Resident Evil 2 Is Extremely Scary and Maybe Too Faithful to the Original

For a long-running series of horror games, it's amusing how funny the Resident Evil franchise often is. It was like that in the very beginning, in 1996's Resident Evil, a game that more or less invented the now popular survival horror genre that utilized scarcity to ratchet up tension: of weapons, of support, of ways to escape. But even as it found new ways for video games to be scary, it also found itself with a surfeit of camp. The voice acting was atrocious, the game's English translation was legendarily clunky, and it opened with live-action footage so kitschy you'd think it came from a Law & Order episode about gamers who murdered their parents.

It's a series of games that, even at their most minimal, are about an evil pharmaceutical company with a small army of secret agents and mercenaries on its payroll, with designs on turning people into unkillable monsters that military contractors might want to buy. Resident Evil games are largely about the horror of corporate indifference, as a single company's pursuit of profit starts to devastate small towns and villages and, eventually, the world. As a result, the games are best when their lenses are at their smallest: 2017's Resident Evil 7 is among the best games in the series for this reason, dialing the scale back to a single family, turned monstrous for something they were powerless to do anything about.

Resident Evil 2—and let's talk about the original 1998 game first—is where things begin to go off the rails, even as it cemented the series as one of the best things in video-game horror. It did all of the things that a game's sequel could possibly do: It was bigger, it was scarier, it was more complex, and it opened the world of the game up, going long on the biological warfare conspiracy mongering that the first reserved for its final act. In the way that it chose to not walk itself back, Resident Evil 2 indulged in an impulse that the series never really shook—the desire to go bigger, always.

So now Resident Evil 2—and this is the new game, the remake out today—finds itself in the strange position of having to continue the franchise's decision to walk itself back that began two years ago, by reimagining the series' point of divergence. The plot is very much the same—Leon S. Kennedy, reporting to his first day of work at the Raccoon City Police Department, arrives to find the city overrun by zombies. On his way there, he runs into Claire Redfield, a college student looking for her brother, Chris—one of the two protagonists of the first Resident Evil, missing since the events of that game. As Leon and Claire, the player investigates the police station and the surrounding area in the hopes of finding help and making it out of the city alive.

The remake is different in ways obvious (the whole game is reworked to place the camera in the player's control, as opposed to the original's static camera angles) and less so (events and locations are remixed and entirely new portions are added, playing your memories against you). The remake is largely good at the same things the original was—the pacing and atmosphere—and bad at them, too (the voice acting could have improved but suffers from the decision to replace the cast with non-union actors).

Resident Evil 2 is a smart reimagining of one of the most well-known games of the past 20 years, even if there isn't anything particularly new about it. It incorporates the greatest hits from all the games that followed the original: an unkillable monster that stalks you through the game, a new camera perspective that changes how you play, and a back-to-basics approach to horror that makes tremendous use of sound, light, and viscera. Ruthlessly efficient, the game is consistently terrifying—on the normal difficulty level, you'll find yourself just shy of the amount of ammo or healing items you need to feel any level of security. It's a calculated approach that results in a game that's hard to turn away from, even for horror chickens like myself.

Here's why I keep playing, though: Survival horror games like Resident Evil aren't just about scares. They're about puzzles. In fact, they're probably more about puzzles than anything else. In a good Resident Evil game, you're presented with a small labyrinth of locked rooms and challenged to either get the hell out or find your way into a part of it that someone really doesn't want you to get to. Good horror games are a series of interesting questions: How do I get into the next room? Why am I here? What went wrong in this place? It's the sort of thing that keeps a game living in your head long after you stop playing for the day.

But there's something bothersome about Resident Evil 2, too, even when you acknowledge how effective it is. It's likely because of what happened to Robert Kendo.

The Kendo Gun Shop is one of the more memorable scenes in the original Resident Evil 2, in which Claire Redfield, taking shelter in a gun store, meets its owner, Robert Kendo, who creepily offers to protect Claire just before zombies crash through the store window and eat him alive. In the remake, Kendo is a father in mourning, holed up in his shop while he waits for his infected daughter to turn completely. When he meets the player—Leon in this game, if you play his scenario first—the shock of meeting another human pushes him out of denial, and after asking you to leave him in peace, he locks himself in a room with his infected daughter and kills himself.

It's the sort of scene that makes you realize that, as impressive a remake Resident Evil 2 is, it could have been more. It could have updated the emotion of the original, and not just its aesthetics and gameplay. It could have brought to the 1998 game a 2019 understanding of people, and not just gameplay systems. I thought I'd be in store for something special after the Kendo Gun Shop. Then I went into the sewers, and blew up a giant alligator.