscares that definitely caught me off guard a bit too. The variety of different things definitely helped kept the game interesting enough to play and finish to the end, even during the most mundane of times.

The Soundtrack



Oh boy…the soundtrack in this game is completely out to lunch, lol.

With a whopping total of over two hundred plus songs featured in this game (J-Jesus!!!), Rezident Evil: It Is Escape may be the largest soundtrack of any RPG Maker game that I’ve played thus far... But how does it all sound???

Well…actually, I think the soundtrack overall fits pretty good! There are definitely some stand out tracks that I enjoyed listening to, like the one song that plays when you’re trying to escape off the train, Chairman’s Wow’s theme where he’s got his daughter locked up…can’t forget about McShane’s crazy ass theme, and the video arcade’s song in the Bone Garden sounds like something straight out of Sonic The Hedgehog series. Oh, and I can’t forget about the Chocobo riding song that plays when you’re running around in the Snow Base (lol). I think other than the rendition of the heavy metal one in Final Fantasy XIII-2, this might be one of the most cringe-worthiness – but coolest – versions of that song that I’ve ever heard of. I couldn’t help but laugh alongside listening to the messed up lyrics for that.

There are also are what you would expect in a game like this in terms of creepy ambience, industrial and dark and unsettling themes that also fit the mold quite well. A lot of these songs also feature robotic-speaking-like lyrics that just adds another level to the unsettledness factor that the game overall presents. I’m not sure whether the creator was the one who did the lyrics or he just used a program to deliver these lines to some of the songs featured, but I definitely will give him marks for going the extra mile.

Sound-wise, the game also hits on this front. There are even walking sound effects in place for whenever you walk on certain terrain that adds a bit of a nice touch. It also even amplifies the creepiness factor with the all additional screaming and background noises that are present throughout the area. And it would also be a royal sin not to mention the Hi-Fi tapes and the Hi-Fi room in this game. As, throughout the adventure, you can find musical tapes from usually out in the field or by defeating certain enemies. These tapes will allow you to listen to various, goofy-like tracks while Tom in the background is dancing, sometimes with his shirt off, in conjunction with the beat. Think of it as more like a semi-sound test option. It’s not required for anything important, but I thought I’d mention it.

The Aesthetics



On the surface, this game’s graphical presentation may come off as something of a complete clusterf*ck with how it generally looks, how it’s mapping is handled, and even just pretty much everything in between. It’s got that old school look of the earlier days of RPG Maker when nobody gave a shit, I tell you what. And, in all honestly, yeah, you would be right… This game does look absolutely obnoxious compared to some of the other more genuine looking games here.

…But then, all of a sudden, this game likes to throw you a complete curb-ball and delivers some of the most spectacular visual effects that would even put games like Space Funereal and Yumi Nikki to shame. Some of the imagery that’s used here (especially that one scene when Tom snorts some cocaine and goes all apeshit) is truly a delight to witness and behold. Even some of the later areas, despite how some of them can be quite tough to navigate through because of the bad mapping and disorienting colors, truly push the bar on the insanity levels of what RPG Maker mapping can do. It’s definitely one of the game’s strongest suites in terms of that said insanity.

The only major gripes I have with the game’s overall presentation (well…besides what I already mentioned earlier with some of the maps being too difficult to terrace through) is that some of the custom menus used in this game, like the Perfect Boys one, can be a bit difficult to scroll through at first, as I thought you could only scroll up or down and not left or right, so I ended up failing this mini-game quite a bit because it wasn’t clearly established that I could move in what direction either way. Some of the game’s menus do have a arrow indicator to tell you where you can move and what not, but others don’t have such luxury. I wish that some of the menus were designed a bit better for that in mind.

Also, there are a few instances where some character sprites will duplicate in two different spots, characters popping in and out and what not, and, even though this was probably attended, some of the effects and pictures have that annoying pink layer outline that comes off as a bit tacky looking. I suppose this was the attention to make the game look this way, but I think some of that could have been ironed out a bit, since there are some scenes in here that don’t have that problem.

The End Result



This game is quite the enigma, indeed. On the surface, you have two different forms of tone here, in which one half of it is horror-related and the other half of it is comedy-related. You would think these two would blend itself rather all right in this sort of situation – but here’s the underlying issue I have with it: In combination, I just don’t think these two different types of styles in this sort of game work well together, because both styles don’t bounce off each other very well. If I then decide to treat this game as strictly, say, a horror game – which fits the bill a lot more nicely here, yes – the comedy parts of it just come off as a bit of an eyesore and sucks me out of the experience. But then when I look at it as a comedy game, I then see the unsettling parts, like with the children getting murdered and maimed, and among other things, that I can’t find very funny because of how morbid it is. The two different styles don’t work very well here, and it’s hard to then treat it as one or the other. It also doesn’t help that the plot can go into the farest reaches of absolute lunacy, and, at the very end of the game, little of what you initially started off with ends up being reverent towards the end of it. It’s like if Marilyn Manson took over halfway into a movie script that Martin Scorsese was working on and the end result was like seeing two different things. That’s basically this game in a nutshell.

I will, however, give credit to the creator on making something that was completely unexpected, and even rivalling some of the more visionary works of games like Space Funeral and Yumi Nikki. I came in with low expectations and left with a different sort of experience when I left (…not to mention all the nightmares I got from sleeping the next day). I can also take solace in the fact that the creator of this game at least provided a plethora of different individual things to do for the player to undertake. You can tell that the creator of this game, at least on the surface, put in a great deal of effort to complete this game and pad it out…and that’s gotta be worth something, right?

I can only recommend this game to those that have a strong sense of morals and that can stomach some of the more distributing imagery in this game and are looking for something that’s along the lines of a Space Funeral or a Yumi Nikki to play. If that’s your fancy, then give this game a shot. Otherwise, I would probably recommend looking for something MUCH different to play, as I don’t think this game is for everyone in mind.



OVERALL GRADE:
3 / 5 - C ~ Just Makes The Cut.