Maybe All Remakes Aren't That Bad

Back to where it all started.

Code Veronica left me in a rather sour mood, too much of one to be honest and it left me wanting to play a good survival horror game. Noticing that I had Resident Evil Remake next to do in the marathon, I figured I might as well continue the marathon, and quickly booted up Resident Evil on steam! Now, this remake is widely considered one of the best remakes ever made, if not the best, so I had some excitement going into it. At the same time, I was a tad nervous, as a lot of my remake experiences have left me rather burnt, being incredibly disappointing experiences that fail to live up to what the original attempted to do. Still, I had hope with this one, it at least maintained the same gameplay as the original, so wasting no time I hopped right in and ended up beating it in that exact same sitting.

I’m not really gonna get into the plot details here as this is about the same plot as the PS1 original. You play as either Jill or Chris, members of S.T.A.R.S who end up getting stranded in the Spencer Mansion, a derelict hellhole filled to the brim with the undead. As the night grows darker and darker, Jill and Chris struggle to find an escape from the madness, as they slowly succumb deeper and deeper into Umbrella’s trenches. There’s a few detail changes here and there such as the introduction of Lisa Trevor, one of the first experiments done by Umbrella, but it’s not too much to change the overall lore of the world so far. If you enjoyed what RE1 had to offer, then you’ll enjoy what remake does, especially since it takes the plot a lot more seriously, actually having decent voice acting this time around instead of whatever the hell the PS1 game was doing. Presentation wise, this game looks stunning, every background is incredibly detailed, the atmosphere is a lot more spooky, the models are all great, this is easily one of the best Gamecube games I’ve ever seen, and I was in awe about how well this game had truly aged. It’s not all perfect though as while the spookier atmosphere makes sense, the lighting ends up taking a massive hit in the process and I feel as if the remake loses a lot of what the original was going for. The mansion is a lot darker here, it feels much more in place with a  typical haunted house, and while I understand it’s to better fit the tone Remake is trying to establish, it kinda loses what the brighter lightning was originally going for. The original Spencer Mansion felt a lot more lived in, it utilized the brighter lighting to create a sort of unease the remake doesn't really have, and it ends up making the remake feel a lot more generic in contrast. It isn’t enough to ruin the game overall, but it was still noticeable enough to bother me. At the very least, the rest of the game made up for this, and I had a blast making my way to the end of this house of horrors.

In terms of the gameplay here, it’s about what you expect though it does add a few quality of life changes the other games post RE1 had, such as the quick turn. Ammo is still scarce, you have to be careful about what you fire, most of the puzzles here return though a good few are remixed, keeping the spirit of the original puzzle intact while giving you new ways to test your brain and leave you figuring out what to do. Enemies can be dealt with in the same way, though so no real complaints there, it’s still tricky figuring out just how exactly to maneuver past each horror here, and the bosses are exactly the same here, so if you could handle them fine on PS1, you’ll win like it's nothing on remake. It’s not all the same though, the remake pulls a few tricks to throw off returning players here. The dogs that burst through the window are one of the earlier examples, having them only tap the window at first, though once you return to the room on a  2nd run, the window ends up shattering. There’s a few small changes like that to scare you a bit more, but the biggest change comes in an entirely new enemy type known as the Crimson Heads. These are the scariest part of the whole game, making you consider every single kill you do in the game. You see, whenever you kill a zombie in the game, the body doesn't actually disappear, it instead just stays there on the ground doing nothing. This seems like a new attention to detail instead of anything substantial, but when you return to the mansion on the 2nd trip, these corpses rise up as a stronger enemy type known as Crimson Heads who can kill you like it’s nothing if you aren’t careful. You might be thinking what’s the point of killing enemies then, however you can actually burn the bodies with a new limited resource, the kerosene, removing the bodies entirely and stopping Crimson Heads from ever being a threat. This seems like a fun mechanic at first, however they give you a little too much kerosene, and because of that I ended up encountering 0 crimson heads a tall till the final area of the game where they spawn incredibly fast after death. This makes them feel a tad like a wasted concept, and while I do understand it’s meant to throw off first time players, zombie locations aren’t really that bad here, letting you easily dodge past most encounters, having you be swarmed with ammo by the end game.  Perhaps that comes from my veteran experience of the 1st game, but it still felt like they didn’t throw things off quite enough to make it more challenging, it really felt more of the same here, and it came to the point where it started to blend in with the original game in a lot of areas.

I played this version via modern HD release on Steam, and as a port this is kinda terrible. The UI is a lot blurrier in this version, making it rather hard to tell what my current status was, and I ended up having to add a mod to replace them with the textures from the original Gamecube release. On top of that I could not play this in fullscreen as it would randomly crash anytime I’d do this, it was terrible, and I ended up losing some progress from time to time when I was unsure where the crashes were coming from at first. Then there’s the new modern control scheme added to the game that completely ruins the tank control set up this game has. Now I’ll be upfront, this is an optional choice that you can personally make, and the tank controls are still kept in tact operating exactly as they did before, so logically there’d be nothing to complain about. However, I find the fact that this was even added in the first place to be a bit of an insult to what the original game wanted to do! These tank controls were never some aged design choice due to technological limitations at the time, they were an intentional decision made to have navigation be tougher, lending to the resource management aspect of the game as it was tricky to dodge zombies here. I can’t call this accessibility because what is this making it accessible too? People that want to play this without encountering intentional friction a game is meant to invoke in you? It doesn't even feel great to use, the fixed camera angles are still intact so when you remove the tank controls you end up going back and forth between these perspectives as you have 0 time to adjust to the change since you no longer are adjusting your position anymore. On top of that, zombies become an absolute joke as you can easily maneuver past each enemy in the game due to the full control scheme here, removing a major part of the resource management and creating a braindead game in the process. I’m so tired of games adding these choices that remove intentional friction behind the design, that reduce them to being entirely different experiences in the process, removing any sort of challenge behind it, and I’m sad to see that this HD release does the same! You’ll see so much discussion as well on how tank controls were never meant to be part of the game, how it was just bad game design, and it depresses me seeing this change in culture throughout the years. I want games to be better, I want them to be proud of what they are, and while these changes are optional, the fact it’s even there in the first place shows a certain lack of respect for the game as an art form. Is it so hard to just keep these games as originally intended?

Overall, I may not be the biggest fan of Remake as other people are, but I still had an incredible time playing through it, and I’m happy I got around to playing it! This marathon in general has been great in catching me up to one of the most iconic horror franchises ever made, and I can’t wait to see what else the series has in store for me next. Next up, Resident Evil 0!