Heads up, real quick! This video is gonna spoil Resident Evil 4,
Dead Space, and The Last of Us. It also might be pretty gross, because these
games are full of zombie guts and stuff. FINALLY, Nebula sponsored this video, it’s
better over there, there’s a whole companion video, you know the drill. The Dead Space remake features one of the
grosser tech features I can remember being used as a part of marketing. Like the original back in 2008, it’s a game
where you blast apart space zombies with las
ers; like the original, the moment to moment gameplay
centers around “strategic dismemberment” of these monsters. Now, 15 years after the original, Dead Space
has returned with what developers call the “peeling system.” Not only can you strategically dismember the
monsters that stalk the halls of the space station, but you can witness the process of
that dismemberment in more gruesome detail than ever before. Shooting a necromorph’s arm once with your
plasma cutter may not sever it, but it will
tear away a layer of that arm’s rotten flesh,
revealing sinew and tendons and bone. Another shot will detach the arm completely
but it might leave the limb dangling on a twisting string of crimson skin, bouncing
uselessly behind the necromorph as it sprints towards you. More powerful weapons, like the “force gun,”
can even strip the beast completely, its flesh blasted from its body like a wet napkin pulled
from a dirty plate. On one hand, this is exactly the kind of “innovation”
we might expect
from today’s slate of remakes; a bit of technical wizardry that looks great
but doesn’t really change the fundamental product. Peeling system or not, Dead Space 2008 and
Dead Space 2023 are both games in which you shoot the dangerous arm until it pops off
the dangerous body. But I think this is a reductive stance; rather,
I see the new Dead Space’s gore system as a sort of grotesque metaphor for the potential
of revisited horror. Instead of simply repeating the scares of
yesteryear in higher def
inition, Dead Space’s remake treats its source material like an
outer layer of skin. It presents a familiar exterior only to peel
that surface away, using its familiarity as a ruse to hide deeper layers of its nightmare. This is but one strategy to remaking horror. Less than halfway through the year, we’ve
already been presented with several different takes on the same basic project: take a video
game and rejuvenate its old scares for modern audiences and storefronts. Remakes of Dead Space, Resi
dent Evil 4, and
The Last of Us have all jumped to new consoles, engines, or even entire mediums in the last
6 months. Each has been met with pretty resounding critical
acclaim. But what’s most fascinating about this trend
isn’t the similarity of their basic concept; it’s the radically different paths each
property takes to reach its goal. This year’s Resident Evil 4, Last of Us,
and Dead Space excel and stumble in completely different areas, based on how each has attempted
to resurrect the corp
se of their previous self. With the greatest amount of time since the
original release, Resident Evil 4 seems the most obvious choice out of these three for
a remake. But it’s also almost certainly the tallest
order. There are vanishingly few titles that can
claim Resident Evil 4’s level of impact; virtually every third person shooter since
2005, including both Dead Space and The Last of Us, fall in the game’s shadow of influence. It’s a massive game culturally, and a similarly
massive game in l
ength and scale. Few recent linear games can boast Resident
Evil 4’s hour count and variety. Finally, although the original is nearly 20
years old, the game has been in a perpetual state of remake or re-release since the GameCube;
on this channel alone I’ve written about several different versions of RE4, and how
each offers minor or major tweaks to its established formula. The game “reinvented” itself as recently
as 2021! Therefore, this year’s version has to distinguish
itself from all these o
ther projects, and it does- by effectively creating a new game. This is RE4 burnt to the foundations and rebuilt,
the same basic blueprints for a completely different house. Resident Evil fans likely knew this would
be the strategy. Like the recent remakes of Resident Evil 2
and 3, locations are homages to the original game, but not perfect replicas. Treasures are familiarly shaped, but placed
in new locations. Characters enter and exit the story at different
times. However, the biggest updates
