Video games have changed dramatically over the past 30 years. They have morphed at a staggering pace, genres booming before disappearing into irrelevance, and mechanical conventions becoming so ingrained that we don’t even notice them. There was a grand convergence towards games becoming easier to play and control. Every video game became much like any other, to the point where you would become comfortable moments after settling into your chair.
But does change necessarily mean change for the better? That’s what I wanted to find out when I started the Retro Spectives Podcast. So much of our understanding of these past games is nostalgic, or simply historical. Rarely will you find someone willing to put an old game head to head with a new one, or review it in a modern context, and there are many that reject that notion outright. I understand where they’re coming from - on some level it's fundamentally unfair, judging something by rules that may not have even conceptually existed at the time of the game’s release.
Instead of viewing the changing gaming landscape as evolution and progress, however, we can look at it simply as a shift in artistic style. And once we accept this, judging art entirely by the value of our modern day opinions ceases to be such a radical concept. Mechanics, controls, graphics, storytelling - modern games don’t do it better, they simply do it differently, and we can compare them side by side with older games because of this.
It is a harsh standard of criticism, to be sure. Art being art doesn’t change the fact that more money, time and attention is being pumped into the video game industry than ever before. So it's no surprise that I’ve actively disliked many of the retro games I’ve played over the past two and half years. But every now and then I am exposed to something brilliant, games that if released today could proudly stand shoulder to shoulder with modern titles.
And that is precisely what happened when I played Resident Evil: REmake. On paper, it’s an ugly grab bag of some of the worst mechanics to have existed, but taken together they produce an experience otherwise impossible to have today.
Resident Evil begins with a mission gone very, very wrong. You take the role of Chris or Jill, elite agents for STARS, a special police task force. Another squad, Bravo team, has gone missing during an investigation into a mysterious cannibalistic cult. Your team finds their crashed helicopter, but before you can check it out you are almost immediately attacked by rabid dogs. Chris and Jill are forced to flee for the nearest building, a seemingly abandoned mansion in the middle of nowhere - and are trapped inside. What else is there to do but explore the place and try to figure out what’s going on?
The Spencer Mansion, where most of the game takes place, is a twisted gothic maze. It's filled with death traps, strange puzzles, and many locked doors. Even If the mansion were deserted, it would still be an intimidating and scary place, with its unusual room design and unmarked shortcuts. Lightning flashes momentarily coat the rooms in harsh light, and everywhere you go the ominous soundtrack will put you on edge, the harsh and low violins reminiscent of The Shining.
For a newcomer, however, the most horrifying thing about Resident Evil won’t be the atmosphere, or the evil horrors that lurk within the mansion. Instead, it’s the sinking feeling in your gut that emerges when you first get control of Chris and try to move him around a table. It's the realisation that not only does the game have poor camera controls; it has no camera controls. And its when you’re put in the position of having to somehow get past a zombie that seems to fill the entire width of a hallway that you may just declare the game to be stupid and clunky.
I know this, because it’s exactly how I felt when I started playing. Resident Evil has no strafing and no way to rapidly adjust direction. You’re forced to veer left or right, spin in place, or backpedal like you’re trying to reverse park. And with the fixed camera angles, you can’t even make adjustments to your movement by swinging the camera around. Your movement and orientation feel locked in place, unfairly amplifying the threats in front of you. But the more I played the more I began to understand the purpose of these mechanics.
The first thing to understand is that fixed camera angles and tank controls work in tandem with one another. If your game is going to have 6 camera transitions as you move through a room, then tank controls are the only logical choice. They allow the player to smoothly navigate a room with twists and turns, even while dodging or kiting zombies, because your movement is consistent regardless of where the camera happens to be.
They have value independently of one another as well. If half of the atmosphere of the Spencer Mansion comes from its visual design, the other half is because of the camera angles. They are not placed at random, and they are not placed to give the player the most useful and clear view of what lies in a room. They are instead set artistically, and a trip around the mansion is to be exposed to a hundred different compositions, both to delight and terrify you.
One shot is set low, tilted upwards, the hallway it is pointed down shrinking into the distance. Often you’ll enter a room and have the camera pointed directly at you, with an ominous shape obscuring the lens in the foreground. You will hear zombies long before you see them, making you shake with trepidation at taking even a single step forwards. These camera angles define the spaces in a completely unconventional way, turning the Spencer Mansion into a visual spectacle far beyond what its architecture should allow.
