Hello, and welcome to The Back Page, A Video Games Podcast. I’m Samuel Roberts, and I’m joined by Matthew Castle. Hello. Matthew, how are things going on your end? Are you playing anything that isn’t Resident Evil now that you’ve finished Resident Evil? Yeah, I’m playing this rogue-like about mountain climbing called Insurmountable. Oh, weird. Is that because- Were you expecting that? I mean, the thought of you climbing a mountain in real life is what immediately came to mind there. I thought, well, okay, that would never happen, so. Oh, yeah, when the scouts went to Snowdonia, which is pretty chill as far as mountains go, I completely shit my pants and got halfway up and then just went back down again. Snowdonia as well is basically the baby park of mountains, isn’t it? Yeah, I mean, it’s really a glorified hill. Don’t come at me, Snowdonia fans. What’s it like then? Are you kind of getting into VR games a bit more at the moment? No, it’s not a VR thing. Oh, sorry, I don’t know why I thought it was. No, no, you think, well, that’s what’s interesting about it is all the mountain climbing games I’ve seen tend to be basically VR games or maybe Death Stranding, if that sort of counts. It’s about the act of climbing a mountain, but this is kind of breaks the mountain into tiles and like a road light, you’ve kind of got survival road light. You’ve got these energy meters that are dropping down and events can happen on the mountain that kind of drain oxygen, sanity, stamina or whatever. And so it’s kind of about like managing all your resources. But I actually think it’s kind of genius in a way. Like I think the way they’ve equated climbing a mountain with the kind of single run of a road light is actually very astute. You only have a shot at Everest. You can’t sort of get up halfway and save. Like once you’re up there, you kind of get to the top or it’s all or nothing. I think it’s pretty smart. Oh, if your character freezes to death, can you pass them up the summit on your next turn? Is that a thing that can happen? That’s not in there. Well, I’ve seen it. That would be brilliant though. Like the mountain should be littered with the corpses of every other run. Oh my God. That is like a great idea. Yeah. That’s amazing. I don’t know why they didn’t do that. It’s not that bleak. I mean, it’s quite bleak. Like when your oxygen runs out, you basically just keep coughing up sort of bloody throth until you die, which is fun. It might be because when we were at that future conference and the man came in and told us about his mountain trip and like he made the whole summit bit sound so vividly like horrible in terms of passing actual dead bodies and then like his fingers being permanently damaged. That I am, yeah. Now I think that in order to properly replicate that experience, yes, they have to litter the mountain with bodies in this like in this nice little roguelike game or otherwise it would be true to life. Yeah, apparently on Everest, there’s a place called Rainbow Valley, which is so called because it’s got all the multicolored sleeping bags and equipment of all the corpses. Oh good, I like it when a name can be both rye and devastating at the same time. Yeah, because it sounds like a Mario Kart track but it is so far from a Mario Kart track. Yeah, wow, good stuff. There we go. We talked about death on mountains. So that takes us nicely, question mark, into this week’s episode. So this is a Resident Evil special episode. So me and Matthew have both played Resident Evil Village which on the day this podcast releases, the game is out at the same time, which is May the 7th. So in this episode, we’re gonna have spoiler free thoughts on Resident Evil Village. We’ll get deep into the game in a kind of like constructive criticism type way but we won’t give away major plot points or like what the bosses are in the game or any of that key stuff, any of the big surprises. And then in the second half of the episode, we’re gonna go through our top five Resident Evil games. So quite exciting, because me and Matthew have both finished Resident Evil Village. We got sent review code by Lick PR in the UK. Thank you very much for that. It’s really great to be able to talk about the game the week it’s released. That’s quite exciting. One of Matthew’s bits of constructive criticism on a past episode, our Mario 3D episode, is that we didn’t play Bowser’s Fury before we recorded that. Matthew’s been livin about it ever since. So it’s good this week to have played the game that’s actually coming out and not just talk around it, which is good. So yeah, Matthew, what’s your vibe on Resident Evil Village? What’s your sort of top line thought on it? My top line thought