Battle of the Remakes: Silent Hill 2

  

        So we’re finally at the release of the Silent Hill 2 Remake and the end of my belated battle of the remakes posts. Now that I have played it to the end and given it a week to marinate, I’d like to sit here and answer some frequently asked questions about the remake. But before that, a few disclaimers. (1) I’m a huge fan of the original, it's one of my favorite games ever. Not to say I think it’s perfect, it is not, but anything I will say will be from the perspective of a fan. (2) Spoilers abound to talk about any and all changes to the characters and story, but I will try and be conservative about it. (3) Opinions on the remake have been moderately varied so your mileage will vary, (4) this will be a long review, and (5) I'm not really gonna talk about the anti-woke psychos on the internet engaging with this game or the unhinged fanbase but I look forward to seeing them all in hell. With that out of the way...

Is it good?

Yes. On its own merits, the remake tells a good story and tells it well, it looks great, sounds great, plays great, and so forth. The team at Bloober should all feel proud of themselves. I enjoyed playing it and would recommend it to others. Silent Hill 2 (2024) is worth your time and money, especially on a sale. 

Is it better than the original?

Probably not, no. Silent Hill 2 (2001) is a masterpiece that, while flawed, is a phenomenal exploration of psychological horror that has yet to be matched in the medium. The remake gets decidedly close though. The same point I gave to the remake of Resident Evil 4 I give here. For every change that I like, there’s a change I dislike so it's about the same in quality overall. That sounds deflating but making something as good as one of the best games of all time is not nothing. It is actually an achievement worthy of celebration. While the two versions are not interchangeable I will question which I play in the future when I have a desire to experience Silent Hill 2 again. Although, Silent Hill 2 (2001) was a tent pole title and standard for horror moving forward and that historical importance can not really happen twice, especially in just modernizing the old game. Speaking of which…

Is it soulless? 

Look, pal. I do not know how you use this word to refer to games or art in general, but I am going to define how I’m going refer to it here. A game is typically referred to as soulless if it’s a cash grab or has little to no “care” in it. As for the former, I get the argument, and not just because I made it last year. Developer Bloober team and publisher Konami needed this game to change their reputation so it was something that needed to make money and do well to turn public perception around. Cranking out a remake of one of the famed games of the PS2 era and modernizing it to a state of homogeneity with other 9th-generation AAA titles seems like a soulless way to do that rather than go all in on a new vision. Then again, such a situation kind of necessitates a substantial amount of care and for what it’s worth Bloober team has put a shit ton of care into this game. For all their buzzword-filled sentiments in trailers about how the game is “true to the original but modernized” there’s clearly a deep love of the original with enough care to make this a good release. It has not been half-assed in the slightest. Except for some stutters on PC because of the Unreal Engine, it’s a game polished to a mirror shine. So while I can hear the argument, I cannot say full-heartedly that Silent Hill 2R is a soulless product. Bloober has also been, for the most part, pretty intelligent with what to change and what to keep the same. Speaking of… 

Has the story changed?
Not in any substantive way. Every story beat is the same and some of the game’s cutscenes are word for word the exact same. I think the lead writer, Andrzej Madrzak, showed a tremendous amount of restraint in his edits. Really the biggest difference is that they’re all a little bit longer and some lines are re-worded and extended. Likewise, some new cutscenes are added and I typically found them to be kind of unnecessary. Not to say that they were bad just doesn’t really make Silent Hill 2 better. Of the three new scenes, I thought the scene with Angela in the park was good, the one with Maria in a different park was pointless, but the big one I liked was the new scene in Heaven’s Night. Having more skilled actors and with more advanced technology, the characters can convey more nuance even in their faces. In the aforementioned scene, Luke Roberts’ James Sunderland conveys a complicated history with alcohol solely with silence and his face which I greatly enjoyed. Those smaller changes like that scene, James’ building more rapport with Laura, and breaking down crying in one of the endings all felt like smart changes. Maybe not needed, but smart.

I will say that I generally like the endings more here than before. More naturalistic conversations and more content for the optional endings felt less game-y and did serve to genuinely move me. For example, the original James confronting Maria at the end of the game says “It’s time to end this nightmare” in a really stilted way that even in a game full of stilted deliveries that work, this one just goes a little too far. It feels like House of the Dead where the final boss would awkwardly announce “This is the final battle!” In the new one, James has a more determined, but pleading tone and says "This has to stop."

On the other hand, a majority of the more naturalistic line delivery in the 2024 version isn’t better but isn’t worse than the old game’s psychotically wooden delivery. This delivery in the original was because most of the actors were just the first white people to walk into Konami’s Japanese headquarters for auditions. Maybe not the way it should have been done, but it did give the game’s dialogue a surreal quality that generally, but not always, worked in the game’s favor when even the people you meet isolate you. Not to say there was no craftsmanship in the original actors. There was. By the end of the original game, Mary/Maria’s actor has shown a crazy amount of range and emotion that doesn’t really survive the remake. Speaking of…

Do the updates to the characters and their new actors work?

For the most part. Opinions will vary on the actors because none of them are bad, they’re just a different take and performance from the original actors. That said, I think Salóme Gunnarsdóttir’s interpretation is the one that genuinely loses something in the transition. Salóme Gunnarsdóttir nails Maria’s detached and flat delivery but still manages a convincingly seductive tone with that, but what she lacks is the venom the original had that made her feel like something malevolent. Without this or the bouncing between Mary and Maria’s voices that Monica Horgan managed in the original, I cannot help but feel like a layer of complexity has been lost. I don’t share these sentiments about the rest of the cast, for the most part. Scott Haining’s Eddie may come off as too sinister from too early, but I generally like the new versions of Angela, Laura, and Salóme Gunnarsdóttir’s Mary. Those takes are different, but maybe not better or worse. 

Which brings us to Luke Robert’s James Sunderland. Luke Roberts is phenomenal. I was very quickly won over by the amount of work he puts in with his face and motion capture as well as his voice. But his James is a different character than Guy Cihi’s original take. Guy Cihi’s James was awkward and distant to the point where there was clearly something wrong with him, which is good. You get the vibe that maybe he had given up on his life already. Luke Roberts’ James is naturalistic but always looks like he’s on the verge of crying, which I liked. Gives off the vibe of a guy who has one thing left to keep him going. Relatedly, Luke Roberts does cry in one of the endings which I don’t know if Guy Cihi could do as convincingly. Then again I don’t think Luke Roberts could land some of the delivery of some of James' lines that even he sounds like he doesn’t believe. I like them both equally and couldn’t pick a favorite.

Recent remakes tend to minimize the soundtrack, does this game do that?

No. The game’s soundtrack is still there and beautifully remixed by Akira Yamaoka. It may be a little quieter and there are undoubtedly mods that put the original tracks with their original volume back in. But the soundtrack is necessary to get the atmosphere across so it couldn’t have been altered as heavily. Speaking of… 

Does the atmosphere survive?

To an extent. The sound design in the remake is superb as is the visual design. The town feels abandoned, gross, diseased, and there’s always something visually or audibly interesting going on to break the silence. Whether it be whispers in the apartment buildings that are just soft enough that you can’t be sure they’re really there or the tight sheets wrapped around buildings in the dark of night, there’s always something to unnerve you. More than these things being scary, these design choices make the game feel claustrophobic and drowning. The original had this sense of atmosphere too and it made it unique among the horror landscape. But the original also carried with it a more isolated vibe where you felt truly alone that doesn’t quite make the transition. 

The original felt more detached. The abandoned town was watching over you from a distance and waiting for the player to explore all of its horrors where even the land itself was diseased. Now, the vibe the game gives off is a town that’s a bit more hostile. Part of that is the new action-oriented camera. Perhaps a more pointed example of this tone shift is towards the end of sections where you’re exploring the city streets. When it’s time to move on into a building, a harsh wind will blow, with shit flying everywhere, and in one section a horde of monsters emerges from the fog. This feels far more hostile. The town is actively trying to push you and attack you for daring to think otherwise. Maybe this vibe isn’t worse because the panic of the weather change and increase in monsters is still scary just in a different way from the druggy and detached vibe the “””liminal””” atmosphere of the original accomplished. Just empty bloodied streets with the distant noises of monsters. Monsters that by the way are more hostile now and will attack more aggressively. Speaking of…

Has the combat gone too far into pure action?

