Resident Evil 2 (1998): A horror classic that needed an update

Resident Evil 2 from 1998 is an amazing game and one of the best horror titles of all time. I don’t think anyone would argue with that. Its ideas were sometimes far ahead of their time, hitting the ceiling of the technology of the time: two playable characters, four interconnected story campaigns, several additional (and not “get off my back”) game modes, a bunch of unlockable bonuses, and a lot of gameplay systems. There’s just one problem: RE2-1998 has aged very badly. Still, twenty-one years since its release have made themselves felt: we turned a blind eye to the problems back then, during the active development of the gaming industry, but now, in a competitive and saturated market, they can only be ignored out of nostalgic indulgence. Today, the press would tear RE2-1998 to shreds with a bitter giggle for its crooked controls and ridiculous story and voice acting. And players would hardly stand aside.

Therefore, when Capcom showed a full-scale remake of Resident Evil 2 (RE2-2019) three years after its announcement in 2015, the Internet exploded. A third-person camera, and even without tank controls? What if it is not scary? Where is the horror? It looks cool, of course, but what is this now, some kind of “action”? Don’t worry. RE2-2019 is as good as you think it is. Maybe it’s even a little better.

Intense horror with a face compared to the original

Despite the sometimes photorealistic graphics (the RE Engine suits the game very well), the over-the-shoulder view, and dozens of smaller changes, the remake does not forget the lessons of the classic (1-3) series for a second. Resident Evil 7, with all its advantages, only reminded us of the golden days of the franchise, but RE2-2019 is a classic, just thoroughly refined and brought up to modern standards. Therefore, if you, being a fan who has lost faith in Capcom or, on the contrary, a person unfamiliar with the series, had doubts, I will clarify: RE2-2019 is not an upbeat zombie action game. It’s a slow, viscous, extremely old-fashioned horror, in which, of course, you can shoot, but most often you want to do with little blood.

The game doesn’t say this directly, but it clearly assumes that a knowledgeable person is sitting at the monitor. Leon laments that he “doesn’t know what else to expect”, but the player does. He knows and smiles ominously. In almost every interview, the project’s producer Tsuyoshi Kanda was happy to remind the public that he, like the entire development team, is a passionate fan of the original game. Impressively, Kanda-san was not lying: instead of quoting the fossilised original verbatim, the developers left the vestiges of the past behind, conveying to the modern audience the very essence of Resident Evil 2 – constant stress. And this stress is already in the main menu, when the game starts with a deceptively complicated question: who to play as. In Raccoon City, which now looks like a branch of hell, two people are stuck: yesterday’s graduate of the police academy Leon Kennedy and Claire Redfield, who came to the city in search of her brother Chris, one of the protagonists of Resident Evil 1. However, as I said before, the dilemma is not easy on the surface. You have to play as the one you like best, even if it’s only in appearance! Anyway, RE2-2019, like the original, needs to be played as both of them at least twice, or even all four times: the plots of Leon and Claire are partially different. One character will “start” the game, and the other will “finish” it, starting in a different place and following a slightly different route; in the original, this was called scenarios “A” and “B”. The walkthroughs differ not only in plot snippets and secondary characters, but also in some mechanics. The latter, by the way, was one of the most interesting findings of RE2: for example, if Leon takes an item from the weapon chest in scenario “A”, Claire, who follows his trail in “B”, will not get it.In the first scenario, this guy just hangs from the ceiling and does not touch anyone. In the second… in the second, he’s still there, but he’s not as harmless.

A tactical game with a variable scenario: Consideration of gameplay features

Unfortunately, RE2-2019 doesn’t have such a “mark” – or perhaps I was looking in the wrong place. In the end, the trickiness of the scenarios was just a trick – albeit a conscientiously implemented one – to stretch out a rather chamber game. It’s the same here. But, to Capcom’s credit and the design of the old RE2, the project didn’t want to be scolded for it then and doesn’t want to be now: RE2 2019 is really worth playing through as many times as it asks. Partly for purely gameplay reasons. As the game progresses, Leon and Claire gain access to different weapons, and this significantly affects the approach to combat. Leon has a pistol, a shotgun, a Desert Eagle, and a flamethrower. Claire has a pistol (which can later be “trained” to use Desert Eagle ammunition), a submachine gun, a grenade launcher, and an electric gun. All of them consume their ammunition (and thus drain their economy), have unique properties, and basically change the tactics of the game.

