In the absence of any huge January releases - at least until Monster Hunter World hit shelves today - we've spent the month catching up on our backlog, and one of the games that's had us on the edge of our seats, and occasionally hiding behind them, is Resident Evil 7. After recent installments took the series further down the action path, this taut, brutal adventure takes us back into a puzzle-in-a-mansion setting and ratchets up the intensity, and one of the things we really love about the opening few hours is the recurring enemies.
Without spoiling anything, the Baker family aren't slain and forgotten - you encounter them and they come back for more, often popping up when you least expect it. It got us thinking about other games that have done this well over the years, so here's a few of our favorites.
The Nemesis (Resident Evil 3: Nemesis)
The original and still one of the best examples of the enemy who won't leave you alone, Nemesis was Capcom's answer to players starting to get comfortable with the flow of its survival horror series. Players would encounter the Nemesis multiple times during the game, and the monster could fight back with gusto, wielding a rocket launcher and even chasing the player from one area to the next. While it was possible to evade the Nemesis from time to time, occasionally it had to be taken down to proceed and it would always be back for more. The nature and location of encounters varied depending on your actions, too, making Resident Evil 3 a uniquely uneasy proposition in a series known for making you jump.
Big Daddies (BioShock)
The Big Sister from BioShock 2 or the Songbird in BioShock Infinite are more specific entities, so we should probably have gone with those for consistency, but in the end it felt wrong not to include the original Big Daddy. Sure, you encounter multiple versions of this lumbering brute in the drowned dystopia of Rapture, but the common theme of that distorted Little Sister voice and guttural Big Daddy groan piercing the quiet is exactly the kind of unpredictable, disruptive enemy we love in this mold. In theory you can continue to sneak around looting and bashing splicers with wrenches without bothering the Big Daddies, but if you want the sweet plasmid fuel their Little Sisters are harvesting then you will need to confront them whenever you can. Perhaps you're the pursuer in this instance? Either way, they make a great shooter that much better.
The Nightmare (Prey)
Another immersive sim built on the legacy of System Shock, 2017's Prey was an underrated gem of a game, a fascinating journey through a space station increasingly overrun by hostile, enigmatic alien forces. One of the things that kept it interesting as the game progressed was the sense that Talos I was falling more and more to the Typhon threat, and there was no better exemplar of this than the enormous Nightmare, a seething mass of muscle and hatred that the aliens deploy to hunt you across the station. Massive and difficult to fight - at least until you get crazily overpowered in the endgame - the Nightmare is a shock to the system just as you think you're getting control of the situation.
Our first encounter with it was particularly terrifying - we had returned to the Lobby area to complete a side quest when we noticed something lurking in the tunnel to the Shuttle Bay exit. It was huge, it said "Nightmare" on its health bar, and we had no idea what it was. Like Ripley priming the airlock at the end of Alien, we crouched low and snuck towards our objective, too scared to look over our shoulder and find out whether it was in pursuit.
The Pursuer (Dark Souls 2: Scholar of the First Sin)
We had a lot of trouble with the Pursuer when we first encountered him in Dark Souls 2, back when we were still getting our heads around the series, but he graduated from an irritating obstacle to a hilarious "gotcha" moment in the Scholar of the First Sin rework, where From Software deployed him at regular intervals to disrupt the player's progress. A giant, flying knight with an Ultra Greatsword that does a good job of spearing you with curse, we particularly liked his appearance in the Smelter Demon arena in the Iron Keep. Having bested that bothersome boss and found the bonfire upstairs, we headed back down to look for loot, but instead we found the Pursuer rising out of the ground, ready to test our reflexes again barely before our Smelter-besting hands had gotten over the previous encounter.
Princess Peach (Super Mario Kart)
Hahaha! But seriously though, 25 years later we still have a bone to pick with the Princess, who was always on our asses, usually as we were desperately trying to gather the last few points necessary to secure a 150cc championship after school. The Princess also has the unique honor of being the only adversary on this list to have pursued us for our entire video gaming lives, tormenting us through a multi-million-selling series of kart racing games across numerous generations of Nintendo console. Fittingly for a powerful, undying enemy, the only way to truly overcome her is to become her instead, at which point none of the other kart racers really carry the same menace.