Silent Hill 2’s lead, James Sunderland, is just some asshole. He’s not a military super soldier, or a grizzled scavenger, or whatever. He’s an office clerk. I don’t think the guy has ever even seen a gun before. So we accepted that when combat in the original was kind of shitty it served dual purposes. A) it made sense context-wise B) It helped the sense of vulnerability. But don’t let it be said that the original’s combat was perfect, it wasn’t. As I said, it was kind of shitty. Primarily because nothing you ever hit had weight to it and bashing a thing with a stick with no feedback was both lame and boring. Not to mention the point-blank shooting fight with Eddie. Here, combat is a lot more of a Resident Evil affair with much of the same controls and third-person camera of the recent RE remakes. I found the combat to be enjoyable and visceral without it feeling like a power fantasy. I never had enough bullets to mow anything down in my playthrough and every swing from James Sunderland of a melee weapon made it seem like he was gonna pass out with the way he was screaming as he did it. James still is just some asshole.

Boss fight of the original Silent Hill 2 where you enjoy a brief point-blank standoff

The camera is the biggest point of difference between the original, which had a more distant angle than the third-person standard one in the remake. Look, I agree with the sentiment that the farther-back camera helped with the atmosphere, as I mentioned above, but I never loved the original camera. I always thought it was serviceable but fucking unwieldy in so many areas and required me to manually fix it by holding down a shoulder button. There are some good camera angles the original gives the player but I don’t think any of the shots from the original. 

 The restraint Bloober’s combat designers showed with the commitment to the original game’s weapons selection and enemy variety is commendable. Even if they can do more attacks now. The gameplay of Silent Hill 2 (2024) strikes the perfect balance where it isn’t clunky and frustrating without ever going into pure action-power fantasy. The boss fights too are pretty intense and fit the horror theme. However, the combat doesn’t work in the few sections where more than 3 enemies are thrown at you at once. The prison especially was ridiculously packed with mannequin enemies. By the time it was over the floor was covered in the fucking things and I couldn’t help but remark how absurd that was. That many enemies threaten to become more annoying than scary, and while I never found it to cross that line it would not be hard to imagine it doing so for others. On the other hand, I get you need more combat to fill in the space between these larger areas. Speaking of… 

I heard the game is double the length. Does the game feel bloated? 

I would not go so far as to say the game is bloated or overly padded. That said, this more than any point here will depend on your tolerance, but for me, I thought it was fine. There are more rooms to explore and sections are longer, but it is spread out enough that no one area feels like a chore (maybe except for the hospital). The bigger areas gave me two feelings that might be bad for any game that wasn’t in the horror genre; (1) when I enter a place I feel overwhelmed by its size, and (2) by the time I was wrapping up I felt a panicky “I gotta get out of here” kind of vibe. This also meant that I was relieved to leave the area, which I felt helped the pacing immensely.

Not to say these additions were necessary. Silent Hill 2 did not need more rooms to explore or longer hallways. The most succinct way I can put it is with the soundtrack. When James meets Maria for the first time, the song in the 2001 game is titled “Null Moon.” In the 2024 version, this track is called “Beneath the Null Moon.” No, those two extra words do not ruin the song or the game, but whats the fucking point? The entire game feels like that. Any new content is not needed and I can’t say the game is better or worse but there sure is more of it.  

How do you feel about Bloober handling Remakes of Silent Hill 1, 3, and 4? Any last thoughts on the recent crop of Remakes?

Now, when the question comes up of which game they should remake next, Silent Hill 1, 3, or 4? My answer is probably none of them, but 4 would be fine. Interest in the series has been revitalized. congratulations. But, you can just re-release the originals at this point without having to go through this whole hoopla again. Part of my reason for saying that is that 1 and 3 are more subject to change because of their less rabid fanbases, so the careful process of remaking 2 might not be repeated. But more importantly, I would prefer a new horror game learning the lessons of Silent Hill (2024) rather than just another Silent Hill game. If companies keep focusing their resources on remakes then less go into brand-new experiences and the new instant-classics will be fewer and farther between.

