i beat resident evil last night. i remember that re4 was like...probably the most hyped game i can think of from around the time i was in high school, so i realized at some point that this was a series like final fantasy that really hit into the international mainstream/"AAA" market a long time ago. in retrospect, i guess i'd osmosed a pretty fair bit of this game despite having only watched very short amounts of any game in the series before, not just because it was well known and widely quoted but since some of the people i hung out with at gdq back in the day were avid runners. and when i turned it on the first time for 10 minutes to get just a tiny taste of what i was in for before streaming it, i thought "man, if people went wild over a game that works and sounds like this it's gotta be something really special"
well, what can i say? it sure is.
this is the third playstation 1 game i've played in the past few months (after atelier marie and king's field) that really has that perfect retro appeal for me, taking simple pieces of a genre/concept and carefully pushing them together into something that feels compact and fresh. (i also played armored core 1 around the same time as KF, which was also really fun, but a bit more broadly wacky and janky.) but this one in particular feels very closely designed around tricky limitations used to burden the player and at the same time shows a lot of surprising care and detail. there's all kinds of gory animations for kills in both directions, and notably rigged up animations that only happen in one spot, most memorably the sokoban boxes in the dormitory basement, which have a cool bespoke and clearly not-physics-based interaction as you push each one onto the next in the water. in fact, even as i'm calling it a perfect retro game, i realize there's aspects of the mechanics that feel "fuzzy" or unexplained enough that they almost remind me of much more recent games i've loved because they feel subtle and slightly mysterious. a similar kind of intuitive and nuanced, or sometimes just janky and "slippery", feel has gotten me to love stuff like death stranding and final fantasy xv (i still need to write about that here...) respectively recently. so it's almost like it hits the best of both worlds there for me.
along with all that is the controls. my friend kishi remarked that they would feel familiar coming right off of king's field, and indeed, the need to turn since you can only walk in a linear fashion definitely has a certain commonality, but it definitely hits different in the third-person fixed-camera world. it feels a bit weird at first, but eventually i started to find it really intuitive.
except at the worst possible moments, obviously. it's one thing to feel like you're freely navigating the winding halls of the mansion even from the slightly odd angles things tend to be at, but when you're suddenly surrounded by even a couple of enemies it becomes a lot harder to think through the process of repositioning accurately. and then you become even more panicked realizing you were just turning in place while getting killed. it's not even that the combat itself is really scary most of the time (though the last time i died on my playthrough was the tyrant abruptly busting out a 3-hit combo that killed me from yellow...), even though there's obviously no real defense mechanic besides not being right next to whatever's about to kill you. (plus i've played lots of arcade games. i'm used to dying.) but the experiences of getting caught off guard and screwing up my escapes happened enough that it really started to sink in, and about halfway through the game i started finding myself waiting a lot longer before opening doors for the first time, and standing in new hallways with some trepidation, especially when the direction they were pointing was mostly towards the camera. even near the end of the game once i started carrying the more powerful weapons all the time...well, the amount of other key items to hoist around meant i didn't have as much space for healing items, so it didn't really go away. i laughed a lot while playing this game, because it's entertaining and somewhat silly so i was having a good time. and i laugh a lot when i'm having a really good time. but i never felt like i was laughing at the game, and in the end the atmosphere and tension absolutely landed for me.
the characters look really nice too, shockingly so when i think about other games from the 95-97 era. i really enjoyed that the credits (at least on the director's cut release?) really show them off, since otherwise you can only see your main character with the same kind of closeness and only if you stand still in specific spots (and probably activate the idle animations, though those were also great).
other than that stuff, this is one of the most 90s games i've ever played. the actors and tv costuming for the intro and ending, the character select screen with their little ID badges, and the visual design inside the main mansion floors (especially filtered through the process of rendering and compressing backgrounds in this era), all combine for that special vibe that will never be replicated. because even though it's certainly possible to do all that again, nobody would. not if they were trying to make something that feels "coherent" or "polished" or whatever to people now. it's something that feels wholly unique to a specific moment in technology and artistic aesthetic. all together, i had so much fun. i'll definitely also play as chris, but i really can't wait to see what 2's like.