Resident Evil 4; My Reintroduction to Survival Horror

One of the few games I played when I was younger was the original Resident Evil. The classic “zombie dogs crashing through the hallways windows” scene scared me for weeks! The idea of a game scaring me well after I left the TV was impressive (not that I was or am a difficult scare). When I revisited the Resident Evil series two years ago with Resident Evil 4, the game had lost none of its creepy content or gameplay for me. Replaying RE4 this term has offered me a chance to review my gamer experiences in terms of the theory and concepts presented this term. This academic distance, and ten years maturity, result in a significantly less scary game experience.

RE4 tries to keep you on your toes (or, on your fingertips) by constantly changing the mechanics of how you play. You play as Leon, the main character and Ashley, the President’s captured daughter, in a typical action-adventure survival horror game fashion. Interspersed in the normal gameplay of navigating the environments and aiming and firing various weapons are sporadic (usually introduced by a short cut scene) quick-reaction button-mashing fevers (“press A to sprint” or “press L + R to dodge”). Some bosses, in addition to whatever particular puzzle or obstacle required, are played by totally different schema. The first boss fight is played by fighting a lake monster with a harpoon and motor boat. Though the button-mashing is the same, the order and presentation of the mechanic differs. This emphasis on variation keeps the game scary, because I am never able to get to a place of comfort within the game.

When a new monster or threat appears on the screen or in my ears, I characteristically shriek and mash whatever button allows me to go to the menu and as a result pause the game. I breathe deeply, make sure I am appropriately armed, and return to the horror. This “pause” allows me to recoup from my fright and prepare for whatever the fight offers. If I weren’t playing the game like such a wuss, the scariness of the “boo!” moment (often diegetic) and the gameplay battle itself (non-diegetic) might meld together a bit more.

My penultimate example comes in the form of the scariest enemy in the game, one of the only scenes I remember truly scaring me in my first playthrough. When I approach a zombie imprisoned on my way to a lever, the zombie bursts out of his metal bars and begins to attack me. This zombie is shown (in a cut scene) to have his eyes sewn shut. The blind “Wolverine”-like zombie chases after me when I run, but cannot hear me when I walk. To beat this character, I must distract him with sound (firing a gun, running footsteps, ringing a bell) to a place where he will charge and thrust his scissor-hands into the wall and get stuck. Shoot him in the back a few times, repeat. After spending the whole game running (not just moving directionally, but moving directionally and pressing B), taking my finger off the “run” button and walking slowly around this zombie (who is running) is petrifying! My expectations are defied as I have to re-learn game mechanics under these new conditions. The monster is relatively easy to defeat, but the initial re-learning of gameplay makes the slow walk around the monster terrifying.

In my brief reading about “survival-horror” games, I found the key characteristics of survival/horror to be content, under-equipping and overwhelming the character. The gore of RE4 (for instance, my cut-scene decapitation by a chainsaw-wielding zombie with a sack over his face) and the story of RE4 (a parasitic virus that eventually turns you into a ‘zombie’) never capture my imagination too much, and I blow through the game assuming an archetypal content behind the “posts” and “communication logs” I’m skipping. The gore, though occasionally inventively gruesome, is dismissible and almost boring compared to the “realistic” zombie situations my imagination is flooded with from film. I found the scariest aspects of RE4 to be the tension of consistently introducing different “types” of gameplay (described above) and when the game takes familiar situations and re-work them to surprise you. For instance, small open cabins line the pathways through the Spanish forest, but after the 5th or 6th empty cabin, I stopped entering with caution. Later, a zombie is hiding in one of these cabins, defying my expectations and scaring me in what I thought was a ‘safe’ space. Other, less dramatic examples keep the player alert- a portrait of the antagonist, a wooden box, a particular background rock- previously non-actionable, background aspects are rendered actionable and foreground. These somewhat mechanical changes in the gameplay and in my expectations of what the game would offer me were what made the content and gore of RE4 relevant, and ultimately ‘horrifying,’ to me.