I also think there’s a lot of value in putting the originals on modern platforms. If that’s even what people want. These remakes do not justify aversion to porting/emulating the original due to laziness/fear either from the developer/player. Then again, even if a game is in its original form, original resolution and all, and gets an official release on Steam, a lot of people do not want it. Metal Gear Solid was released on Steam with the original resolution and aspect ratio last year, but with a strategy guide and soundtrack, for 15-20 bucks. Half the negative reviews for one of the greatest games of all time and one of the most important for the evolution of the art form are just “It’s the original PlayStation game. No changes. Thumbs down.” But that’s game preservation! That’s what we want!

The OG game being sold in 2023, much to the chagrin of idiots

My other reason for not wanting more remakes is that these games all look and play the same. Silent Hill 2 (2001) and Resident Evil 4 (2005) are both important horror games of the sixth generation but are nothing alike. The 2023/2024 versions, however, have the same 3rd person ranged combat with a stun mechanic by shooting for the knee which can be used for a follow-up close-range attack, using the same controls, the same sections of squeezing through walls, parts where you push things to a painted ledge that point you in the right direction, and so forth. These things are also present in a million other games. Final Fantasy VII, God of War, Metal Gear Solid, Silent Hill, Resident Evil, The Last of Us, Guardians of the Galaxy, and so on to infinity. 20 years ago these games did or would have had extremely different gameplay and art styles. In the 2020s, these games all have the same art style with a fair amount of mechanics shared between them. Remakes and new games have managed a state of bland hegemony. I don’t want every old thing I liked to be uniform to every other fucking AAA 70-dollar game I play. Not only is this antithetical to the preservation of game history. Not only does it make once unique games blander. But it is also more selective than just porting the games or having them on an official emulator. 

Resident Evil 4 (2023)

Nintendo, for example, has put several Gamecube games on the Switch in HD like Pikmin 1 + 2, Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door, Metroid Prime, etc., and some third-party developers have done this as well. Some people prefer this to just dumping them on the NSO emulator but not me. While I appreciate a lot of these games are getting put into widescreen with resolution bumps, and some even more touch-ups, this is inevitably going to exclude some Gamecube games never coming over. The original Animal Crossing, for instance, is a good game and some people prefer it to the newer games but Animal Crossing: New Horizons just with less stuff and meaner villagers is not going to be a good enough sell to justify a 20 dollars HD re-release. This goes for most Gamecube Mario Party, Mario Sports, Wario Ware, etc. games that have newer versions that seemingly replace the older ones for most people despite the fact that those old games have an immense amount of value. Silent Hill 4: The Room has good ideas but is bad, should it be dumped into the dustbin of history because a remake wouldn't turn a profit?

Relatedly, any game that gets remade should be one with good ideas but is kind of bad, or a game that would be good were it not for one glaring issue. I don’t mind the Dead Rising remaster/remake because the original’s survivor AI was bad and really ruined the game for me. Fixing that doesn’t fundamentally change the game. Silent Hill 4: The Room has some good ideas about a ghost serial killer who really wants your apartment, but is bad. Taking that good idea, getting rid of most everything else, and giving it another go would be welcomed because it would be so different to practically constitute a new game and I wouldn't care about the homogeneity as much when applied to a game that sucked. Both old games should still be available but I wouldn’t mind either of these remakes in particular. 

Should I play this game? (summary)

Whether it is your first time with Silent Hill 2 or you’re a hardcore fan, I do think there is something worth seeing and playing in the remake. As a hardcore fan, I am happy this exists. I like having a remix of a favorite game even as a novelty. It is also nice to see so many new people trying a Silent Hill game. It’s fun and it's scary, it’s moving, depressing, and exhausting. Silent Hill 2 (2024) is what any good horror game should be, and while I don’t think it is better than the original, there’s no shame in being about as good as one of the best games ever released. While I like some of the changes more and some less than the original, on its own merits, Silent Hill 2 is nothing short of a phenomenal video game that I think would be worth people's time and money. Flaws and all, this shit rules. But with that said, I don’t want Silent Hill 2 to be one and done. I want new great horror games with these bigger budgets that use this as a jumping-off point to build weird new ideas that horrify and excite me. I don’t want the older Silent Hill games to be brought up to modern hegemony, even if all the positive things said in this review remain true. 