is a really pleasant surprise. I played the demos, the two demos that they did of it, the little castle demo and the little village demo, and found them thoroughly underwhelming. And I think they actually picked probably the two worst bits to show off what that game was about. I think, the other part of the pleasant surprise is I think Capcom genuinely sat on a lot of really interesting, great stuff about this game. I think they managed to focus the conversation around quite a thin slice of what the game is. And that has, yeah, I don’t know, it made for a really rollicking 10 or so hours. Yeah, I would agree with that. It’s very much a kind of a marketing campaign that managed to draw its attention on a large woman, tall woman, Lady Dimitrescu, is that her name? I believe it is. Yeah, something along those lines. You don’t pronounce a U at the end, according to the merchant in the game. So I’m basing it on that. And so yeah, that definitely tells the story of what some of the game is about, but they’ve hidden a lot of surprises as well, which is quite exciting if you’re a fan. I actually didn’t play these two demos because Capcom did that really bizarre thing where you could only play them for a certain amount of time, and I thought, that’s too stressful, I can’t be bothered. But I did play the maiden demo earlier, which did seem like kind of a mood piece that gave you a kind of taste of the castle in the game. Yeah, it’s like, yeah, 10 or so hours. I just blasted through it in a weekend like you did. And yeah, really, really fun, really energetic game and really entertaining for a Resident Evil game. So yeah, we’ve got loads to dip into basically. This first half will focus on that. In the second half, like I say, we’ve got a top five Resident Evil games. Matthew, choosing your games for that list, what was that process like? It was difficult actually, because I’ve got, as many people have, I imagine a couple of like stone cold classics. But after that, actually a lot of Resident Evil is like a big soup of like seven and eight out of tens for me. So dipping into that soup and going, do I go for like the heart choice or the head choice? Heart does some weird stuff in Resident Evil, and has resulted in a recently weird list that I imagine lots of people will disagree with. Yeah, it’s an interesting one, because I haven’t played every game in the series, so I’ll totally own up to some of my shortcomings on that front when we get to it. I know Resident Evil pretty well though, and I’m curious, Matthew, is your list just entirely made up of multiplayer shooters and light gun games? Is that your vibe on Resident Evil? More than you might think. This sounds like a fantastic disaster in the making. So yeah, this episode then, let’s get into it Matthew. So we’ve kind of recapped our thoughts there on the game. Like I say, this is an incredibly entertaining game, and a point you made to me when we were talking about it before this podcast is that this game seems to have a new idea every 30 minutes or so, a new set piece or a new little something, a new twist, a new surprise. And it keeps firing ideas at you throughout the entire game. So I would say that the last part of the game, it loses a tiny bit of momentum or gets a little bit stranger for various reasons. But generally speaking, I found this incredibly consistent and a really rare example, a modern example of pacing done really well in a blockbuster game. Talk to me about that sort of thing. So the pacing of the game, like generally, that’s like its major strength, right? Yeah, absolutely. And I think this is something which I associate with some of the best resies. I mean, famously, the thing about Resident Evil 4 is its pacing and it isn’t very sexy on paper. Well, when you’re playing it, you are like, man, that is a well paced game. That is a game that has always given me something. And here as well, and there’s just, there’s very, very little fat on it. I think it also speaks to the fact that where so many series have felt the need to kind of push outwards to like 20, 30 hour, they’ve taken in sort of open world or various degrees of open world. This doesn’t do that. And actually it could, probably could have. There’s, you know, structurally, as I’m sure we’ll talk about in a sec, there’s potential for this to be a lot more sprawling and baggier than it was, but it’s surprisingly lean. You know, I think by the end of it, you get the impression of like, wow, I’ve done this 10 hours. It’s incredibly dense. You know, there’s so much stuff in it. Really, really packed. Generally very polished, very high quality. Kind of the, you know, one of the first big next gen games, which factors