to games 2 and
3 were basically…making them control like Resident Evil 4. Since RE4 already, you know, controls like
that, it has to demonstrate its novelty through more involved means. Maybe it’s best to start small and zoom
out. Leon has a parry now! When an enemy chucks an ax at him or charges
him with a pitchfork or even swings at him with a chainsaw, he can parry [rules of nature]. In a vacuum, this is just a single new verb
Leon has access to. But the beauty of the game’s combat, both
in t
he original and remake, is how interconnected every system is. So if you just threw a parry into old RE4,
Leon would seem overpowered. This is also true of his increased speed,
and his new ability to move while aiming. But instead, the remake works outward from
the new verbs; Leon can deflect attacks so the enemies must be made faster too, more
aggressive, less likely to hold still and let you reposition. The parry is borderline required when you’ve
got a half dozen Ganados in your face, BUT lik
e every resource other than Leon’s boot,
it’s limited. Any knife you’re holding will eventually
break, and a broken knife is more than simply lessened defense because they’ve also added
a new type of enemy that gets back up after lying on the ground for a while, and you really
want to be able to use your knife on them, and there’s actually new crafting you can
do with the knife as well, so you might not want to use it at all if you need more bolts
for the bolt thrower, and more bosses have conte
xtual weak points and you might even
be able to get off a couple of stealth kills with one and suddenly a few changes to the
knife has reconfigured your approach to every scenario! You could make the same claim about the game’s
new spinel economy, its resurrecting enemies, its reusable ammo, minibosses, open worlds,
hell even its sequence breaking. Adding any single element into the original
game’s recipe might throw the whole dish off kilter. But the remake isn’t interested in making
the same d
ish. Instead, those familiar flavors are still
there- my beloved suplex is as good as it’s ever been- just sharing space with a whole
host of new ingredients and spices. Put another way, the Resident Evil 4 remake
feels like it was based on the conceptual framework of the original game rather than
the final product. The concept of Resident Evil 4 has the “Garrador,”
a blind enemy that finds Leon based on sound, and so both versions of the game include one. But 2023’s Garrador is only a “remake”
of the 2005 one in the loosest sense– the lead-up is different, the room you fight it
in is different, the emotional experience is different. The same could be said for the new bull-headed
men, the optional uber-enemies, the behavior of las plagas. Surpassing any new enemy though, the most
surprising renovation of the game may be the story itself. It has not, thank goodness, pivoted into seriousness. The entire basis of the narrative is still
“are you a bad enough dude to rescue the president’s
daughter” and Leon has new
one-liners that I almost can’t believe weren’t in the original [“nighty-night, knights.”] But along with that cheesiness is a welcome
level of characterization missing from the original’s broad tropes. Put simply, Ashley feels like more than a
sketch of a character now, and Luis too, and even Krauser gets some good stuff to work
with, all without betraying the original’s sense of fun. I laughed out loud in the middle of the excellently
redesigned Ashley section, when s
he’s being attacked by a half-dozen suits of armor and
simply yells “this sucks!” And to me, none of the mechanical holdovers
from the original seem too obviously dated. Kicking dudes to buy yourself space, playing
inventory tetris, solving light puzzles; all this is still in the game because it still
works, not simply as tribute to its earlier iteration. Games like Resident Evil 8 have moved back
towards this formula because it’s just effective game design! The only repeated mechanic I could do
without
is the del lago fight, because in either game it’s…pretty boring. There are things I miss from the original,
of course. I miss the laser hallway. I miss the IT fight. I miss when the castle was Ramon’s spooky
house of tricks, with a trap ceiling or two guys driving towards you on a giant drill. What I most acutely feel the loss of isn’t
a level or a mechanic though, but a piece of audio. Serenity. The save room theme. A sedate yet eerie wail, an ice cold glass
of water, a warm cabin in