5/5

Oh This shit Rules

Crow Country

If you’re a guy who has talked to me in real life ever, you’ll know I enjoy the classic horror games of the late nineties and early 2000s, most exemplified by the Silent Hill and Resident Evil series on the PlayStation and the PS2. So, when the Super Flash Bros, developers of everyone’s favorite Switch launch title Snipperclips, announced a throwback game to it that showed well in trailers, I was interested. And hey, the Silent Hill 2 remake has yet to come out and Resident Evil is more action-focused at times, so a deliberate throwback may scratch an itch for classic “”””analog””” horror. Thus, I played through all of Crow Country in a night, and I have some thoughts.

Crow Country’s gameplay and plot will really come as no surprise to anyone who’s into the genre. A young woman shows up at an abandoned place to find a person, will have to avoid monsters as much as they do fight them because of limited supplies, and must find a crank of some kind to put in a crank-shaped hole or whatever. Specifically, Mara Forest shows up at the titular theme park to find the owner and discover the mysterious reasons behind the sudden closure of the park years ago. You roam around the park, find papers on the floor that tell you hints about puzzles and in-game lore, and collect items to unlock new parts of the park. All the while avoiding or fighting gross monsters and unlocking new weapons to do so. If you want any major point of difference between it and the games it's riffing on, it is that Crow Country has free aiming and full 3D camera control instead of a fixed camera angle and auto aim. 

I thought Crow Country was fine. Gameplay-wise I think it satisfyingly gets the itch for looking at papers on the floor and solving bizarre puzzles that always lead one to ask “Why would anybody build anything like this.” For example, If you accidentally locked yourself in a control room you wouldn’t build dice-faced pressure plates into the floor to step on in a particular order to get out. All that’s par for the course, but my two biggest gripes with the gameplay are the enemies and traps. Littered around the park are wall spikes, chandeliers of spikes, foot traps that release toxic gas, standing traps that release toxic gas when you walk past them, etc. Most of the time I was damaged it was by these things. They are everywhere and my issue with them, emblematic of the game as a whole, is that it is not scary. Traps that just spritz green febreze at you and need an antidote don’t really make me jump or create an interesting environment that feels hostile at every turn, it's just annoying. 

Similarly, the monsters are more annoying than scary. Their designs and functions are pretty rote and I never found them to be fucked up in the way I wanted. And by that, I mean, with one exception I never fought or engaged with, I never asked myself “Oh god what is that? what does it do? And how dead am I being near this thing?” That’s a great feeling for horror games. Every time there’s a new Lethal Company update, for example, I love playing with my friends, seeing a fucked up-looking thing, and going “Oh what the fuck is that!” I never felt that with Crow Country and you can avoid so many of the monsters. I found them to be more annoying than scary. Furthermore, the monsters don’t evolve really. 40 minutes in, of a four-hour game, so do that math however you want, I felt confident I had seen every monster design the game has and that any new one wouldn’t be a heavy enough deviation for me to be scared or interested or thrilled. Even the ones you do see never deviate from a red-goo look that at the end of the day just kind of looks like nothing.

The same goes for the environments, more or less. Horror, of any medium, lives and dies on pacing. The mastery of the genre is in build-up and intrigue. For example, in Resident Evil 2, by the time the player has been through the map enough times, the player becomes comfortable with moving around in it. It no longer is as scary as it was. The game solves this by throwing an indestructible monster after you. Silent Hill starts having transitions to an alternate dimension where the map's layouts change and the plot rises to have footage of burn victims kept alive by psychic hatred and characters bleeding to death spontaneously in front of you. My point is, you get the layout of Crow Country’s map pretty quickly and the game never sufficiently throws in new threats or cranks up the horror of the plot as time goes on to compensate. This is exacerbated by the upgrades you’ll get trivializing combat that is otherwise perfectly functional. Not to mention if you’ve been paying attention to the memos stapled to dogs or whatever, none of the story beats will come as a surprise. Even some plot twists you’ll probably see coming from anywhere as soon as 60 minutes in. By the end, without spoiling anything, I was confused about what the game was trying to accomplish emotionally with the story. 