As for those ‘stupid and clunky’ controls? They serve to make the zombies actually feel threatening. Resident Evil is a survival horror game, and your resources for killing the zombies are extremely limited. You start off with 15 bullets, and zombies can take up to 8 bullets to kill. Before you even reach a safe room you’re going to run out of ammo if you try to gun down every zombie in front of you. So at some point you’re going to need to run past them.
With a modern control scheme, this would be absolutely trivial. But when you’re playing with tank controls, it becomes a challenge entirely in itself. You can bait out a lunge, letting you run past, but doing so without getting caught is very difficult. This makes going through every single room with zombies in the game feel like a meaningful experience. It also feels extremely rewarding to clear an area of zombies, because that threat is now permanently dealt with (or so you hope). These are not throwaway enemies to be ignored, mooks that only exist to be filler content - Resident Evil never lets the tension evaporate.
If there is one word that defines the gameplay design of Resident Evil, it is exactly that - Tension. As you play through the game, you are constantly forced into the delicate dance of opportunity cost.
You can shoot the zombies, but you only have a limited amount of ammo. You can kill the zombies, but they might reanimate into something far scarier. You can burn the zombie’s corpse to prevent that from happening, but you only have so much lighter fluid. If you carry around the kerosene, you also have less inventory slots, so maybe you can’t pick up that herb that you found that could heal you. You could heal yourself with that herb, but if you combine it with another herb you’ll get a stronger heal. Except red herbs by themselves are useless, so maybe you should wait before combining two green herbs together. Every resource is precious, and every decision has consequences.
Topping it all off is how the save system works. Resident Evil saves are limited by an inventory item, the ink ribbon, which you can only use at typewriters (the main ones being located in safe rooms). There is no quicksaving or autosaving. You must make a deliberate decision that you’ve made a reasonable amount of progress, then commit to that decision. Psychologically, this can be devastating to wrangle with.
Let's say you leave a safe room and immediately get bitten by a zombie. You heal yourself, go up the stairs, and find some shotgun ammo and a key quest item. You get bitten twice as you explore, but get through a new corridor and find yourself back in the main hall. There’s a typewriter near here, and you’re only 1-2 bites away from death. Your inventory only has one spare slot, you have no idea where that quest item is, and you’re not entirely sure where to go next. So do you save?
Sometimes, the answer is obvious, but most of the time it isn’t. The open ended, metroidvania-like structure of the mansion doesn’t lend itself to neat and clean decision making. In the end, I realised that the game is actually quite generous with how many ink ribbons it gives you, and like in Dark Souls you just have to be prepared to die in order to progress, bit by bit.
In practice, I viewed each excursion from a safe room as an information gathering mission first, and a successful run second. I learned the layout of the mansion, scrawled notes about items and puzzles on my crudely hand drawn map, and figured out what items were actually essential to keep with me as I explored. I might die within two rooms, but at least I could add the details of that room to that map, so that whenever I got the Armor key I’d know where to return.
There is a sense of strategy here. Killing zombies isn’t about shooting your gun, it's about the decision to purposefully kill specific zombies (and burn them) in specific rooms that you frequently move through. Zombies are persistent, and limited - so expending your ammo on them feels justified. You mark down the location of the 3 green herbs you find instead of picking them up, knowing that they’re going to be the target of a future trip. When you are agonising over what to bring from your safebox, you might not take any spare ammo for your shotgun, just the 6 shells inside it - hopefully that’s all you need, and you’ll have more room to collect those essential survival items.
This is the essence of Resident Evil, a constant juggle of life and death. Every death is a lesson learned, and you’ll be far better prepared to navigate your way through the halls next time. You might think that this makes the game feel repetitive, that once you understand where everything is that the game could be played blindfolded. You’d be wrong. For you see - the mansion changes.
Let me tell you a story about a door knob.
There is a safe room that you will use more often than any other in the mansion. It's the most central, is replenished with supplies and has access to everything you need for your journey. Right next to this safe room is a door. When you go through it, a message appears.
The doorknob looks like it's ready to fall apart. Go through anyway?
