Leon Arrives and the City Is Already Dead
Leon S. Kennedy shows up to Raccoon City for his first day as a cop and immediately the entire city is zombies. You have to respect the commitment to the worst possible onboarding experience.
The Resident Evil 2 remake pulled off something I wasn’t confident Capcom could manage: it satisfied fans of the 1998 original without being held hostage to their nostalgia. I was skeptical, which seemed reasonable. The original defined a genre—it taught a generation of players that ink ribbons are finite, that running from something is sometimes the correct move, that horror operates on scarcity. Remaking it either had to sanitize all of that or reproduce it with better graphics. Capcom did neither.
The game follows Leon and Claire Redfield on interlocking tracks through Raccoon City, both trying to survive the Umbrella Corporation’s catastrophically indifferent experiment in biological weaponry. The dual-campaign structure came from the original and still works—it gives you the sensation of being one small, frightened piece of something much larger and much worse. Each character sees only their portion of the disaster, and the game is smart enough not to over-explain the parts you’re not seeing.
The new third-person camera changes the texture of the fear in ways I didn’t anticipate. The original’s fixed camera angles created dread through concealment—you’d hear something before you could see it, and the camera wouldn’t show you what you were afraid of. The remake puts you right behind the character’s shoulder, which is closer and more immediate. Mr. X, the Tyrant who stalks you relentlessly through the police department, benefits enormously from this. Hearing his footsteps directly above you while you’re trying to solve a lock puzzle is a specific sustained terror the old camera could never have produced.
The level design occasionally tips from labyrinthine into just confusing, and inventory management is a puzzle-within-the-puzzle that will feel like depth or like friction depending on your patience for that kind of thing. The zombies are beautifully made—they absorb bullets wrong, move wrong, die reluctantly—and the game never stops feeling like it might kill you at any moment.
The free DLC, The Ghost Survivors, dropped shortly after launch: what-if scenarios for three characters who don’t make it through the main game—a U.S.S. agent, the mayor’s daughter, a gun shop owner. Somewhere deeper in the game there’s also a sentient life-sized tofu, which I can’t adequately explain and wouldn’t want to spoil. It only makes sense inside the logic of Raccoon City, which by that point you’re fully inside anyway.