Underpowered

The Resident Evil 2 remake opens with Leon and Claire arriving in Raccoon City just as the Umbrella Corporation’s experiments escape containment. Mutated creatures, zombies, the full catastrophe. I watched someone play through it, which turned out to be the best way to experience it—you’re helpless, you see what they’re about to run into, you can’t do anything but react, which is exactly what the game is designed for.

Resident Evil 2 in ’98 basically invented survival horror. You’re not a commando, you’re someone underpowered and trying to stay alive. The remake keeps that tension. It splits the campaign—you play Leon or Claire, and their paths overlap, so you’re moving through the same spaces at different times, which creates this strange sense of being in the same catastrophe from different angles.

Level design gets convoluted sometimes. You’ll backtrack through hallways looking for a keycard, never quite sure if you’ve missed something or if the game is just making you work. Inventory management is maddening—limited capacity, everything matters. But that’s not a flaw, it’s pressure. The puzzles make you think. Zombie animations are unsettling in ways that matter. Characters feel like people instead of plot devices.

What strikes me is how much trust it puts in you. No hand-holding, no endless exposition, no cutscenes dumping lore. You move through the city and piece things together on your own.

There’s DLC called The Ghost Survivors that takes side characters and gives them alternate-timeline scenarios. It shouldn’t work—feels like the kind of padding that ruins lesser games—but the mechanics are solid enough it works. And somewhere in Raccoon City you can play as a life-size tofu, which is exactly the kind of absurdist detail that proves someone in that development studio had actual taste.