I mean, what are you to do? Not use that door ever again? So you go through, and nothing happens. Seems you were worried about nothing, and besides, you have far more pressing issues. Like the zombies that keep crashing through the glass windows.
The mansion changes, and the threat level elevates the more you play. At one point, I had a gauntlet of death that had two dogs in an L shaped hallway followed by 5 zombies in a U shaped one. I went through there once, and then resolved to never go that way again. There are many routes you can take through the mansion, and it's up to you to choose the safest one. The map indicated I had looted all those areas, so there was no need to traverse those corridors of death. I was safe.
Until, of course, that bloody door knob broke.
In a game where you are trying to deliberately plan everything, there is nothing worse than having that plan thrown into complete disarray. I did not have hundreds of bullets. I did not have an endless supply of healing items. I had not carefully and strategically taken down those zombies in those narrow corridors. And I had certainly not unlocked the shortcut that would have made this whole situation irrelevant. I didn’t even know what was at the end of the death march I was embarking on.
I made a plan. I used a save on the dining room typewriter, which I had otherwise barely used. I would bring the shotgun for the dogs, since trying to kill them with the pistol earlier had not worked out at all. I brought some kerosene, but would try to kill no more than two zombies and burn them both. And I brought some healing items, feeling that taking damage was inevitable. I took no keys, no quest items with me - this was a mission of murder.
My first attempt I got swarmed by the zombies, and eaten. Turns out 5 zombies in a narrow, looping corridor was not an easy thing to overcome. My second attempt was better - I got through the corridor, with some damage taken - but then I didn’t have the item I needed to progress. I rolled my eyes and let my face get chewed to bits. Attempt 3 I was finally successful, and I was proud of myself for getting through it. The zombies were not defeated, but I was one step further, and if I was very lucky I might not have to return.
Let's recap what happened. I made a strategic decision to not clear up an area of zombies because I wanted to save ammo. That area got way more dangerous when more zombies crashed through the windows, and I decided to avoid it altogether. Then, I was forced into re-entering those rooms. I had to itemise correctly, and make a plan to get through there. I failed a couple of times in execution, gained some information, and finally succeeded. It made me engage with all the risk/reward systems in the game. And how did Resident Evil achieve all of this?
It broke a fucking door handle.
The trials and tribulations I went through were not scripted or bombastic, and certainly were not something I expected. The situation had entirely dynamically emerged from how I had decided to play the game. The baseline mechanics of Resident Evil are so strong, the tension between everything so taut and perfect, that a simple thing like a door not working can completely change the terms of engagement. If you want a single sign that this game is a straight up masterpiece, all you need to do is look at that door knob.
This is not the entirety of the Resident Evil experience. You eventually leave the mansion and venture to the surrounding parts of the property, like the giant shark tank that comes included by default in most country villas. It remains enjoyable from start to finish, but never quite reaches the highs of those first few hours spent blindly trying to survive. When you are granted the power of the magnum, and can dispose of enemies with ease, something is lost - cathartic as it is to blast Hunters to death.
And while the lore of Resident Evil is fascinating, the presentation is mediocre at best. If the gameplay mechanics preserve the string of tension beautifully, the cutscenes and interactions awkwardly slash it in half. But as soon as that cutscene ends, and you’re placed back in control, your situation starts to sink in again, and you start worrying about your next step.
I know that Resident Evil isn’t some underground franchise that no-one has ever heard of. I know many people have already sung its praises to high heaven. But it wasn’t until I played it that I began to fully appreciate that its flaws were not actually flaws at all. The very things that people cite as problems with the game are the exact reason that Resident Evil is as brilliant as it is.
Understanding the game holistically is the key. If Resident Evil was an action game in the vein of Devil May Cry, I wouldn’t enjoy its controls. If Resident Evil was a puzzle game, I would hate its limited inventory space to pieces. But all of its seemingly ‘outdated’ design choices put together produce a remarkably tight and sophisticated survival horror game that still stands the test of time to this day.
Before I played this game, I wouldn’t consider myself a fan of the survival horror genre. Now, I am one, and I’m eagerly looking forward to what comes next. I can only hope that the many things that make the game amazing have not been sacrificed on the altar of player comfort.
