*SPOILERS AHEAD*
Adorning much of the pre-release marketing material, Dulvey plantation owner Jack Baker became a videogame celebrity of sorts even before Capcom’s Resident Evil 7 arrived on shop shelves just a few days ago. With his formidable presence, southern drawl and familial obsession, Jack put an unusually human face on what has traditionally been a cadre of increasingly cartoonish looking villains within Resident Evil lore.
A welcome far cry from the walking pint of Guinness with the Matrix fashion fixation that is Albert Wesker, Jack Baker is actually bloody terrifying because he’s relatable in a strange way. Sure, he might channel the backwater stereotype a bit strongly but ultimately he’s human; he’s one of us, a family man through and through, albeit someone who has been physically and mentally twisted to obscene proportions and likes to do donuts in his garage when the mood takes him.
As a foe, Jack evokes a rare kind of malice that we don’t usually see from big bads such as him. He talks shit to you, he dismembers you, he tortures you and the horror of all of it is expounded because everything feels so intimate with Jack making a point of getting right in your face (sometimes literally) to do all of this horrible business. Certainly, ol’ Jacky boy oozes malice from every filthy digital pore; the sum creation of what might happen if you put Bray Wyatt and the entirety of the backwards cast of Deliverance into a genetic blender and hit the flashing red button labelled ‘oh screw it’.
The ramifications that Jack has for Resident Evil 7 as a whole are substantial too, since for much of the game Jack emphatically earns his “Immortal” moniker by basically being completely unkillable. In presenting a Nemesis-like presence, the towering Dulvey native invariably dictates the pace early on with the big man potentially lurking around every corner or inside every room, just waiting to send you to an early grave while he eats your bullets like Nandos spicy nuts and crashes through doors with Hulk-like fervor.
Honestly, he’s just what the series needed really; by utterly upending the traditional Resident Evil baddie formula, where you could just charge about the joint, suplexing fools through tables and emptying high-caliber ammunition into your enemies without a second thought, here, the big man shrugs off your attacks and generally makes you cower like Starbucks on a corporate tax return audit.
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That feeling of defencelessness, of needing to turn and run away rather than stand and fight because you are so hopelessly overmatched is something that the series has needed for an age. The upshot of this is that the balance of power now, quite rightfully, shifts against the players again, a state of affairs that should never have changed in the first place when considering Resident Evil’s adherence to the tenets of survival horror. Jack is, for all intents and purposes the franchise’s equivalent of The Terminator, an enemy that just reeks of dread as he seemingly just won’t stay down no matter what you do to him and who will never, ever, stop coming after you.
What’s also intriguing is the fact that, whenever you encounter this guy, there are a number of unexpected ways that events can pan out. Take the first time you meet him in the corridors of the main house for example. Here, after realising you’ve escaped captivity from their meat-heavy family meal, Jack stalks the hallways in pursuit of Ethan and should he catch him, the player is then greeted by an extended sequence whereby their leg is gruesomely amputated before being ‘repaired’ by a magical medicinal liquid.
The beauty of this encounter though, is that it can go the other way too. If you’re quick enough, you can outmanoeuvre Jack and hide under a panel in the floor of one of the adjacent rooms, completely missing out the aforementioned cut scene and all the nastiness that went along with it. Likewise, such surprisingly nonlinearity also exists in the garage boss fight, where if you’re quick enough, you can snag the keys and get into the car before Jack does, giving you full control of the vehicle to pull off some donuts of your own before ramming the Baker family patriarch into the wall a good few times, thus sending that encounter down a different road than it might have otherwise travelled.
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Jack Baker also reminds us that the true monsters in Resident Evil 7 mirror those that we encounter in our everyday lives; horrors that just so happen to be wearing human flesh suits. As such, he puts the Resident Evil *in* Resident Evil and Capcom’s seventh core entry in its survival horror franchise is better for having him; a fact that makes the prospect of the incoming Jack-focused DLC all the more enticing.
Do you agree? Who is your favorite Resident Evil villain?