Resident Evil HD Remaster Review

Excellence Doesn’t Age.

Resident Evil is one of my favourite games of all time, and the excellent Gamecube remake in 2002 bettered it in every conceivable way. Nearly two decades after its initial release, Resident Evil has landed on current-gen consoles and I have to tell you: It hasn’t aged a day.

Storyline:

Resident Evil follows a team of special operatives investigating strange disturbances in the woods outside of Racoon City. Chris Redfield and Jill Valentine, two members of S.T.A.R.S., are chased into a creepy mansion full of feral dogs, humanoid lizards and the countless, shuffling bodies of the undead.

It’s an iconic setting that lends itself to the game perfectly, with the massive estate and its labyrinthine layout ensuring you become lost within its walls if you don’t focus. Along the way, Jill or Chris, depending on who the player picks, discovers the history of the mansion and the experiments that went on within its walls. As the story progresses players chip away at the corruption of the Umbrella Corporation – a pharmaceutical company that we now all know as the Resident Evil villain mainstay.

Even all these years later the characters and their interweaving narratives work well. Chris and Jill each have different encounters and challenges in their fifteen hour campaigns, and half the fun of the twin playthroughs is seeing where these experiences diverge. Despite a hammy script and a couple of wooden deliveries these are fun characters to get to know with surprisingly deep lore to explore.

Gameplay:

Resident Evil can be broken down to three main gameplay elements; puzzle solving, mansion-orienteering and zombie extermination. To escape the mansion you must delve deeper into it, discovering its myriad secrets and death traps, all whilst keeping your bearings. That’s easier said than done: the mansion and its sprawling grounds manage to confuse even the best explorers, and learning which room leads into the next or where a valuable save room is located is of paramount importance.
It’s also important to remember where you left any zombies, as it’s unlikely you’ll be dispatching them all. There isn’t enough ammo or fuel to kill and burn them all, and consumable conservation (even save-reliant Ink ribbons are in short supply) must be considered at all times.

It’s thanks to these old school mechanics and trust in the player’s competence that makes Resident Evil refreshingly unique. It feels worlds apart from modern gaming blueprints: it’s difficult, it’s unforgiving and it can be pretty obtuse when it wants to be. I’m praying that mainstream gaming will one day return to these roots, but for now re-experiencing these once classic tropes (and some of the best puzzles in the genre) at their best is enough.

Resident Evil still hits all the right notes – its age doesn’t diminish some of the best scares in gaming history. Throughout the ten hours I spent with it on my first playthrough I was jumpy and nervous despite remembering each scare well. I know these halls, I know when zombies are going to burst out of doors, when dogs will jump through windows and when the haunting moans of Lisa Trevor will rattle through the corridors, but it doesn’t make them any less spooky. There’s a terrifying atmosphere that punctuates every moment spent in the Spencer Estate, and it’s there for newcomers and veterans alike.