a blizzard. Although the remake still has a song technically
inspired by this original piece, it only plays while interacting with the merchant and even
then almost imperceptibly. What was remarkable about that original theme
was how unsubtle it was, how stepping into a room where it played felt demonstrably different
from the rest of the game. And its effect was to introduce a sort of
dreamlike purgatory, a pathos absent from the actual narrative. I obviously have a lot of feelings tied to
this
one track– years ago, I spent hundreds more words trying to describe it. But I do think, even without my level of obsession,
you can sense its absence from the remake– without Serenity it's like the experience
has had an emotion removed. As absurd as it sounds, there’s nothing
dreamlike about this remake, and there was that something in the original. But I’ll survive. Because if there is one thing that 2023’s
Resident Evil 4 is not trying to do, it’s supplant its predecessor. Its new mechanics,
aesthetics, and level design
establish it as a game that stands on its own, the bits lifted wholesale from 2005’s
release done so simply because the original game is still one of the most rock-solid titles
ever released. I can see myself returning to any number of
the varietals of Resident Evil 4, Albert’s complete HD Project or the excellent VR port,
or now this complete reimagining. Leon’s roundhouse feels good in any generation. What this remake lacks– its impossible task,
really– is communi
cating what Resident Evil 4 means. Because this new release so comprehensively
feels like a 2023 game, I don’t think it’ll convey the earth-shaking impact of that original
2005 release. As my friend Blake Hester wrote for Game Informer,
“There's no universe where this game will ever be as important as the game it remakes. It can't come out in the same time, space,
and context as the first Resident Evil 4. Somewhat ironically, it's only as good as
it is now because it exists in a post-Resident Ev
il 4 world.” Thanks to its thorough modernization, you
can’t feel the near-experimental quality of its shooting perspective. Because its aging edges have been sanded away,
Resident Evil 4 feels like the end product of generations of iteration, rather than the
catalyst for it. Playing this new version won’t communicate
why I’ve talked about the game in 47 different videos, but to be honest, I’m not sure if
playing the original now would either. Its significance is so widespread that its
innovatio
ns may feel rote in retrospect. More than individual scares or setpieces or
plot beats, Resident Evil 4’s most important quality is its influence, and that’s the
one quality it doesn’t even try to remake. It’s an absurd ask, for a remade piece of
media to be as impactful the second, or third, or fifth time it’s released. How could it be? Well, I’ll tell you. It could be released on HBO. For those of us who’ve long been in game
discussing communities, the first half of 2023 has presented a bizarr
e sort of society-wide
deja vu. Back in 2013, the release of The Last of Us
impacted the gaming landscape with nearly the same level of force as Resident Evil 4
once did. However, its shockwave wasn’t mechanical–
it basically still plays like Resident Evil– but rather in the realm of prestige. The Last of Us was one of those games that
was topping “greatest games of all time” lists a year after release. Marketing of the game focused on the realism
and emotion of the performances. Coverage of its
narrative referenced Cormac
McCarthy. In a recent piece for Polygon, Cameron Kunzelman
tracked the multitude of cultural factors that combined to make The Last of Us “the
greatest story that has ever been told in video games.” This superlative has been given to the game
by, among others, Craig Mazin, the creator of this year’s TV show. When The Last of Us came out, I showed it
to video game doubters as “proof” of the medium’s maturity, I saw people compelled
by it that hadn’t been moved by othe
r games, I even (sigh) I wrote an article about how
the game grappled with aRoger Ebert’s claim that video games couldn’t be art, I’m
sorry it was 2013, I was a teenager. So, with all that history, it’s been a little
weird that a decade later, seemingly the entire world has gotten on board with The Last of
Us, that it’s prompting new memes and new cosplays and spawning almost exactly the same
conversations it originally did, just instead of my online friends, now it’s parents and
coworkers and c
