On Survival Horror And Spicy Food

Let me ask you a question: Do you like spicy foods?

A lot of people love that kind of stuff, and will eat it up at any culinary opportunity. Bury their barbecue with buffalo sauce, sprinkle some sriracha on their sweet potatoes, confidently chew on a Carolina Reaper. Good for them, I say, enjoy your bold spicy flavor. I, on the other hand, have a low spice tolerance and can hardly muster anything hotter than a spicy Dorito. I remember a few months back, I was on a vacation with family and we went out for dinner on Friday night to a sports bar and grill. I ordered a nice burger with a side of sweet potato fries, but one family member went and ordered some extra spicy wings. When I asked him how in the world he could eat such spicy stuff, he said that it really wasn't that bad, like a 2 out of 10, and that I should try one. So I did. 

I made it one bite in before going "oh fuck no" and spending the next 10 minutes nursing my mouth burn with iced tea. That shit was so hot that a little got on the corner of my mouth and actively burned there too. It was not a pleasant time. Later, just to prove that this man's spice tolerance ratings scale is off the charts compared to my own, he showed off his 10 million Scoville scale lollipop and took a taste. He was relatively fine, just saying it kind of tasted like shit. That terrifies me. On the other hand, spice didn't make the night a total bust: my sweet potato fries came with a side of spicy mayo, and that stuff was actually quite pleasant. Its creaminess with a little teensy kick made for a nice flavor contrast with the sweetness of the fries. 

Let me ask you another question: Do you like survival horror games?

A lot of people love that kind of stuff, and will eagerly play them at any gaming opportunity. Surviving Silent Hill, acclimating to Amnesia, finding their way through Fatal Frame. Good for them, I say, enjoy your spooky atmospheric flavor. I, on the other hand, have little experience with the genre and can hardly muster up anything beyond a passing play session their way. You'll notice I left perhaps the defining survival horror series off that list, and that's because we are going to talk about it right now. Let's talk for a bit about Resident Evil. The only one of these I've actually beaten until recently was Resident Evil 4, which I wrote about for a Halloween marathon a while ago. Given that it revolutionized its series and action gaming as a whole, however, I'm kind of reluctant to count it in the survival horror terms I'm thinking of. I'm talking the old school style, where you've got 10 bullets and 20 things chasing you and so every waking moment of the game is a tense struggle for, well, survival. I've experienced that before, of course. It was in the original Resident Evil.

This game and I have a history, and it is not a fond one. Of all things, it's the DS port of Resident Evil that I'm most familiar with. It was the last game I ever bought while I was living in the city, and one I remember playing and tinkering with during the period where I was moving away from the city. I remember playing it in various ways in various places, but the one thing I don't remember is actually beating it. That is because I never did. I got to the ending bits at least three times, but something stopped me from finishing the game. It could have been anything, but the way I remember it is that I played too recklessly. I used too much ammunition and killed too many things along the way, such that when I got to the end I lacked the bullets to deal with the actually hard stuff and practically soft-locked myself. Terrible inefficient play. I couldn't close it out, and while other people beat the game multiple times, I was always locked out of its final moments. So it was for a decade and a half.

That brings us nicely to last weekend, where a few things happened that will actually connect these two threads a little. First, I finally crossed a culinary desire off of my bucket list and made caramelized onions for the very first time. It was worth the wait (and the eye burning) because they are absolutely delicious little flavor bombs that amplify the fuck out of my burgers and sandwiches and chip dips with just one small spoonful. That got me thinking of other food-related mountains I had yet to climb, and my mind turned back to spicy food and that really hot chicken wing. I fell down a little hyper-interest Youtube rabbit hole about spicy food, and wanted to try more of it. Specifically, buffalo sauce. It looked like you could do a lot of great things with it! You could make a creamy version that sounds absolutely delicious! You could mix it with chicken and other things to make amazing pasta! I wanted to try these things, slowly build my tolerance towards the throat-searing heat, and discover new and untasted sensations like I'd just discovered with the caramelized onions.

At the same time, Resident Evil came to the forefront of my mind as well. A very good friend and mentor cites the 2002 remake of Resident Evil as one of her very favorite video games of all time, and we even have a subchannel in our mutual Discord server entirely for the series and expressing that adoration. In addition to that, there was a rediscovery of my own. I had long since given the DS copy of Resident Evil away, but when I got myself a new bookshelf a while back and was placing games into it, I was reminded that I bought a copy of the Resident Evil Origins Collection for the PS4 during one of my Grand Bank trips for $16. Here, at last, is where the threads combine. Stepping out of your comfort zone and trying new things. I had no tolerance for spicy food, or survival horror, but people I knew loved both. I had a score to settle, and I was going to do it this time. I was going to beat Resident Evil, this time in remake form.

So, here's how that went.

