This is a video game where the player is regularly roundhouse kicking both enemies and barrels, running into a creepy vendor who seems to exist outside of space and time, and hoping the local chickens will crap out an egg that you can eat for extra health. The original Resident Evil 4 had a chaotic energy that was hard to pin down. (Thankfully, the game is extremely generous about dropping almost exactly what you need, but praying for the right drop is part of the delicious tension.) You can’t buy ammo from a vendor, and while the game has storage options, it limits what can be stored. It’s not uncommon to reach the end of an encounter, look at your inventory, and gasp at the lack of options for what comes next. Same setup, but now, with the energy of a thousand suns. Rob, on the other hand, is unloading entire clips and dropping f-bombs. They are deliciously easy to dismember, and rarely pose a threat. What you quickly notice, beyond the obviously impressive new visuals, are how quaint the old necromorphs feel. Lately, I’ve been replaying the original Dead Space alongside my colleague, Rob Zacny, who’s been playing the remake simultaneously. It feels comfortably similar to what EA tapped into with Dead Space. The hordes of enemies from 2005 feel quaint, compared to what Capcom regularly throws at you here, but it summons the same overwhelming feeling of dread. More enemies, more intensity, more reasons to reinvent one’s strategy on the fly. The remake understands this, and instead of reinvention, focuses on ratcheting. What good is a pistol when you’re dealing with a swarm? A grenade helps. Your focus on the enemies in front of you distracts from the four that, suddenly, are behind you. It’s crowds, closing in on the player with Jason Vorhees energy. Resident Evil 4 does not dole out enemies in reasonable groups of two or three. You’re constantly on the run, diving through windows, climbing ladders, and praying for a breather that rarely comes. No longer can you slowly and calmly line up a shot, nor can you run around a corner and expect peace. The famous opening scene of Resident Evil 4, where Leon Kennedy approaches an empty village only to be overrun by an unyielding horde, asks the player to recast expectations. And in the span of a few minutes, Resident Evil 4 cast that aside in favor of something new. It wasn’t a Resident Evil game unless you made it to the end credits with 30 rounds of grenade shells that you never used. It was about being careful and conservative, slowly creeping around hallways and conserving health and ammunition to the point of hoarding. The parameters that defined “survival horror” were well established, three games into the popular series. Resident Evil 4 was a rarity in sequels: a genuine, if loving, rejection of the past. Newcomers have a chance to understand what the fuss was all about, and the rest of us jump in a time machine. The Resident Evil 4 remake feels like what it was like to play Resident Evil 4 in 2005. The Dead Space remake feels like what it was like to play Dead Space in 2008. Electronic Arts took the same approach with Dead Space, another remake that, like Resident Evil 4, sought to embrace the gap between our collective memory of an old classic and what games feel like in 2023. Besides honoring Resident Evil 4’s unique DNA-a game of many flavors and tones, of which the game oscillates between at will-the original game has not been pulled from physical and digital shelves. It more than justifies its existence, and crucially, does not pretend the past never happened. In other words, perhaps it’s no surprise the Resident Evil 4 remake, too, is spectacular. Capcom re-releases the game every time a new platform launches, and recently oversaw a surprisingly great VR update. Unlike many games from the 80s and 90s, Resident Evil 4 hasn’t aged poorly, or looks and feels so old that it wouldn’t work for a newcomer without the context of being alive in 2005 and witnessing in real-time how Resident Evil 4 reshaped our understanding of action games. Few games sit on the same pedestal as Resident Evil 4.
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