Resident Evil Remake

After an early morning session and an evening session, I’ve made it out of the Residence! This a cool area that also has one of the clumsier puzzles I’ve seen in a Resident Evil game. I was also introduced to Lisa Trevor for the first time which was terrifying. I didn’t try to shoot her but just dodged her and got the hell out of her disgusting whacky-shack. I’m curious what’s happening with Barry. I thought he was a fan favorite, who was he talking to in Room 202? Wesker showed up after all the mayhem to help sew some doubt into the narrative. I don’t trust him, but Barry is a surprise.

My intention was to do a whole post on the contents of the courtyard / residence / aqua ring area but we got distracted … by playing more Resident Evil! I’ve got to say, this game is brilliant; every puzzle is a puzzle on a puzzle AND it’s done so well that it doesn’t ever feel bloated… well most of the time.

In the residence there is one puzzle that I absolutely do not know how you’re supposed to solve without looking it up. There is a note you find that describes the only effective chemical to kill a giant plant that has grown out of control. In a small closet that was locked behind the OTHER clumsy puzzle in this section (the eye-ball lamps and pool balls). The note tells you what color these compounds are and in the room you have three options, a red chemical, a yellow chemical and water. There is no formula written down anywhere and after a few attempts we just looked it up. And I’m glad they did! Because it was an assinine number of steps that could not have been sussed out with trial and error. Maybe the trick here is that you don’t HAVE to do this at all, you can raw dog the plant, guns blazing, but it still feels ill-explained.

Right before we stepped foot into the outbuilding that led to the two branches of the courtyard, Catrena and I were debating where we were going to find the helmet key, one of the last keys we needed to unlock the doors in the mansion. We’ve been in the mansion so long that we thought we’d seen most of what the game had to give, but then you step out of these doors and the world of Resident Evil expands dramatically. You start to learn about The Trevor’s, a terribly sad case of cruelty inflicted by the Umbrella Corps of the 1960s. You even meet the deformed (and possibly immortal?) Lisa Trevor who wears the face of her fallen mother because “no one could replace her mother.” You find yourself stomping around in these underground caverns that host experiments gone awry and suddenly you’re trying to drain a million gallons of water from a mutated shark’s tank before they come busting into the control room. The puzzles and gameplay and action and scares are all slotted together like the many bizarre family crests and medallions and transforming keys that you need to make your way through this world.

Remarkably the move back to the mansion from this newly expanded world did not feel like a rehash of the first hours of the game. In fact, as you come back through that little outbuilding Barry leaves you a note saying that “he fixed that pesky doorknob” which now means I can come and go to the East Storeroom more freely. There are also new enemies stalking us; Hunters are hiding in the mansion in areas that were otherwise safe. Here is where the fixed camera angles can really make things tense - I don’t know if moving around this corner is going to bring on a fight with these scary reptillian BOWs or just reveal an empty hallway.

As you open the doors with the Helmet key, unlocking the REST of the mansion, it gets even weirder! Lots of angles through dirty windows and hallways with open flames on them. It turns out Yawn, the giant snake from earlier, makes a comeback and thanks to the grenade launcher will never poison me again. And we gain a battery to now unlock the rest of the courtyard!

After killing some more giant tarantulas, running away from MULTIPLE boulders, tricking Lisa Trevor and crushing some trash, I made my way back into the mansion with all the parts needed to open the mysterious gates in the basement of the main hall. It was a lot of back and forth in this part but I was able to get it done within a few hours and the only time it felt overbearing was when I kept filling my inventory on errant herbs. Now we are staring at the gates, ready to head down to … who knows? I’m assuming it’s going to be some kind of laboratory but you never know with this game!

It turns out there WAS a laboratory! And a creepy one at that. I maintain that in this playthrough I did not take one single shot at Lisa Trevor. Her story is too sad and after she pulls her mother’s skull from the coffin on the altar and jumps away, I knew I had made the right decision.

From here we took a quick dinner break and went straight back in. The lab was cool, I really enjoyed all the puzzles relating to the door locks. Getting the x-rays aligned, using the slide filters to get the door codes, hacking into the computer - it was just a well thought out puzzle. And the kicker once you get all of them unlocked you don’t even have to go down there! That’s just where Chris was being held. It feels like you could skip so much of this area yet the way its designed, it compels you to get everything done.

By the end of the maze we’re met with the reveal that Albert Wesker, that son-of-a-gun, used Barry’s family as leverage to get him to turn heel! What a crook. I’m glad that Tyrant slapped him like a bitch. The Tyrant is also cool, really the prototype for every other bad guy in the Resident Evil franchise since. Also making an appearance here is the “throw them a rocket launcher” for the grand finale (I love how often this comes back throughout the numbered games).

And that’s credits! What an ending! I think we ended up with Jill’s best ending, as both Barry and Chris made it out with us. I love that we got to use the Rocket Launcher to blow away the Tyrant and we had a race against the clock to escape before the facility exploded. This game’s pacing was so excellent, I’m still reveling in the fact that despite it’s mystery and tedium, this game really helps you along and never punishes you. In the laboratory I started getting annoyed at how often I had to keep running up two flights of stairs to get to the safe room and right before I brought that explosive fuel container over to the power station I noticed a door in the area I hadn’t gone through. It was in a junction at a hallway and my icon kept obscuring it. Well it was a safe room and it was exactly where I felt one should be. They give you what you need when you need it, nothing more and certainly nothing less… at least on the lesser difficulties - I can’t speak to hard or anything like that.