This Resident Evil remake is quite nice, when it comes to difficulty. They offer you three selections at the beginning, but don't actually label them as "easy" or "hard". Rather, it's selections like "You like to go on a hike" or "You want to climb a mountain". Notably, the mountain one is the hardest available on a fresh save, and that's just normal mode. You have to clear the game to unlock higher difficulties, and I kind of like that. For someone fresh like me, it's allowing you to build your survival horror spice tolerance, and not throwing you into the deep end. Additionally you have two characters in Chris and Jill, and I picked Jill 'cause she's cool as hell. Also she can carry more items and unlock doors easier, so that's helpful. On I went into the hellish zombie-infested mansion, and at first I was really feeling that heat.

It wasn't the game's fault, though, but my own. My prior experience with those three failed runs was souring my mood at first. Without a frame of reference or any security, my anxiety about failing a fourth time was kind of eating me alive. Every decision and failure in dealing with the monsters in my way was nightmarish. OOOH, YOU USED FIVE BULLETS INSTEAD OF THREE? CONGRATULATIONS, YOU SOFTLOCKED THE GAME EIGHT HOURS FROM NOW! WHAT? YOU ACTUALLY SAVED AFTER 30 MINUTES? DON'T YOU KNOW THERE ARE ONLY FIVE SAVES IN THE WHOLE GAME? YOU'VE FUCKED IT ALL! RESET! RESET AND KNOW THAT LITERALLY EVERYONE ELSE WHO HAS PLAYED THIS GAME BEFORE YOU CAN BEAT THE GAME WITH THE KNIFE WITHOUT GETTING HIT THEIR FIRST TRY! GOD, IMAGINE FAILING TO BEAT THIS SHIT THREE TIMES IN A ROW, WHAT KIND OF A FUCKING IDIOT DO YOU HAVE TO BE???

I kind of resigned myself to this fate, treating the game like it was going to be a hours-long version of what I felt after biting into that chicken wing. It was going to be miserable and I was going to question every moment of my own competence while playing it, but I would persevere. I would save up every single little shred of ammo and health and endure the opening miseries to make it to the end bit and actually have enough resources to close out the goddamn game this time. So I played like a perfectionist. Three bullets instead of two? Reset. Easily dodgable zombie grabbed me? Reset. It was a misery, but it was how I played and how I learned to play.

A funny thing happened then: I started to appreciate the flavor of the game. My anxious perfectionism had accidentally unlocked a new way to play the game, one which my friend coined a phrase for. I was using exploratory saves to figure things out. I would just run through the mansion, exploring places I hadn't been in before and discovering what items or puzzles were there, along with what forms of resistance would be in the way. Then, once I had a good handle of about four or five objectives, I would reset and do all of them in a row. I'd know what was coming and how to avoid or deal with it, get it all done, and then lock in the save for the next round of exploratory save exploration. This meant that I was kind of playing the game twice and keeping the good result, but it also meant that I was able to learn the game without the stress of wasting resources eating me alive.

There's quite a lot to balance in this Resident Evil game! You have to manage your ammunition and not use too much, but also healing items are limited so you can't just leave everything alive or else you'll get grabbed in every hallway. Ah, but then the remake adds in defensive items like knives and tasers that you can use to get free of a grab without damage and hurting the zombie. Ah, but also you can't just kill every zombie you see because of the new mechanic where defeated zombies come back as fast zombies, so every one you kill just creates a deadlier hassle later down the line. Unless, that is, you burn the bodies of everything you kill, but that requires the use of kerosene which is another limited resource, and can you see at this point why I was intimidated? Here's the truth, though. The difficulty mode I chose was, as it turns out, ultra-generous. I was drowning in health and ammo by the end, and had lots of unused kerosene and more than a few defensive items. I was anxious over nothing. I was fine in the end.

But also, it was kind of rewarding to play and learn in this manner? Like, there was something that felt good about deciding which hallways were travelled enough that I needed to clear them out with my resources, and which ones I'd only need to proverbially poke my head through once or twice and thus could just gun it from whatever was there. Slowly but surely, I made this efficient little path that could get me from my save points to wherever I needed to go with relatively little hassle. There were hallways that I didn't clear out, but I could just go around to the ones I had cleared and save time as well as resources. That felt really quite good to realize and navigate, and there's a deeper meaning to that than just making the game easier.

I was taking this spooky atmospheric place, this monster mansion, and making its haunted hallways my very own space with efficiency and a little ease. In its own way, it reminded me of what must have been one of Resident Evil's influences: Dawn Of The Dead. In that film, the survivors of zombie apocalypse treat a shopping mall much the same as I had been treating the mansion in the game. They are efficient and quick in their planning, and know just what to do and where to go to secure safety in their well-travelled walls. Eventually, for a time, the mall stops being the place of the zombies and becomes their place, and that was what was happening to me here. These horrifying halls which had haunted me for over a decade and a half were becoming home.