elebrities. All it needed to do was…not be a video game. Among the praise for The Last of Us TV show
is the frequently proposed question, is this the best- or even the “first good”- video
game adaptation? I don’t really have a horse in that race,
but I do think an equally relevant question is, is The Last of Us TV show the easiest
video game adaptation? Not that making the show itself was easy,
I’m sure it represents a billion hours of effort or whatever. But rather that The Last of Us’ prestige
-fueled
original impact was because it so thoroughly resembled prestige media we were already familiar
with. Let me put it this way; the legendarily bad
DOOM movie back in 2005 spent an inordinate amount of effort and money attempting to recreate
how the game looked in action. The results are as dumb looking as they are
ineffective at replicating DOOM. The Last of Us TV show has several sequences
that are lifted word for word, shot for shot from the game. But unlike DOOM, these sequences don’t e
ven
register as out of the ordinary for new viewers because the game was already trafficking in
the language of high-budget HBO shows. And yes, these scenes are recreating cutscenes
whereas DOOM was recreating gameplay, but I’d argue they’re both tackling their
source material’s most iconic bits; when we think of DOOM we think of running down
a hall with a shotgun, and when we think of The Last of Us, we think of watching a well
written and strikingly acted conversation. I’d guess that The Last
of Us game connected
with such a variety of people, Craig Mazin included, not because it presented a radically
new method of storytelling, but because it already so resembled what they considered
“grown-up art.” All that is to say…The Last of Us TV show
is good. Of course it’s good! It is, like the game, well-written and well-shot
and well-acted. And although I’ve gotten over my desire
to “prove” gaming’s worth to non-gamers, I am glad it is now accessible to people who
wouldn’t, or couldn’t eve
r play the game. So maybe it’s selfish of me to think…since
I have played the game, what’s the point here? What new am I, someone who can and has experienced
this story on playstation, supposed to glean from this fabulously expensive and well-produced
TV show? The most readily available answer is the new
stuff– by far the show’s best episode is the one given to Bill and Frank, all of
which is completely new material. Not only is it more interesting to see a story
I’m unfamiliar with, their episo
de, freed from the bounds of the game, can actually
use the strengths of its medium. The ongoing and unexpected passage of time
in this one episode might break the chronological narrative of the game, the privacy it affords
them in intimate moments might clash with expectations of player control. While not as playful with the form, the show’s
two pre-apocalypse cold opens are also excellent, and hearken back to Mazin’s expertise with
tense bureaucracy in Chernobyl. But for the parts that hew clo
ser to the game’s
original story, I just don’t quite know how I’m supposed to feel. There are multiple scenes in the show that
are line for line, shot for shot recreations of cutscenes in the game, and I’ve seen
multiple articles from gaming outlets citing this as evidence of how deeply the show cares
about the original game. As my friend and esteemed colleague Leo Vader
said, [“they’re lucky that gamers love when the stuff in the show is the same as
the stuff in the game”] But as someone who ha
s played the source material, arguably the
audience the show is doing this for, I watch these scenes and I’m mostly…bored? These scenes just indicate a larger lack of
choice for me, a disinterest in doing something new given a whole new medium to work with. And I’m not just referring to the shot-for-shot
scenes, this is how I feel about the slavish commitment to the game as a whole. Each reference simply reminds me what the
story’s lost given its new non-interactivity. Although cameras show Joel
and Ellie rooting
through drawers and scavenging barren shelves, what they’re never able to communicate is
the core desperation inherent in every single minute of the game. Pedro Pascal occasionally misses a shot, but
the show never communicates the tightness in his chest when he realizes that was the
only shot he had. Encounters with TV clickers are scary, but
not nearly as tense as when you’ve seen those same clickers rip through your neck
half a dozen times. What TV Last of Us can’t get acro
