Resident Evil. The first one. Only this time, it is the remake. The good one, actually. I think it first came out on GameCube. I didn’t have one. So I had to wait plenty of time before I could play it. I think I played it first on the PC back in 2017. It was winter, I think, the end of February or maybe early March. I can’t be sure. But what I am sure of – this game caught me by surprise. I didn’t expect it to be so good.
As usual, I played as Chris Redfield, only now I used the skin of him from RE5 – the Chris after saying his prayers and eating his vitamins. Changed the mood of the game. He was buffed, mean, and I expected from him a boulder-punching mindset. Basically, it was the same mindset I got in the game.
And the game was gorgeous. The graphics looked great. In fact, I think that’s how I imagined things to be in the original game. The funny thing, when you’re a kid, you don’t need some super graphics to imagine things, feel the atmosphere. Your imagination just fills the lack of textures, jerky animation, and everything in between. It also makes sure the game is much darker and scarier than it really is. Well, the remake got it right. It became detailed, darker, and somewhat spookier (I wouldn’t dare to say scarier). The mansion looked awesome, the zombies were now detailed. In fact, they even had different skins, so now you didn’t have to kill the same bald dude in a lab coat over and over. They now looked somewhat scary. In fact, everyone looked kind of scary now – zombies, dogs, hunters, snake, Tyrant.
And talking about enemies. Besides the already well-known zoo of mutants of all sorts, the remake brought us some more. The red zombies. Or crimson heads. Or feral zombies. Whatever you call them, those guys were part of the new mechanics introduced in this game specifically. It worked like that: you kill your regular zombie and just leave his body lying around. You run here and there, do obligatory backtracking, and the zombie’s corpse is still there. You get so used to it that you stop noticing it. Right till the time is right, and all of a sudden the zombie you thought was dead hours ago turns red, jumps up, and rushes to you as soon as you enter the room. First-time scare guaranteed. In fact, they managed to make me jump up even during later encounters when I expected them to appear. They were faster (they actually ran), stronger, smarter (it fits here in the description, can’t say that for real, though), and took more hits. Real pain in the ass. However, there was a method to prevent them from appearing. You had to burn their corpses. Yep, that’s it. For that, you had to spill gasoline on them and threw a match. Fun, however, one thing should be noted – there wasn’t enough gasoline to deal with every feral zombie, so very soon, you had no choice but to face them.
The other new addition from the enemies was a giant white shark. They called it Neptune since it was fucking huge. And angry. And dangerous. And if in the original games, there were only small white sharks (unpleasant but manageable), this time you had, besides small sharks, a freaking great white shark. It was ready to obliterate you in one hit. Terrible thing. Considering the new graphics, it looked like a nightmare fuel. Appeared too. Snake didn’t look this nerve-wracking, like a damn shark.
And, of course, there was added an additional location (cemetery) and a new boss – Lisa (I think it was Lisa… or maybe Lucy… or maybe Lina… or maybe I don’t remember, and I’m not going to check, so I’ll call her Lisa). Anyway, Lisa was the daughter of one of the scientists, and she fell victim to the Umbrella Corporation. She was experimented on and turned into a freaking monster with a leather face kind of mask. To make things worse, she was completely immune to everything and was kind of a problem. Also had a tragic backstory and ways to deal with her, but to be honest, it was hard to feel sorry for a monster who sucker-punched Chris Redfield. Not cool, Lisa, not cool.
Anyway, besides that, the game was basically the same first game, only better audio, visuals, actors who this time gave a fuck and acted with their voices. Of course, they added a few new mechanics, like a special weapon that helped to fight off zombies. I’m talking about knives kept in separate slot and used automatically by the characters if the situation gets too close and too personal. Maybe there was something else, but to be honest, I was too focused on the game, looking at and enjoying the scenery, characters, and new ways of shocking the player in the visual department.