RESIDENT EVIL HD REMASTER (GAME)

 

RESIDENT EVIL

We’re used to feeling like the centre of attention in games, like the whole world revolves around us. But Resident Evil’s zombie-plagued mansion doesn’t care about you. It’s a place where death lurks around every prerendered corridor, and if you stumble into one of its sadistic traps or undead denizens, bad luck. It’s back to the main menu with you, and you better hope you saved. Resident Evil doesn’t hold your hand: it rips it off and eats it.

This is a remastered version of a remake of the original 1996 game, which was released for the Nintendo GameCube in 2002. It retains the fixed cameras, rendered backgrounds and tank controls of Mikami’s pioneering survival horror game, but mixes a few things up. If you know the Spencer mansion from the PlayStation game inside out, there are plenty of surprises. But if you’ve never played the original, this is the best place to start. Even though it’s 13 years old (and based on a 19-year-old game), it’s worth it.

You can play as one of two characters, each of whom has their strengths and weaknesses (see ‘His and Hers’ below). There are no respawning items in the atmospheric haunted house setting, so it becomes a game about management: knowing when to fight, when to run away and conserve ammo, and whether to use a health item now or save it for later.

Even your saves are finite. The term is regularly misused, but Resident Evil really is a survival horror game. Every wasted bullet or typewriter ribbon (which are used to save) could come back to haunt you later. Even defeated zombies can be a problem, springing back to life as more powerful ‘crimson heads’. You’ll have to devote time and resources to burning their corpses to avoid this.

Low Resi

The remastering isn’t as good as I’d hoped. I thought they might have dug the original pre-rendered backgrounds out of some dusty archive and presented them at a higher and previously unseen resolution, but it seems as if they’ve just added a filter to the existing GameCube files. As a result it doesn’t look spectacular, especially on larger monitors, but the lighting and atmosphere make up for it. Light sources in the world illuminate your character as you move past them, which does a surprisingly good job of fooling your brain into thinking these are 3D spaces rather than static backgrounds.

The mansion is a wonderfully eerie setting, and the fixed cameras, although archaic, actually add to the tension. The game uses blind corners to great effect, and you’ll often hear the groan of a zombie before you see it. This makes you play cautiously as you creep through the dingy corridors. Sometimes the camera will be peering at you through a window or floating above you, which gives you an uneasy feeling of being watched. Rather than be hamstrung by their two dimensional limitations, the developers have used them to make a really effective horror game.

With hardcore survival games frequently topping the Steam charts, Capcom couldn’t have picked a better time to revive Resident Evil. It’s a punishing, but immensely satisfying game, even if the ‘remaster’ isn’t as dramatic as the title suggests. If you can’t stomach the tank controls there’s a new analogue option that works really well with a controller, but the keyboard and mouse controls are pretty clunky. This was a game originally designed for a Nintendo console after all.