Ada’s first costume is a deliberately ridiculous rip-off of a stereotypical “spy” outfit. But it looks good on her, dammit! And the red cocktail dress hasn’t gone anywhere. Part of me wants to run RE2-2019 for both of them, just to… Well, to be with them again. Twenty-one bloody years later. For a person who is not familiar with the series and has not seen the original, the story will be completely irrelevant; don’t eat me for saying this, but the plot, to put it mildly, has never been a strong point of Resident Evil – and the remake does not change the situation, although it tries very hard. At the end of the nineties, both Leon and Claire were just low-poly avatars for the player, “guides”, albeit not without a couple of good lines. But in the remake, it’s much more interesting to follow them, if only because they’ve improved a lot. Say what you will, but since 1998, technology (and the idea of video game scenarios) has made a cosmic leap forward. Smooth, believable animations of movements and faces, habits, very “human” voice acting, as opposed to the unintentional replay of ’98, are all on top. Leon and Claire rarely intersect in the course of the plot, but every appearance of a familiar, friendly face in this hell is invariably a joy. You start to empathise with this duo of losers who have won the most sadistic lottery in the world instantly. Leon at times acts and speaks like a green recruit desperately trying to keep his cool, while Claire covers her panic with jokes. Ada Wong and Sherry Birkin were not forgotten: the former also began to behave a little more believably – like a young hired spy, not a Bond veteran.

The essence of survival: Challenges and stresses of Raccoon City

But that’s all lyrics. Whomever you choose, you will have to do the same thing: survive and try to get out of Raccoon City as soon as possible. And this task, as in the original, is far from easy. The whole city is teeming with zombies, there is always not enough space in the inventory, there is never too much ammunition – in short, the greatest providence wants you to stay in the mass grave of Raqqun. Ammunition and medical supplies are important, but often not the most important thing. Without keys, maps, gems, and other even stranger nonsense needed to progress, you won’t get far even in an ambulance, so you’ll not only have to beg, trying to squeeze as much good as possible into your inventory, but also solve myriads of puzzles. Some are logical, some not so much. And to do this, you need to explore, explore and explore again everything around you, while escaping from zombies who have their own plans for you.

And it is in this area that RE2-2019 is most pleasing, because the remake perfectly understands the essence of the original source and imagines where things can be improved without changing the original. After all, at its core, RE2-2019, like RE2-1998, is a marathon test of stressful thinking and the player’s ability to make decisions under increasing psychological pressure. It’s not so much the zombies themselves that scare you as the possible consequences of meeting them – the loss of exhaustible resources. If you let stress get the better of you and regularly make mistakes, mindlessly wasting inventory, eventually the protagonist will not die, but certainly not get out of the city: there will be nothing left to fight with. Although it is worth admitting that in RE2-2019, zombies cause an unpleasant chill down your spine even with their mere appearance. There are not so many unique models in the game, but… How vile they are! Even if they are just standing on the other side of a glazed door, staring with whitish eyes into the void, or pointlessly banging on a boarded-up window. And, believe me, you will be immensely glad that they are banging on the window and not dragging their feet in your direction, because meeting even one zombie is a problem. And there is no right way out of the situation – only compromises that will almost certainly backfire in the future. The remake changes the sequence of some events and adds new details. Now, for example, the player has a real (albeit very primitive) reason to hate the police chief Irons. The most obvious solution is to run. In RE2-1998, it worked like a charm: you make the zombies rush forward, move away from the attack in time, and run off into the sunset at motorbike speed before the creature realises what’s going on. It’s not hard to reel in the rods, even with the tanky controls, once you get the hang of it. But it worked because there was no physics in the game, but in RE2-2019, every movement has weight and inertia. Leon, thank goodness, runs faster than zombies, but the speed advantage is valuable only in open spaces, which are not so much in the game. But in narrow corridors, it is possible to miss the next creature, but it is difficult, and the lightweight (read “human”) controls do not make the task easier.

Survival strategies: Interacting with a changing world

In addition, if you run away, so what? The zombie will stay there – it will be funny if you haven’t picked up an object in the room to which you now have to return. Then the dead man will also follow you if he hesitates – the door is no longer an obstacle. Or he will wander into some corner where it will be even more inconvenient to deal with him: right opposite the safe room with the chest, for example. Wouldn’t it be better to shoot him? Or, at worst, break his legs? Crawling will be much slower and more harmless. The only thing worse than slithers is darkness. The darkness in which you can hear something nearby, but you can’t see it – the flashlight is weak, and it’s hard to look in all directions at once.