Look, I know a lot of this seems harsh, and it is, but I did like some of Crow Country. The gameplay updates to the formula, like a third-person camera felt like smart ways to get the most out of the environment by having the player really look for ammo and health pickups around every corner. The controls having a dedicated slowly step backwards button was smart and the free aiming allows for more nuance in combat even if I found myself wasting a few shells trying to aim. The soundtrack and sound design are also strengths the game has. There are appropriate horrified moans and squelching where need be, and while I don’t know if I’ll be listening to the soundtrack while I study, it worked for the areas it was in. Finally, for every complaint I have about the game plateauing really early on, there usually is something interesting to see as the game goes on even if minor. 

Battle of the Remakes: Resident Evil 4

  Last time on this blog nobody reads, I discussed my concerns for two remakes of genre-defining horror games from the sixth generation. Now that one has been released, I want to discuss Resident Evil 4. As much as I should discuss Resident Evil 4 on its own merits, fuck that. To be clear they are both great games and get perfect scores from me if you’re into numbers, but I will be spending most of my time comparing it to the original release. How has the gameplay and plot changes affected the transition? The two games are still pretty similar. Both are Resident Evil 4. The 2023 release is not “like a completely separate game.” At the end of the day it's the same, fucking awesome, game.

Resident Evil 4 (2023) vs Resident Evil 4 (2005)

Six years after the whole being in Resident Evil 2 kind of thing, Leon Kennedy arrives in the same region of Europe that still uses pesetas looking for the president of the United States’ daughter, Ashley. She has been kidnapped by a cult planning to do some resident evil type shit by infecting the region with a horrible virus that turns people into zombies, monsters, and sometimes zombie monsters. You spend most of the game running around the area shooting villagers, roundhouse-kicking monsters, and collecting treasure to buy new weapons. There are, of course, some classic Resident Evil puzzles of finding strangely shaped keys to fit into strangely shaped holes. Like finding the statue heads of different animals to slot into a statue to open a wooden door, for example. Both games keep this basic framework. 

So what's changed? The 2023 release swaps the tank controls of the original release for the familiar third-person action game controls that most people are used to. To compensate for the improved movement, the enemies are faster and a bit stronger. You still get to shoot them in certain spots to daze them which can lead to a follow-up melee attack with some splash damage thrown in there for a fun bonus. The controls are more modern and it’ll depend if you prefer them. On the one hand, it's nice to move freely but the combat isn’t any more intense than it was back in 2005. If anything, having to stop moving to shoot or stop shooting to move made it an interesting choice you had to make when being surrounded by enemies, which isn’t really here anymore. 

You do get new moves in this game too. There’s a stealth kill, which makes a lot of sense. Areas of the original were open enough but with enemies that didn’t notice you immediately. That said, you can’t just stealth kill your way to clear a room. No area in the game is designed for that. But it can lead to fewer bullets used when everyone does notice you and shit hits the fan. You also get a parry move, blocking incoming damage from most weapons. However, all these new moves degrade your knife and you have to choose whether you want your knife to whittle down or break just to save on health or ammo. Speaking of choices, the other new gameplay mechanic is minor crafting. Gunpowder and "resources" (which is just a sack full of metal) can drop from enemies and be found stuffed into pieces of furniture. Combining them makes different types of ammo depending on the amount. While it could be annoying, it isn’t. What ammo to craft depending on the enemies you’ve been fighting and your play style is a welcome option with a simple crafting mechanic. Perhaps you prefer using a shotgun for close combat or moving away from enemies and just using a rifle to take them out. The game now gives you the option to create ammo to fit your play style. Simple mechanics like one-button parries and two-item crafting make it so you have more choices, which is great. Overall, I’d say generalized gameplay is better in the remake because of those choices that make up for the removal of some fight-or-flight choices. 

