You Will Die Here Tonight Review

thesixthaxis.com:

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