That doesn't mean, of course, that the game doesn't push back. At around the halfway point you leave the mansion for a courtyard and house just outside it. When you come back, you're met with a new enemy: these green monsters with claws called Hunters. Hunters are what drained me of all my ammo on the DS. They're big and scary and try to claw at you and so I used all my shotgun shells trying to blow every single one away. Ah, but now things are different. The easier mode means there are less in my way, and the revised mansion layout means there are other paths I can take to get around the mansion with familiarity. 

Already these are excellent concessions, but then a wonderful thing happened. On an exploratory save, I had mapped out that to complete my objectives, I'd need to defeat three Hunters. As I was playing "for real" though, I had a thought. What if I just took the long way to avoid two of them, and then just... ran by the last one for the two trips I needed down that hallway? And so I did that and it worked. That last guy hit me a bit, but with the way I was hoarding health items it was a resource I was happy to spend. Remember, my main anxious worry was running out of ammo. In my mind, I would rather have spent one healing item than one clip of handgun ammo defeating those three Hunters. Hell, even before I just went and did it like that, I had actually mapped out ducking into a scary zombie room and taking the clip of handgun ammo as compensation for what I was about to use.

That I had this safety net was, in the end, just a kindness which helped me finish the game easier. I was still learning how to play it well. How to dodge enemies instead of kill them, where to clear things out, and managing my resources well. All of these are essential survival horror skills, I'd learned them, and it felt good. It was good to realize I could just avoid all three of those hunters and save my resources for a later, possibly harder, segment. It was an incredible discovery, just like the marvel I had when I cut up a bunch of onions and let them melt in a pot with brown sugar and other stuff for several minutes. I had created a new and exciting as-yet-unknown flavor to me, and I was enjoying it.

And so, I kept on going. I kept exploring, and even got a little more daring and used more saves while also keeping my first runs of areas because I was doing well. I made it back to that scary lab, and made it through with relatively little hassle. My last exploratory run of the game even mirrored the anecdote I shared about the Hunters, where I first ran through killing every scary thing in my way before reloading and just rushing past all of it to save my handgun ammo. Here I was at the final battle, the apex monster of monsters shuffling after me... and my frugal conservatism had left me with dozens of grenades for my fancy grenade launcher. Now was the time to use it. 17 years of frustration and anxiety, locked and loaded and ready to fire.

Bang.

So that was that. Resident Evil, the thing which had caused me so much grief and hassle over all those years, was finally cleared by my own hand. More importantly, I liked it. I liked trying this new thing and finding this interesting nuance of how to play it, learning as I went along. I liked how all my frustrations and fears melted away into something that I could not only enjoy, but grow to get better at. In hindsight, I really could have just played it with little regard for the nuances of resource management. I was given more than enough tools to blast every monster in the game away, but I didn't do that. Instead, my own fears forced me into this need to hoard. It caused hassle at the beginning, but through that adversity came an enjoyment. Through that burn, I learned to enjoy the unique flavor that this survival horror game had. I kind of got it, even if I was playing on an easier difficulty. It would interest me to mess around with Chris, or higher difficulties, to appreciate more of its nuance and uniqueness. I would not be opposed to trying more of this flavor.

Oh, and speaking of flavor... The day before I beat the game, I was at the grocery store doing my weekly shopping stock-up. As I browsed the shelves of this little store in my little town, a certain bottle on the shelf caught my eye, and so I pored over it for a few moments in pondering and inquisitiveness before saying "fuck it" and putting it into my cart. What was it?

So it was, then, that as my journey to enjoy the flavor of Resident Evil came to an end I found a new base to start trying to enjoy spicy food flavor. I enjoy this stuff! Its flavor profile reminds me of my favorite brand of BBQ sauce, Bull's Eye, but it has that added little kick of heat that sort of sits in the back of your throat. It's not a numbingly agonizing burn like that chicken wing, but a little added sizzle that sits with you for a few extra minutes. So far I've only used it as a dipping sauce for chicken, but I really am interested in what it tastes like on grilled meat. I wonder what the heat of my own grill will do to it, and I'm excited to try. 

I don't need to start chomping on ghost peppers willy-nilly, nor do I need to play Resident Evil on its hardest mode with just a knife. There are ways to manage a new flavor and keep it fresh and interesting as you explore. Breaking out of my comfort zone regarding survival horror and spicy food has been quite the interesting journey, and I hope you've enjoyed reading about it. I also hope that, if you feel like it, you at home are inspired to push against your own comfort zones and find new flavors and experiences to broaden your horizons. Play it safe, keep your own limits in consideration, and just open yourself to new experiences this summer.

Maybe afterwards we'll grill up some spicy BBQ burgers and play some Resident Evil. What do you say?