It almost seems redundant to be excited for October and Halloween to arrive in bringing the seasonal scaries with them, considering how positively horrifying the everyday happens to be as of late.


R.I.P anxiety sufferers

Yesterday’s post was an attempt at being more reminiscent about a subject that I’m similar parts excited to discuss as I am still salty about, and that is the kind of game Resident Evil 4 turned out to be. You’d think after a good two decades after the game launched and took the gaming industry by storm, and after having beaten the game about a million times since then, you’d think I’d be over it. I am, on some level, though as evidenced by my article involving the games “failings”, I still have thoughts about it. My feelings on RE4 are part and parcel a great example of how I usually operate within the gaming space: never quite the devotee to blind fandom, but also never the man vigorously chugging the hatorade with reckless abandon.

I think one of the reasons I’m not more deeply infected with the bug of resentment towards RE4 is a matter of realism. I mean yes, putting aside the game is just an amazing example of effective game design, and maybe one of the prime candidates one can look at for how to reinvent the series, one of the primary reasons RE4 had to do what it did in the realm of survival horror, in redefining the standards of what it could entail, was in fact a last move gamble to try and survive the horror of irrelevancy. These moments are extraordinarily real existential threats that crouch in silent wait for any game series not willing to swing with the times, and even my favorites within the industry have fallen victim to the reality that persists when any single franchise refuses to evolve with the shifting perspectives and taste of gamers at large. I think one need not look much further than just Resident Evil’s more worth contemporary, Silent Hill, to see such truth in the matter.

To wit; when Resident Evil 4 was coming out, Silent Hill 4 had launched a half year before, and while many enjoyed what the game had to offer, some felt that perhaps the series was starting to run out of gas, and needed some kind of change up. Resident Evil was haunted with similar issues in comparable ways, they were just luckier in having a larger stream of spin-offs with which to tinker with various ideas. This is also on top of RE’s attempt at going for a face lift, and re-exploring the roots of the series with the remake of Resident Evil 1, which most people agreed then was one of the most impressive revisits the industry had ever seen, and remains a piece de resistance in terms of remake qualities. However, even following what was a stellar remake, RE 0 was not met with the same fanfare, and with the spin-offs of the Resident Evil games performing middlingly, like the too ahead of it’s time Outbreak series, it was clear that the formula did have to evolve in order to stay relevant.

With all of this in mind, and acknowledging that either Capcom knew how to manage their series more responsibly than Konami knew how to manage their’s, or maybe due to the franchisement capabilities the Resident Evil series possessed, Silent Hill just didn’t have quite the same amount of breathing room to stretch out and play around with more ideas, instead being in a bit more tied up in an artistic entanglement with Team Silent wanting to be at the helm, but members of the team also wanting to move on and work on other projects. A few years late, after RE4 had already evolved the RE series into a goliath, by being something new and not what the series represented, SH: Homecoming came out, which arguably, doubled down on what made Silent Hill so Silent Hilly, and there was a surprising mix of reactions to the game itself. There were of course a number of reasons why, but more so to the bottom line point: the formula had to change into to swing with the times, and where Silent Hill stuck with it’s guns, Resident Evil rearmed itself with a whole new arsenal of ideas and went in guns a blazing.

Even though Silent Hill continued to maintain some sense of regular releases, it’s fairly clear in hindsight looking back at the series from a future standpoint, the reinvention ended up saving the RE series in a big way, which wasn’t a moment SH would get to enjoy with any timeliness, and in fact, would be in the form of a playable teaser (P.T.) that not only came more than a decade after the release of both SH4 and the cyclone that was RE4, but was a demo that was essentially delisted due to behind the scenes conflict with Kojima, thus keeping the SH series stalled for awhile longer, before we would get a glimpse into what eventually became the now celebrated SH2 remake.

This is all a ridiculously truncated version of what happened with both series, but I had very little time today to spare to write an article, which is why I had to do such an expeditious speedrunning attempt involving this look back of nostalgia at two titans within the survival horror realm, so this will have to do for now.

~Pashford