Resident Evil 4 has very little setup. Pretty boy Leon Kennedy bursts into the first house he sees, quickly kills the infected inhabitant inside, and then continues down the path in broad daylight, dispatching wandering Ganados. It encapsulates early on how this Resident Evil is far more of an action game.
The Resident Evil 4 remake, on the other hand, strings out the first encounter. Leon creeps up to a large abandoned shack in the middle of the night, runs across a maimed cop from his escort team, and saunters around piles of junk and animal bones until he finds and brutally dispatches his first infected enemy. This unfortunate soul then makes a surprise return in a way that sums up how this whole sequence has been reframed and changed to focus more on horror.
It immediately gives the perception that the entire game has been shifted to fit the horror genre more cleanly instead of being an action-horror hybrid like the original. However, according to Producer Yoshiaki Hirabayashi, that’s not the case. He said that this move was more general, as Capcom wants to show players that they will not be able to predict everything from there on out, even if they have blazed through the original a dozen times with the Chicago Typewriter.
“The intro scene really sets up the starting feel of the game,” Hirabayashi said through a translator. “We have been modernizing the game. So in that sense, what we want to do is focus on making the player feel a certain way and have uncertainty going into the game. So that has caused that scene to be a bit longer just because we want to increase that feeling as you enter the game itself.”
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Hirabayashi also spoke about how the team has taken specific sections and juiced them accordingly, meaning some areas are much scarier while others have been tweaked to have more action; it’s not pivoting fully into survival horror. It’s the essence that matters and since the intro thrives on mystery, it seems to have made sense to amp up those feelings of mystique far enough to turn that part into something much scarier.
“The main point is that each area of the original game and its concepts have been preserved,” said Hirabayashi. “Of course, there’s been some powered-up stuff and things that have been modernized for the modern gamer, but the intro is very much a survival horror-specific area. That area really does well with having hypered-up horror for the remake.”
The Resident Evil 4 remake’s core gameplay seems to be built to support both styles and feels like a mix between the 2005 original and the Resident Evil 2 remake. Crowd control is still incredibly important and the adrenaline of juggling multiple hostiles is as thrilling as it ever was. A well-placed headshot still causes enemies to stumble in pain, which opens them up to a devastating, context-sensitive kick and a few slashes.
Scrambling around and only stopping to carefully fire off a few headshots amidst the turmoil remains a stellar micro gameplay loop and doesn’t seem to have been unrecognizably altered. This was most notable in the iconic village scene at the beginning, where hoards pour in and overwhelm the player. It was a frantic battle almost two decades ago that accurately summed up the game’s tempo and now serves as a promising preview for the rest of the remake.
However, as seen in the intro, there are some noticeable changes. Ammo can be crafted and knives are now a destructible resource that can also be shoved into an enemy who has gotten a little too grabby, all of which have been taken from the last couple of remakes. Leon can also move and shoot now, but that doesn’t seem to have robbed the game of its tension, at least early on. The D-pad quick select allows for a more fluid way to switch weapons, too, something that its many rereleases have sadly neglected to add.
Leon can now even execute enemies on the ground, stealthily kill unaware foes in one hit, and parry incoming blows with a well-timed button press. This latter defensive move is arguably one of the biggest mechanical changes, one that sounds interesting on paper and looks appropriately silly in practice — a regular combat knife stopping a fully revved chainsaw is laughably ludicrous. While it has yet to be seen how cleanly this new move fits in Leon’s repertoire, Hirabayashi said the studio added it to give players more options, which calls back to the design pillars from the original.
“One of the original concepts from the original game was to give the user a high amount of options of how to play it, like they can upgrade the weapons in different ways, and then that way it really shows how the user prefers to clear the game,” said Hirabayashi. “And so now we have the knife where we can give them even more options and even more opportunities to play the game in the style that they want.”
Adding something like a parry might piss some purists off, but Capcom is thinking of people like that while reimagining this widely loved magnum opus. While Hirabayashi is a producer on this remake, he was also at Capcom for the GameCube remake of the first game and a producer on the Resident Evil 2 remake. He called out that 2019 remake specifically, noting that the team tries to think of what its hardcore players would want.
“One hint we got from the RE2 remake was how to preserve the game in a way that makes fans the happiest,” he said. “Basically, when developing the game, we look at what we need to preserve and what we need to boost. So we went in and looked at the game and asked, ‘What would fans love? What do we need to preserve? What can we have the same? What can we power up?’ One thing that the team was focusing on for this remake is how the player can feel the same sort of nostalgic feeling while playing the game while still being a remake of the game itself.”
The merchant is another area that has been remixed and updated. Players can obviously still buy items and upgrades at shops, but they can also fix worn melee weapons and take up side missions that reward gems that can be traded back in. But even though he serves a useful function, he’s also a loveable scamp with some irresistibly catchy phrases that have been forever burned into the culture at large. His voice is undoubtedly going to be a hot topic upon release since any change to “Whaddaya buyin’?” and the like is going to turn heads.
Hirabayashi wouldn’t answer if Capcom hired a new voice actor for the role (the game’s recent trailer seems to imply as much) and was hesitant to speak at all about the cloaked shopkeeper. He also declined to state whether or not any cut content from the original was making its way into the remake. He seemed determined to keep as much as he could a surprise and only speak broadly about the design and what Capcom is keeping in mind rather than getting lost in specifics.
It’s an understandable choice, especially seeing how easy it is to get overly concerned with the details. Those details matter in many regards — even more so for a game this sacred — but keeping the general spirit is much more important than if the merchant chuckles the same way. And the Resident Evil 4 remake appears to be evoking the original’s essence without just being a carbon copy of it. It has the rewarding, high-adrenaline combat that redefined the series and its atmospheric world, but with contemporary touches and twists that only better highlight what was already there.
It’s going to be difficult to keep that balancing act up for the whole experience. However, Capcom seems to get why Resident Evil 4 is so highly regarded, which worked out incredibly well for the first two Resident Evil remakes that also took classics and successfully reinvented them.
