2023 has been an incredible year for games, but the pace was relentless. Sometimes, great games get left behind. As the year wraps up, I wanted to remember why I dropped the Resident Evil 4 remake and see if it’s worth completing now.
My wife, five minutes into booting this back up after eight months: “This is awesome! Why did you stop playing this?”
Me: “I don’t know.”
My wife is very smart — the Resident Evil 4 remake is awesome. It’s as gorgeous, fluid, and tense as the original was in 2005, with a fresh coat of graphics and savvy gameplay updates. Along with the other Resident Evil remakes, Capcom’s writers also took the opportunity to update the characters and dialogue while keeping the story intact. I already wrote a whole article about how Capcom modernized this game, but that was when I was still playing it. Will I feel the same way?
RE4 happens in three acts, each set in a different location. Act 1 is the village, the site of the famous running gunfight that announced RE4 as a game changer for the industry. Act 2 is set in a big Spanish castle, and Act 3 ends in a combined military/research facility like every other Resident Evil game.
The remake expertly recreates and expands on these locations and packs them with detail, visually and in the gameplay. As you drive through the story blasting bug-infected Spanish farmers in the face, you’ll make optional detours for treasure and side-quests. I don’t know if there is more of this in the remake than in the original, but it feels frictionless and modern — a testament to RE4‘s design in both 2005 and 2023.
The problem with remaking one of the most beloved games ever is that I’ve played Resident Evil 4 so many times. I literally just played it in VR last year (you can throw your gun in the air and catch it!), and there’s an undeniable deja vu that all the ray tracing and haptic feedback can’t erase.
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The remake’s gameplay additions, like an open world section around the lake at the end of Act 1, add to this feeling. Even if you’re doing something new, how you’re doing it is familiar. There have been many Resident Evil games since the series reinvented itself in 2017, all running on the same game engine, and despite some differences, they’re all fundamentally similar.
The remake is also a victim of its original’s success. RE4 still defines third-person games. This is not just a new version of something I’ve played a dozen times — it plays exactly like a million other games. It’s very hard to ignore the voice in my head saying, “Yeah, cool. Next!”
I stopped playing the RE4 remake halfway through the castle section, about 60% of the way through the game. I bet I’m not alone. A poor Spanish village is a creative and memorable location for a video game, but we’ve been tearing through castles with machine guns since Wolfenstein 3D. I didn’t hit a wall or get lost. I just stopped. “Yeah, cool,” I said.
Then Jedi: Survivor, also one of the year’s best games, released a month later. I hadn’t booted up RE4 for a while when Jedi came in hot with its 100+ gigabyte install size. I needed the space. I shelved RE4.
And so my soul spent the summer tossed by the passionate waves of unbelievably high quality, big budget, story-driven video games: Jedi, System Shock, Diablo 4, Final Fantasy 16, Sea of Stars, Baldur’s Gate 3, Starfield, Assassin’s Creed: Mirage, Alan Wake 2. Though some were disappointing, I loved them all in their way. Then, after Spider-Man 2 kissed me on the cheek, got dressed, and left, I rolled over and texted my first ex of 2023: Resident Evil 4.
We picked up right where we left off. Because RE4 is so similar to other games, the learning curve was non-existent. After a quick refresher on new mechanics like the parry system, I was right back in it like no time had passed.
After some time away, I was much better able to appreciate the newness of RE4, and even the castle section felt propulsive and fresh. I realized I hadn’t finished the original RE4 since the first time on the GameCube, and there was a lot more to love this second time.
The knife fight with Krauser that caps off Act 2, a series of quick-time events in the original, is fleshed out into a full-on boss fight that makes good use of the new parry system. Following that, infiltrating the island military base — originally a combat-heavy slog — uses the remake’s new stealth system and muscular, scrambly combat to good effect.
In the dreaded military base/lab section, you’re relentlessly pursued by the Regeneradors, pale naked freaks with dump truck thighs that can recover from any injury — unless you kill the parasites nested in their bodies. The remake’s cutting-edge tech updates these encounters: the shotgun blasts away their flesh to reveal the parasites, and my precision pistol finishes them off.
I was curious how I would approach RE4 after playing Alan Wake 2, a masterpiece that is very much in conversation with the Resident Evil series and currently sits at the forefront of survival horror. Would I experience the same deja vu? Nope! Alan Wake 2 is to Resident Evil 4, as David Lynch is to David Fincher. Superficially similar, they couldn’t be more different at their core. One doesn’t cancel out the other.
Unless you demand the freedom to throw your gun in the air and catch it, the remake of Resident Evil 4 is the best way to play a classic. It’s an improvement on the original in every way, worth playing for newcomers and vets alike. Will I feel the same about my other 2023 exes, like Dead Space? There’s only one way to find out.
The above article is part of a series from Colin Munch on the video games he’s dropped this year. Here’s a list of the others, so far:
