Resident Evil Rotten Louisiana

Resident Evil: Rotten Louisiana mainly focuses on showing that the good old RE7 can be transformed into a completely different, far more hardcore experience. This is part of my Rotten preset series, which I’m currently developing a project that represents my mental style and artistic vision.

The goal here is to boost the horror atmosphere to the max strong shadows, deep image depth, and a cold, rotten, almost nauseating color palette. I’ve added cinematic effects like film grain to enhance authenticity, chromatic aberration, and tons of other tweaks.

Essentially, Rotten presets are built on a base of carefully tuned effects that scale very well across most Resident Evil titles. Usually, the only thing that needs adjusting is the color tone since the base look is driven by a LUT. The rest like edge enhancement, texture sharpening, HDR simulation, and other subtle or not-so-subtle visual touches just beautify specific areas depending on the game.

There are a lot of effects, and yes they’re demanding. On weaker PCs, you’ll feel it. On my potato RX 6500XT, I experienced FPS drops of around 50%, depending on the resolution. But let’s be real I don’t game in 1080p. I operate in much higher resolutions.

Most of my main screenshots (like the thumbnails or previews) are captured in something like 5K (5120x2880), which absolutely slaughters FPS pretty much down to zero. But I know my hardware, I know the engine, and I know where you can recover some frames.

I can also reveal that for the upcoming Resident Evil: Rotten Village, I shot those juicy promo screenshots in full 5K with high-quality textures I was literally walking around at 5 FPS looking for the perfect angle. That’s just how I am. Slightly twisted, but I can’t help it.

Anyway, to the point just drop the preset and the shaders into your main game folder. Here’s the default Steam path:

C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\RESIDENT EVIL 7 biohazard

And just to be clear I’m using the DX11_NON-RT version (so, without Ray Tracing).

Also, make sure you’ve installed ReShade version 6. 3. 3 or above. I personally use 6. 3. 3 and wouldn’t recommend going lower. Anything above that should work just fine.

Important note some people ignore the shader folder, thinking only the preset is enough. That’s wrong. If you want the preset to actually work, you must include both the Shaders and Textures folders. No exceptions.

Now, what did this preset do to me? Honestly  it disgusted me. In a good way. For example, when I saw the infamous Baker dinner scene with this preset on… I was eating chocolate cereal, and it straight up killed my appetite. And I’m not even that sensitive to horror but this time, the cereal stopped tasting like anything.

With this preset, RE7 feels like a completely different game. The atmosphere is insane. Louisiana gets a massive boost in mood — you can feel the humidity, the age of the house. Walking down those moldy hallways, you can practically smell the fungus in the walls.

I highly recommend at least giving it a try. It’s worth experimenting with the game’s narrative and atmosphere from a new angle.

Also feel free to share your thoughts and feedback! Suggestions are welcome, though I’m not really open to complaints like “the grain is too strong” or “the film bars are unnecessary.” I made this with a full cinematic immersion in mind.

So yeah I even recommend turning the HUD off completely, including the crosshair.

And finally feel free to check out my DeviantArt as well. Lots of related content there!