At 25 years old, the Resident Evil game series can rightly be called venerable, but the series has remained fresh by evolving over time. The series' latest evolution is a new board game, heralded by a brief but creepy teaser trailer.
Capcom has steadily remastered its stable of survival-horror games by starting from the very beginning, but Steamforged Games, the publisher behind the newly unveiled Kickstarter campaign, has worked in the opposite direction. Resident Evil 3 and 2 have both been immortalized in tabletop cardboard, and now it's the original game's turn. Almost.
Steamforged Games' teaser trailer provides tantalizing glimpses of the physical game headed to Kickstarter on Oct. 26, bracketed between sections that bring to mind the remastered opening scenes to the Resident Evil that started it all in 1996. A handful of chilling sentences, backed by tense audio, set the scene for the game itself. The setting and characters will be familiar to long-time fans, with Chris Redfield joining the plastic figure lineup for the first time.
There's little concrete to be gleaned from the teaser trailer, beyond a brief glimpse at the shifting layout of Resi's iconic Spencer Mansion. The in-progress game is shown littered with monsters and challenges for the four playable hero characters to overcome. Steamforged has confirmed that Resident Evil will be playable by one to four humans and that games will take around 90 minutes to complete. The board game has a recommended age rating of 14 and up. All of this lines up with previous tabletop games in the series, which feature an identical player complement and time investment.
Something may prove a little different for this release, however, as the publisher promises "...a campaign unlike any you've experience[d] before." Just what Steamforged means by this will have to wait for the end of the month. While there's a Kickstarter page available for the plastic-and-cardboard survival-horror game, it mostly plays host to the teaser video at present.
It also lists how many potential patrons are considering throwing money behind it when the campaign goes online at the end of this month -- appropriately, just before Halloween. With almost 5,300 possible backers at the time of writing, it's extremely likely that Resident Evil will meet the same fate as its tabletop game siblings: complete backing in short order, followed by distribution to major centers around the world.
Source: Kickstarter