I think anyone who knows me will say that I have a bit of an addictive personality. I pick up a lot of habits, but luckily gambling isn’t one of them, though I’ve always veered obsessively towards any game with a Blackjack mini-game. Red Dead Redemption was deadly.
So when Banned Footage Vol 2. was released for Resident Evil 7 and I saw it had extra content that more or less marketed itself as a twisted version of Blackjack, I was there before you could say “deep seated emotional problems subtly personified as addictions”.
Opening as Resident Evil 7’s answer to Stranger Thing’s Barb once again finds himself in a tricky situation, 21 asks you to guide Clancy through many rounds of Blackjack to survive Lucas Baker’s desperate need to be Jigsaw. There’s a problem, though: your opponent is another captive by the name of Hoffman. His face is never shown (presumably to save time on animations), but his pleas for his family make each hand feel that much weightier.
21 amps up the pressure across three separate stages: fingers, electrocution, and saw. As you might be able to deduce, failing to win a round results in you getting closer to meeting your doom by one of these tools – the latter is the most gruesome, but the possibility of having your digits chopped off one by one makes everything that little bit more intense.
It’s standard Blackjack fare (at least to begin with), which means that the player closest to or to reach 21 with the totals of their cards wins the round. Obviously, as Lucas is Lucas, it means both players lose if the round reaches a draw. The weird thrill in edging closer and closer to 21 without going over the limit is one of the main draws of Blackjack and it’s no different here with the deadly implications taking things up a notch.
Charging for horror-themed Blackjack might not hold water with many Resident Evil fans, so luckily Capcom have brought in a game-changer. Trump cards can drastically change the course of a round, from making your opponent’s stakes higher or just simply swapping cards with them. As you progress deeper into the mode, the AI opponents become even trickier, pulling out absurd combos and laying down the same Trump cards again and again to halt your progress. A lot of 21 depends on luck, but skill and strategy are just as important.
Once the “story” component of 21 is beaten, its Survival mode is unlocked and it works mostly like Nightmare from the previous Banned Footage in that the difficulty level spikes and asks that you really hunker down.
The opponents here are nothing short of arseholes, consistently cancelling your best laid plans with absurd Trump cards. It’s possible to beat everyone with the most rudimentary of decks, though it’s more likely that you will conquer five successive opponents without losing all your fingers by building up your Trump deck. The more you play, the better cards you can use. It’s not the most finessed way of increasing the replayability of what could seem like a straightforward mode, but it works.
21 is a neat little dessert on Resident Evil 7’s menu. It helps you to kill time while still being immersed in the world of the Bakers, but most people will probably look to the new Banned Footage’s Daughters DLC instead. Expect thoughts on that before too long.
If this tickled your pickle, how about a review for all of Resident Evil 7’s DLC?
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