    That said tons of minor changes to set pieces have been done that I don’t know if they add up to positives. The boss fights with “It,” the bit with the Salazar statue chase, the crane game, the laser room, the lava room, the dozer section, the underground ruins, the bit with the truck driving at you, and so on have been cut. The mine cart section, the section in the canyon, and most of the cutscenes have all been shortened. Some things have replaced these sections like a tiny fire-breathing Salazar statue and a wrecking ball instead of the chase and king of the hill dozer sections respectively. On the one hand, these changes make the game a bit shorter, for my playtimes at least, and lead to a tighter game without much faffing about. One of my complaints on the 2005 release was that it was a little bit long for my liking and cutting some non-essential stuff down or just out makes sense. The game’s pacing doesn’t really suffer from these cuts. 

That said, those weird bits in the game were fun. I liked shooting a dude in the driver’s seat of a truck as he floored it toward me, I liked running away from a weird statue, and I liked the bits where the game would pause so Leon Kennedy and the villains would roast each other. It was just fun. I can’t help but feel like with a lot of fun bits taken out that Resident Evil 4 Remake is blander because of it. Also, the core combat is better here but I found it can get a bit more repetitive without those bits to break up the standard area clearing out gameplay. Some bits that were added also make the game blander. For example, there’s a section where Leon is dying and slowly walks while staggering through a room. Like that bit in Batman Arkham City, Dead Space, Gears of War, Spec-Ops: The Line, Spider-Man: Miles Morales, etc. Or the new exciting bits where you squeeze through a narrow crack in the wall like in God of War 2018, The Last of Us, Uncharted, Guardians of the Galaxy, etc. Tons of modern cinematic techniques used in a game so action-focused just made me roll my eyes. They are overused to the point that those tropes lose all effectiveness. All those small changes are still small, but they add up to a slightly different experience that I can’t confidently say is for the better. 

    The game’s tone is also a bit different. Everything is a bit more serious now and played a lot less like a B-level horror movie. I found the results of this to be mixed. The secondary villain Krauser is less cartoonish, more threatening, more memorable, and has a motivation that’s more easily understandable. His boss fights as well are better this time around by being centered around parrying instead of quick time events. However, another secondary villain, Salazar, is much worse. He has less screen time, less fun things to say, has a worse boss fight, and is just generally less memorable this time around. The main villain suffers much of the same fate. In fact, I don’t know if the game ever implicitly or explicitly states his endgame in the 2023 release. Luis, a side character, gets better motivation and screen time on the other hand.

All the characters worked in the 2005 release but they were different. Ashley is more of a screaming girl in a horror movie originally, and now she’s more serious and calm. Ada Wong seems more regretful of her actions with a bigger attraction to Leon rather than just a strict femme fatale. The mysterious allegiance of Ada in the original worked for its cheesy vibe and the more serious tone in the remake has an Ada that’s more complex and better suited for that tone. It makes more sense to keep a more serious tone especially if we’re going for an altered Resident Evil canon in the remakes. But the 2005 release was a stand-alone title, more or less, and the 2023 remake makes some characters way more boring. I’m not confident in saying that the remake’s tone is better, you just gotta pick which one you prefer.

    That’s how I feel overall about Resident Evil 4 Remake. Both are excellent games with stellar gameplay and a more jovial tone than most AAA games right now that will be worth your purchase. Especially once the remake matches the price of the original over time from price drops and sales. I think in the future I’ll play the original over the remake. The remake is more mechanically interesting, more serious, tighter, and has some smarter characterization. The original is more fun in tone and characterization, has more content, and is more important to video games as an art form. Of course, the newer one also looks better, but you can get the old graphics with an HD texture mod on PC so take your pick really. In many ways, I would consider it a success that Resident Evil 4 doesn’t have a definitive version post-remake. Except for the Zeebo release of course

5/5

Oh this shit rules

Resident Evil 4 on the Brazillian console, The Zeebo