ss is that
every fight isn’t simply individually desperate but compoundingly so, that thinking about
the future is often actively dreadful when you consider how little you have to survive. Although the most memorable parts of the game
Last of Us are weighty conversations in cutscenes, the weight of those conversations comes from
the nightmare of the outside world, a nightmare that HBO can show us but not necessarily make
us feel. This is, I admit, a pretty basic analysis
of the strengths of each
medium. But what’s frustrating to me about The Last
of Us TV show is I don’t know what it’s replacing this missing element with. The TV show represents not the first or the
second, but the third re-release of this story. Each edition has, undeniably, looked more
realistic than the last. I can’t deny that this version looks the
most realistic of all, and I also can’t deny how impressive it is that its 4th release
has somehow created another cultural “moment.” But I can’t help feeling that a deca
de after
release, The Last of Us is still just painting the same picture on a less compelling canvas. Released between Resident Evil 4 and The Last
of Us, 2008’s Dead Space did not land with quite the cultural impact of either. In fact, although it reviewed well, several
outlets noted its strengths while still remarking that it was “basically Resident Evil 4 in
space.” It’s also perhaps the least obvious remake
on this list. The Dead Space franchise has been dormant
for several years but despite
this it’s hardly aged at all. I’ve written about this exact phenomenon
for its sequel- turns out, the design and aesthetic of these games is pretty timeless. Although Dead Space does play similarly to
“Resident Evil 4 in space,” the generational gap and accompanying technical leap between
them means that RE4 reads as “almost 20” wayyy more than Dead Space reads as “almost
15.” In a dark room with a good set of headphones,
you barely have to do any work to get absorbed in the ambiance of that or
iginal 2008 game. So how the hell is it that this game maybe
justifies its remake most of all? It’s not obvious what the remake is doing,
not from the opening level at least. The first 30 minutes or so of the game are
damn near identical to the original. We enter the Ishimura, things are bad, monsters
blast out of the wall, this dude gets squished in an elevator. The graphics are better and Isaac talks a
little bit, but neither of these fundamentally shift the overwhelming familiarity going on
h
ere. Oh, cut off their limbs? Is that what I’m supposed to do? Cutting off their limbs does reveal that disgustingly
good “peeling system” I talked about at the beginning, however. And the levels, although familiar in shape,
are so much darker than they were before. Texture resolution and geometric detail have
certainly been boosted since 2008, but more significant is that the Xbox 360 and PS3 couldn’t
achieve “true dark,” not really. Dead Space now has sections where the blackness
swallows your
light and everything else within it, and those peeling necromorphs have now
learned that they can stay quiet while enrobed in that dark and only scream when they’re
feet away from you. All this is well and good, but it’s how
these systems stack that takes a turn into the delightfully cruel. You reach a place where, in the original game,
you had to replace a circuit, and now you find you have a choice. Not one that will affect the plot or give
you some kind of reward, but a simple switch that al
lows you to choose your own brand of
space misery. Lights? OR oxygen? This, like the new knife economy of Resident
Evil 4 is one of those small-scale changes that goes onto impact the entire experience
of the game. But because the choice you’re being asked
to make is on the- literal- atmosphere rather than your mechanical abilities within it,
the effect is significantly more oppressive. No matter if you pick lights OR oxygen, the
Ishimura’s hostility increases, forcing you to pull a safety net o
ut from under yourself. It’s increased agency in the most stressful
way, disempowerment via decision-making. And all that’s before the game starts really
changing things. Separating each individual level of the original
Dead Space was a train ride from one part of the station to another, a very distinct
“level complete!” event that acted as a little pressure release
valve from the tension of the gameplay. You could board the train and think “If
nothing else, at least I’m through the medical bay.
