Resident Evil 4 is ten years old.
Say that with me. Roll that around in your head a little. Weird right? Resident Evil 4 (RE4) is a decade old, and yet, it’s pretty much the last classic horror game. Think about it, modern big-budget horror is twitchy and action-focused, with games like Dead Space and the modern Resident Evil titles. Meanwhile indie horror games have taken to the smaller, more psychologically-focused experiences like what you’d find in Amnesia: The Dark Descent, or Lone Survivor.
But the classic blend of action and horror gameplay is pretty much dead, and it’s all Resident Evil 4’s fault.
I’d blame it on this guy too, but it seems like he has enough problems going on in his life, what with all the needles. [Capcom]
That’s not to say Resident Evil 4 is bad. Far from it. RE4 is a classic in the best sense of that word. Most games, especially big, genre-defining ones, don’t hold up past their vintage. Very few games age like wine, and instead, most age like fruit – they have a shelf life, and then they’re basically done. That goes doubly for very important games. GoldenEye 007 and Grand Theft Auto III are seminal games in their respective genres, but they’re both almost unplayable by modern standards.
Resident Evil 4 though, stands out as not only being pretty much the best action-horror game of the last ten years (possibly by the virtue of being one of the only action-horror games of the last 10 years) but also defining the third-person shooter genre in ways game design hasn’t moved past in a decade.
RE4 was the first game to adopt the over-the-shoulder perspective in a third-person shooting game. Uncharted, Gears of War, and even the Batman: Arkham games owe their very existences to Resident Evil 4. It’s patient zero for that entire genre of games, and while someone else could have theoretically done it first, they didn’t, and now everyone borrows RE4’s mechanics.
That’s part of what helps it hold up so well – we haven’t moved very far past it. Horror games however, haven’t moved forward so much as they’ve moved elsewhere. Modern horror has gone in two very different directions, and neither is picking up the torch RE4 lit 10 years ago. Because Resident Evil 4 nailed it the first time out, and there’s nothing left to do now.
RE4’s opening is still spectacularly spooky, even if there’s a giant note about new HD textures floating overhead. [Capcom]
Modern Resident Evil is a pretty good test case for what happened to big-budget horror – it became a theme. Resident Evils 5 and 6 are twitchy, trigger happy shooters. There’s no way around that. RE4 opens in a moody, foggy forest littered with bear traps and creepy noises. RE6 opens in a warzone, with helicopters and a city on fire. Capcom took Resident Evil in a very different direction after 4, presumably inspired by that game’s improved shooting controls, along with the increasing popularity of the movie franchise. But beyond the simple aesthetic differences (lonely European villages full of furious locals speaking in tongues are a thousand times scarier than “Any City U.S.A.” full of zombies and SWAT agents), the more recent Resident Evil games miss the tense, almost psychologically upsetting terror of RE4.
That style of horror-themed shooters is reflected in games like Dead Space, or even Bioshock, which use spooky environments as set dressing for standard gunplay, without a hint of what made RE4’s horror mechanics special. Resident Evil 4 nailed the delicate balance required to ensure a survival horror game works. The game constantly made you feel helpless but always ensured you could still progress. Bullets were never plentiful, so you always found yourself counting your shots, conserving your best weapons for a rainy day.
At the same time, you slowly had to come to terms with less finite weapons – Leon’s nonsensical bicycle kick, and his short-ranged-but-deadly knife. Horror is building tension, with an eventual jump scare for catharsis, and RE4 loved to build that feeling by slowly stripping you of your tools. The game forced you to take shots and kill enemies, with each shot making you feel more and more helpless, before throwing a screaming, chainsaw-wielding madman at you to really freak you out.
That’s not to say RE4 was perfect by any means. Its over-reliance on do-or-die quick time events is still frustrating, and were past their “sell-by” date three years before the game came out. Not only that, but its pace is downright glacial at times. Yet, many people remember the game fondly. It nailed third person horror in a way no developer has been able replicate since.
Admittedly, the giant monster eel is far less scary when you see it like this. [Capcom]
While Capcom took the series in a more action-focused direction, presumably inspired by the success of the RE movie franchise, Japan’s other horror game powerhouse, Silent Hill, fumbled with half-baked plots and substandard imitations of RE4’s gameplay. That series is finally picking itself back up with P.T., Konami’s teaser for their Silent Hill reboot, which relies on classic cinematic tricks like subtle sound cues and eerie camera angles to build the tension that the series has been missing for so long.
Indie horror games like Amnesia and Lone Survivor instead make you truly helpless to build the tension, by stripping away your weapons and forcing you to actually run scared from the monsters. Even Telltale’s Walking Dead series uses Resident Evil 4’s tension-building tricks and limited resources to craft a genuinely scary environment at times. But none of them have the pacing of RE4, the mechanics of RE4, or the gameplay of RE4. What happened?
Well, Resident Evil 4 broke horror games, maybe even for good.
Look at The Evil Within, which is RE4 director Shinji Mikami’s return to the third-person action-horror genre. People complained that it was too similar to his previous game, even though we’ve gone years without an actual game in that style. I don’t think that game’s critics are wrong. Far from it. The innovations of RE4 aren’t innovative 10 years later, and its problems far worse, so seeing them in a modern game is pretty much inexcusable.
This guy? Less inexcusable. More of him please. [Capcom]
Horror is hard to do. Or at least, it’s hard to do right. Building tension doesn’t work when games like Resident Evil 5 and Dead Space 3 turn you into a trigger-happy god, and the catharsis is often missing in games that remove your ability to fight back against the monsters that scare you. I think P.T. and Amnesia are fantastically put together, but there’s a reason they’re short experiences. It’s almost impossible to make a 10+ hour horror movie. Nothing is scary after more than a few hours, especially when you’r often repeating the same actions over and over.
Resident Evil 4 changes things up each chapter, effectively becoming a different horror movie each time. It also breaks things up with some goofy camp, courtesy of its hilariously voiced merchant, and Napoleon-wannabe villain. The kind of pacing is recognition that people can’t just be scare for hours on end, it gets exhausting. The Evil Within, Dead Space, even last year’s (really excellent) Alien: Isolation are all the length you’d expect a modern, full-priced game to be, and they’re all about as scary as a puppy after hour four. In trying to make a better RE4, these games missed the core lessons at the heart of the game: that not only is horror hard, action-horror isn’t worth doing if you can’t do it perfectly. Otherwise, it just comes off as boring.
RE4 suffers from the classic Nintendo conundrum. It did things so well the first time out that there’s nowhere left to go. It’s what happened to Zelda and Mario after their “peak” games. It’s why indie games never tried to steal RE4’s sensibilities, and instead went in more narrative, combat-light directions. It’s why big budget AAA horror became simply “horror-themed” shooters.
RE4 tried to teach games a lesson in how to make good horror games, and what we learned is that big budget horror is too hard to do right. Resident Evil 4 killed horror games, but at least it did a really great job doing it.
In preparation for this article, I played the PlayStation 4 HD remake of Resident Evil 4.
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