Latest / The Autistic Mile / The Ideal-ist: Halloween Special
Transcript
- Shane: Good evening everyone. Welcome to the Autistic Mile. My name is Shane Gaffney and this is our Halloween special for the Ideal-ist. And today, as you can see, I've taken the liberty of breaking into the Baker Estate for this particular episode. No one informed me that this was part of my contract, but I blame the economy. And as you can probably tell by that setup, today we will be talking about The game of Resident Evil 7. Just be careful not to make too much noise because right now the Bakers are busy tending to Ethan, and I don't necessarily want to draw attention to myself. So Resident Evil 7 happens to be, as the name implies, a entry in the very prominent Resident Evil franchise. Which is a horror series all about zombies and bioweapons and all that sci-fi mumbo jumbo. And in the case of Resident Evil 7, it involves you being stuck in a house in the middle of the Louisiana bayou. Being hunted down by crazy zombie redneck people like I am now. Or at least I would be if I weren't good at keeping a low profile. In this particular entry, You play as a man by the name of Ethan Winters who receives a very strange message from his wife, whom he had presumed to be dead for several years, calling him to the Baker Estate far off from any civilization in the middle of a dirty and dilapidated swamp. Definitely are better places you can end up being marooned in, but I guess beggars can't be choosers when it comes to saving your wife from unknowable horrors. And when Ethan arrives at the Estate he ends up coming face to face with a family of completely deranged Southerners who happen to be infected with some weird parasite that allows them to heal from any injury. And what's interesting to me is that each of them has their own different power or brand of horror. For instance, there is the Patriarch of the family, Jack Baker, who is all about physical strength and supreme endurance. He can survive getting run over by cars, shot in the face, set on fire, you could even blow off his top half with a rocket launcher for all he cares, and he still keeps getting right back up as if nothing happened. And that's not even counting the fact that he can tear through walls like the Kool-Aid man. Which isn't exactly making me feel very safe if I'm being honest. But what can you do? If you've seen that one crazy guy from The Shining, yeah, it's basically that, but on steroids. And his wife, Marguerite Baker, happens to have the ability to control bugs, which is something I'm not going to touch with a fifty yard pole because I admittedly am a huge weenie when it comes to bugs. And that's not even counting the fact that she looks like she hasn't brushed her teeth in fifteen years or so. But that's just a personal thing. And finally, there is their son, Lucas Baker, who is all about traps and machines and basically it's like Saw, if you've ever seen that horror movie. And Ethan is effectively stuck in this house, trying to hunt down all three of these terrors, while seeking out his wife was Mia at the same time that they are all hunting him. And as for what is special to me about this particular entry so much so I decided to go out of my way to get it myself, even though I'm not really big on survival horror games because of the resource management, and all that hassle, is that in a way it is nostalgic to me about all of the things that I don't particularly like about the state that I live in. As you can probably see from the room around me, the Baker estate is very rusted over and moldy and Unhygienic. Full of moss and bugs and general decay. And that's the sort of vibe the entire game goes with. A lot of you could probably have deduced this from the backgrounds and the thumbnails I've created over these months. But I tend to gravitate towards things that are more shining, pristine, high tech, elegant. Basically the opposite of all this. And I guess that elevates the horror for me in a way. But what is more important to me is this is a game I picked up for the exclusive purpose give or take of taking down the main villain, which is a girl by the name of Eveline and the reason for that is that Despite looking like a little girl who is just a little creepy in her appearance, she is perhaps one of the most pure evil characters I think I've ever encountered. You see, Eveline is the cause of everything that's been going wrong in this house. She is a bioweapon created by a criminal organization known as the Connections, which is a rival group to the infamous Umbrella Corporation, which are the main villains of this entire series. And while trying to escort Eveline on an oil tanker, she ends up going completely rogue and getting shipwrecked out here, where she's found by Jack Baker, and it's all pretty much downhill from there. At her core, Eveline is someone who wants a family on account of the fact she doesn't have one. She had a pretend family within people in the Connections posing as a father and mother, just for the sake of keeping her in line, but because she's a psychic she ends up overhearing the fact that they're not really her parents, and that sends her into a complete murderous rampage. And so she decided if she didn't have a family, she was going to make one by force, in the form of brainwashing all of the Bakers who were previously normal people, aside from Lucas, who was a bit of a psycho to begin with. But them taking her in out of kindness turned out to be the biggest mistake of their lives. Now the Bakers are effectively just brainwashed husks that serve as extensions of Eveline's will, trying to kidnap more people to join her quote unquote family. And I'm guessing Eveline is not very good at keeping a house neat and tidy, if the state of this place is any indication. But probably best not to let her know I said that. And how she controls the Bakers is particularly telling in that she makes them abuse and dismember each other because they can regenerate, but also because she's a bioweapon who does not compute how families are supposed to function. She was made to be a weapon, and so she believes through her twisted lens that a family is supposed to be defined by fear and dominance, and general sadism. And the saddest part is she really cannot be reasoned with. Nor does she really care about all the people she's hurting to do this. So me being a guy who likes thematics in stories and in games It just felt personal to me to make a point to try to take her down and ensure that what happened to this family doesn't happen to anyone else, even though I know this is all purely fiction. Which is kinda harder to convince myself of considering my current situation, but it is all technically fiction. If there's any lesson to be taken from all this, it's that it's good to deal with your own darkness before it starts to act through you and cause pain to countless other people. Though I'm sure Eveline is too far gone to really heed that advice either way. I'd imagine a lot of people on the spectrum would indeed find horror in this environment. Because it is all disorderly and broken down and not really maintained in any sense of the word. But that's all really admittedly tangential here. I chose this game for this particular episode because It seems significant to me, and hopefully maybe it is for you too. Guess we'll just have to wait and find out. But that's about all I have to say about Resident Evil 7. Be sure to comment if you want to, like and subscribe, and I will see you- Well, I guess that's my sign to log off here, so I better find a new hiding spot and hopefully not die. See you guys next time, hopefully. Thank you.