” They also, of course, acted as loading screens
from one scenario to the next. But games today don’t need to load in the
same way, and so I assumed that the new game would maintain the trains position while simply
making them run in real-time. This is not what it does. Instead, the remake burns new corridors through
the steel of the Ishimura, back-alleys and catwalks and maintenance panels connecting
once-separate parts of the ship. You don’t step on a train and get whisked
to the next level, y
ou walk through brand new geometry. I have rarely encountered an addition that
functions as so much more than the sum of its parts. On paper, these additions don’t make up
much of the total square footage of the Ishimura; in practice, the effect is dizzying. The different regions and thus the different
levels of the ship bleed into each other, the overall complexity of the environment
exponentially increased by it all existing at once in one space. As someone who’s probably played the original
e
ight or nine times, I continuously found myself lost in cold metal. The obsessive replication of the first 30
minutes almost feels like a subversion, a promise of familiarity the game gradually
undercuts. The same goes for the game’s narrative. Although the largest plot beats are basically
the same as the original, the remake burrows into its characters' psyches, creating new
wrinkles that feel almost insidious in the way they alter every person on the Ishimura. As in the original, the general a
ura of “the
marker” brings on some sort of space madness. But whereas we previously only met people
who were all the way gone, now the whole spectrum of the process is visible. Security officer Aiden Chen is killed in the
first scene and yet Hammond continues to see him throughout the entire game, sometimes
with his face attached to a monster, sometimes hallucinating his “whole” and human body
despite the talons protruding from his forearms. Another member of the crew, Kendra, knows
the potentia
l effects of the marker yet can’t help seeing her long-dead brother running
through the halls. Now that the protagonist, Isaac Clarke, is
fully voiced, he feels more capable and in-control than ever, which makes it all the more disturbing
how convincing his visions of his dead girlfriend are. Best slash worst of all is the game’s fully
original twist, the expanded role of Elizabeth Cross, a horticulturist onboard the Ishimura
who forms a sort of symbiotic dementia with Isaac, each convinced the
other is their long-dead
partner. Cross, like Isaac, feels distinctly capable
and sympathetic, her turn to madness all the worse because of it. I guess it helps that this moment made me
just about jump out of my chair. ["Jacob...if you're hearing this...you know I have to try."] More than one room in the Dead Space remake
appears to perfectly replicate the original, only to reveal a false wall that slides aside
to unveil some new architectural twist, an addition so seamless it feels like you mus
t
have just missed it while playing the original. The remake “peels” once again, stripping
not flesh from bone but space from memory, making even the player question how much they
can trust themselves. The same goes for every addition to the plot,
each new jumpscare. How much of this is truly new? And how much has always been there, lurking
behind the walls, hidden just out of sight? The sound in the remake is exquisite, screams
echoing with unnerving realism down its metal corridors. The animat
ions are among the most detailed
and grotesque I’ve seen, the dismemberment and kinesis-fueled gameplay is as good as
it’s ever been. But Dead Space’s greatest achievement as
a remake is binding its horror to its existence as a re-released piece of media. Whereas Resident Evil 4 offers basically a
new game, and TV The Last of Us is probably most effective to those with no knowledge
of the original, Dead Space actively weaponizes its status as a remake. I’m still playing the hell out of Resident
Evil 4, and I’m happy the non-gamers in my life are so excited about The Last of Us. But in the eminently subjective and personal
world of horror, Dead Space is the best justification I’ve found for the pursuit of old nightmares. A return to a nostalgic fright, only to find
that the terror itself has been growing and twisting for all the years you’ve been absent. Now. If you’re a longtime viewer of this channel,
you might be asking “wait, that’s all he had to say on Resident Evil 4?,” but
fortun
ately I can respond, not a CHANCE, buddy! I had a very specific thing I wanted to talk
about in this video and I did that, but if you want to hear me just ramble, I have some
good news. Over on Nebula, I discussed the remake for
over TWO HOURS with Blake Hester, who I actually quoted earlier in this video. From the most minute differences to our weapon
preferences to our obsession with The Mercenaries mode, this is just straight up 125 minutes
of two people talking about RE4 with an almost unhea
lthy knowledge of the original. Nebula is a creator owned and operated streaming
service which both provides a healthy platform for people like me to work from, AND lets
me post stuff like this, which I would never place on my main channel. Nebula also enabled me and Blake to start
up our podcast Something Rotten again. If you enjoy what I do here at all, there’s
more of it on Nebula, and you’ll be directly supporting me by signing up. Follow my link in the description; it’s
only $30 for a whole
year of access and that comes with my bonus videos and podcasts, classes
by other very smart creators, movies, plays. The list goes on. I am not generally someone who makes multi-hour
videos. However, if you want to just let my words
wash over you as gentle footage of Leon roundhousing dudes into next week graces your screen, this
is what you’ve been waiting for. Join Nebula, support this channel, and get
all the Resident Evil you can handle.
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