These are good times for Resident Evil fans. Alongside the fantastic remakes that Capcom themselves are producing, there are a number of tribute projects such as the recent Tormented Souls and Them and Us with exciting titles like Echoes of the Living on the horizon. You Will Die Here Tonight is clearly a love letter to the very earliest days of the series but also brings its own unique twist to the narrative. Long-time fans will spot a myriad of nods and references to both mainline and side entries with even forgotten titles like the GBC RE Gaiden getting some love. The result is an indie survival horror that manages to capture the essence of early Resident Evil.
You Will Die starts off in fairly typical survival horror fashion. You begin as a new recruit to the elite Aries team, brought in to lend your scientific knowledge to aid in combating a new threat. Once you’ve met your new teammates, a veritable who’s-who of STARS stereotypes, you venture forth to the Breckenridge Estate and find yourself in a nightmare beyond imagination. While a standard setup, what follows turns out to be a truly uncanny combination of the familiar and the new.
Graphically, You Will Die is an interesting blend of styles with HD characters superimposed over pixel backgrounds. This is combined with a top-down view that is highly reminiscent of the aforementioned Resident Evil Gaiden but with a PS1 style aesthetic. The result is distinctive and helps You Will Die to stand out from the usual fixed camera approach. Exploration continues in this perspective but when you switch to combat you enter a first-person view that really brings the Gaiden influence to the fore. Unlike that game’s golf swing timing based combat, though, this plays out in more conventional FPS fashion. The 360 degree view comes into play at times when you find yourself surrounded by zombies and also in the occasional boss fights that play out like a combination of Resident Evil and House of the Dead.
After the initial moments of exploring the mansion you are overwhelmed by enemies and fulfil the game’s title for the first time. Upon dying you switch to one of the other Aries team members and continue your mission and so the process continues until everyone is dead. There is a semi-roguelite approach though, as the key items and progress made with previous characters carries over and you can therefore make iterative progress as the team is whittled down. Once you lose all of the squad then it’s game over unless you happen to find mysterious K coins that enable you to begin the whole process again but with progress maintained.
Alongside the first person combat there are typical survival horror puzzles involving paintings, hidden keys etc. These are pretty well designed and generally fairly intuitive with each paying clear homage to Capcom’s original games, and you will need to complete all of them in order to access a number of locked weapons and upgrades. I would recommend trying to solve the shield puzzle in the main hallway as soon as possible as it unlocks a defensive option in combat that will prove invaluable. I can testify to its importance as I lost many lives to boss battles without it.
Without going into spoilers, there is more going on in You Will Die Here Tonight than it initially appears. The loop of resurrections and progress isn’t just a mechanical issue and actually contributes to a really interesting meta-narrative. While completing the main mission and escaping the mansion via the helicopter in the garden gives you an ending of sorts, the true story involves completing specific side missions to unlock what is really happening. This meta story takes You Will Die in a totally different direction to standard Resident Evil and left me genuinely surprised. I’m not going to say any more here except that remember the game isn’t completed until credits roll.
