See if You Can Beat Capcom's Hilariously Mean Resident Evil Choose Your Own Adventure

When my elementary school would host book fairs, I would always stop and leaf through every Choose Your Own Adventure title I could find. Combine that with a few stabs at writing them myself and a life spent playing video games, and I feel like I've got a pretty good bead on when a Choose Your Own Adventure is unfair. If you're going to, say, put a pit full of spikes along the way, there'd better be some warning!

Capcom's Resident Evil-themed "Escape For Halloween" browser game is basically all spike-pits, no warnings.

Featuring screenshots from Project Resistance, Capcom's asymmetric multiplayer spin-off of Resident Evil, the browser game is as dead simple as they come. You start by deciding whether you enter an Umbrella facility alone or with friends. Each new screen presents you with 2-4 choices, some of which do seem unnecessarily risky (why try to run past a camera or shoot a booby trap rather than sneak by?), but when you fail you just fail, miserably and out of nowhere.

That booby trap blows up in your face. Search the wrong area for a key and a zombie eats you. Try to disable that security camera and not only will it shoot you, but you'll get your leg trapped in a previously unseen bear trap. I've only made it as far as the sixth of nine screens, and every time I've made it there I've been blindsided with a Licker attack. I haven't even seen a Mastermind-controlled Mr. X lurking about.

Now, this is just a silly Halloween browser game, and the only reward for beating it is having your results retweeted by Capcom's official Dev 1 Twitter account—but then why make it so incredibly hard? There are definitely some semi-random elements at play, so starting again and picking the same options won't always get you to the same point as before. So far, only seven people have cleared the "Escape For Halloween" game.

As a test of your Resident Evil know-how and Choose Your Own Adventure wits, this browser game's not great. But I hate to admit it—just like retaking a Buzzfeed quiz because I know it gave me the wrong "Succession" character, part of me wants to see if I can shepherd these hapless teens to a horror movie happy ending. That said, if screens 7 through 9 feature spike pits, I'll definitely quit in a huff.