LogFAQs > #953453298

3. Resident Evil 4 (Every Platform, but originally GameCube, 2005)

Resident Evil as a series has always understood something better than almost every other horror video: tension. Every horror series knows how to ratchet up the tension; that's the easy part. Players are primed for it when they start the game, and every great horror game has a moment in its first hour or so that sets the stakes and the scale for tension. In RE2, it's the aforementioned first Licker. In the RE1, it's the first dog. In REmake, it's the first crimson head. Etc, etc, etc. I'm sure it's true in the myriad other horror franchises out there too. But no game in the series or the genre has done it as well as Resident Evil 4 (I can't speak for RE6-8 yet, but I'm willing to bet it holds true).

Prior Resident Evils opened with a pretty common formula: few weapons and limited ammo, tight quarters, and sporadically placed enemies when and where you least want them. RE4 flips this expectation on its head almost immediately: the village is expansive, outdoors, ammo is relatively plentiful, and enemies are all over the place. There's a shotgun - rare for an RE game to give you an upgrade over your handgun this early - but taking it sets Dr. Salvador, the chainsaw Ganado, in pursuit of you. It's also a timed area, though you don't know it at first; survive long enough and the mysterious church bell rings and you're safe for a little while. Fuck up and get your head sawn off. Right from the get go, you know that the game is subverting your expectations, and that adds to the tension.



When that bell rings, and that fight ends, the tension breaks. It's only been maybe 10, 15 minutes, but that first opportunity to breathe is significant. It always is in horror games. But what Resident Evil as a series, and Resident Evil 4 in particular, does is lean on the other thing horror fiction uses to break tension: comedy. MSG took all the great screenshots in his not-actually-a-writeup, but RE4 is outright hilarious at times. Horror video games struggle with this, or avoid it entirely, even though it's long been part and parcel of the movies and TV series that inform and inspire the genre. It's campy as fuck at times. There's no better comic villain than Salazar, and Leon is somehow both pithy and kind of a ditz, which is just perfect for a protagonist. But the jokes aren't all cheese; there's some pitch black humor, too.



The game expertly builds and breaks the tension with this balance of fights, harrowing scenes, quiet, and jokes across its entire length, even once Salazar is out of the picture. Even not knowing which Plaga is going to erupt from the head of a killed enemy gooses the tension. The games environments get increasingly wild (the Castle is deeply underrated, by the way), and along the way, so do the enemies and bosses. Iron Maidens, Regenerators, Garradors and Novistadors, Verdugo and U-3, et al, all feel both organic to the series and true to the very specific Spanish setting of the game.

I could go on at length about RE4, but I won't. We've all played it, and it's still as good now as it was then. Just a magnificent, hammy, bloody good time.

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The Thighmaster