Capcom combines cosmetic features with practical ones: zombies walk staggeringly, slowly, uncertainly, unpredictably swaying from side to side. They are simply difficult to hit, and sometimes the shots make them roll back, so you won’t be able to quickly put a few bullets in their heads. And if there are several zombies? At least two or three? This is a huge waste of resources.But even five “headshots” is by no means a guarantee of safety, and for such a decision I want to kiss everyone involved in the development of the remake. In RE2-1998, everything was simple: if a zombie fell down and a pool of blood spread under it, it was done, you could forget it. If you cleared the location, it would remain safe until a plot event triggered a script that would add new enemies. In RE2-2019, a zombie is guaranteed to die only if you crush its skull, but even a shotgun volley doesn’t always do it, let alone a pistol. And as long as the head remains on the shoulders, the zombie has a chance to rise up. In a second, in a few minutes, in half an hour – whenever. Maybe it will only “remember” that it is still alive when you decide to test it with lead.

Fear and Uncertainty: Survival in the World of Resident Evil 2

Now multiply this fact by everything I’ve mentioned above. Do you feel the full extent of the paranoia you have to navigate? You walk into a room you’ve never been in before, see three or four dead bodies on the floor, and know that one of them is still dangerous. But who? It is not profitable to spend bullets to calm everyone down: what if they are just lying there and are already resting? If you kill only one, the others might react to the noise. And what to do? Tiptoe over the corpses, saying: “Excuse me, I have to get off at the next one”?
RE2-2019 never makes you feel completely safe; zombies turn from simple monsters into obstacles that make adjustments to your every move. You have to think not only about how to get to a particular location, but also about the best way to get there. What to sacrifice and what to save. Where are the fewest zombies? Maybe I’ve already knocked some of them over and it will be easier to squeeze through? Yes, but there’s only one here, without legs, so you can’t even touch it. Damn, I still have to get a book from the library, it’s better to stun the crowd with light and noise than to waste money.

This sticky feeling of uncertainty, like a wet T-shirt, increases many times over when Mr X, the Tyrant sent by Umbrella to eliminate the living witnesses of the disaster, is added to the mix. Thanks to modern technology, the big guy now follows you everywhere and reacts quickly to the sounds of gunfire, and lags behind the protagonist only at the moments strictly specified by the plot. And then, as a rule, not for long. And most importantly, the game doesn’t care how you handle it. Playing through RE2-2019 on Hardcore (it’s open right away) as Leon was one of the most nerve-wracking and uncomfortable gaming experiences I’ve ever had. I wanted to stupidly crawl into a corner of a safe room and stare at the map, flip through diaries, look at items in my inventory – in short, anything to avoid going outside. Because Mr X is outside – I can hear his footsteps from the floor above. Because there are zombies outside, crashing through the windows I stupidly left unbattened. Because there are lickers on the way to the library of the precinct, and one of them is blocking the entrance to the armoury – and I’m running low on ammo. The last save was an hour and a half ago, and the station has run out of ribbons for the typewriter, which means there is no second chance to avoid losing an hour and a half of hard-won progress.

I must admit that I was pleasantly surprised when I reached the first boss and simply could not defeat him. I couldn’t physically beat him, not because of the enemy himself, but because of my own short-sightedness. Too little ammunition. Even with the objects scattered around the arena, I lacked firepower: I had used up almost everything I had collected before the fight, and I thought it was nothing. I thought that I would have enough left over, because the game would surely throw more. It wasn’t enough, and the game didn’t care. I made too many mistakes – and I paid the price for it, loading an hour and a half old save with a satisfied smile. Perhaps this moment best shows that RE2-2019 understands its ancestor like no other. And at the same time, the players who fell in love with it.

Resident Evil 2 (2019): High School of Horror and Game Design

Resident Evil 2 is a rare example of an almost flawless rethinking of the material that has been worked on many times. It looks, sounds, and feels so great that the original of more than twenty years ago never dreamed of, but it doesn’t show off its technical superiority. It respects the past immensely, but does not dwell on the past and plays with familiar ideas and moments in its own way.

If the HD remaster of Resident Evil 1 was the best way to get acquainted with the first part, then Resident Evil 2 is the best way to understand why the second one is so loved and respected. It doesn’t matter if you are familiar with the series or not. Old-timers will shed a few tears of gratitude, and newcomers will touch the philosophy of game design that the gaming industry has long forgotten. Stock up on green grass for future reference.

Pros

• perfectly conveyed spirit of the original
• convenience, like in Resident Evil 7
• skilful work with sound and picture
• real stress
• Hunk and Tofu!

Cons

• unpretentious design of bosses
• still no plot
• the game ends sooner or later