into that. So you think it’s gonna, it’s a very like intensive, like 10 hours for, you know, on their part, which most people would be quite happy, you know, I was about to say spiking that with 10 hours of baking powder, because I’ve been watching The Wire and they do that a lot with drugs. That’s a very specific reference. Yeah, and I was like, actually, not everyone else is watching The Wire. So maybe that’s not, but you know what I mean? They haven’t cut this game with anything. It’s very to the point. Really does whip along in a very kind of confident brash way. And, you know, maybe it’s because we don’t get a lot of these kind of single player games to kind of compare it to. But I don’t know, I found it very refreshing. Yeah, it’s about as long as Resident Evil 7 was. And there’s a very easy and boring conversation to have about length versus value. I would say that if this game was a 70 pound first party PlayStation game, which it isn’t, it’s about, I think it’s 60 quid to pre-order, but there are places to do it for about 50. I think like 50 quid is like, I probably wouldn’t pay more than that for this in terms of like the value to measuring value in a really arbitrary sort of like cash pounds way. That feels like about the right price point to me. It just fits that perfectly. I think that I agree with you. It’s very well judged in its length. I think by being about six hours shorter than Resident Evil 4 is, for example, it accounts for the fact that people’s attention spans maybe aren’t what they were in 2004 or 2005, which is fine. And yeah, like you say, just to really kind of confident, this is what the game is, no fat. There’s a little bit of like optional stuff if you want to kind of prolong the adventure, but not much really. And yeah, cinematic survival horror adventure that in kind of like picking this sort of particular template manages to hit a lot of Resident Evil’s greatest hits, either in the settings that you’re sort of going to, the types of bosses you fight, or whatever. There are bits and pieces that will remind you of Resident Evil without it being like a total pastiche. And there are a number of direct references that fans will probably enjoy. But yeah, just, I agree with you, just a really, just perfectly kind of like pace game, really kind of confident game design, completely against type of what does well now. And that’s what’s exciting about it. So the premise of the game, you’re playing Ethan Winters, an extremely boring man who was the protagonist of Resident Evil 7. After that game, he went out for Chris Redfield and his wife, settled down, had a kid. The kid gets kidnapped. The kid has been taken to this village. You don’t know why it’s a village in, I think it’s speculated to be Romania or somewhere like that, but sort of everyone’s speaking in American accents anyway. It’s kind of confusing in terms of it’s like timing and the aesthetics of the village and stuff like that, but it’s not worth dwelling on that much. And then you are trying to get your daughter back. So the story, Matthew, is not the game’s strongest part, I would say. I didn’t find, I think Ethan, even by Resident Evil protagonist standards is a pretty boring main character. What was your vibe on the story in the game? Yeah, I’d agree with that. I mean, the weird thing is about this game and not to get too much into like how it ends, but it kind of, I feel like in the run-up to it, there was quite a lot of talk from Capcom about like, this is the culmination of the Ethan Winters storyline. And you’re like, it only started last game. Like, it’s a culmination of one game. Like that isn’t a saga, that’s nothing. Like that’s quite an odd structure, you know? And it is definitely a big scale step up from seven. Like it’s a much bigger feeling game in many ways. So you could see it as like the big third act in a story, except it’s not. It’s sort of the second and third act of the Ethan Winters story in one. I will say, like, Ethan Winters himself, not a great character, but it is hilarious. Like just what a horrendous time he has. I’ve never, there is not a pair of hands in games that have taken more punishment than his hands take in this game. And it’s like, he would have died so many times over, you know, based on just the kind of, well, he would have in the first game too, but in this game, it really ramped it up. I mean, did you feel this, like specifically in like the castle section, it felt like every 10 minutes, he was like losing a finger. Yeah, it’s a pretty like, it’s comical how much finger damage he takes in this game. Just gets absolutely wasted. It’s, yeah, and some of the, it’s preposterous, some of the stuff that he goes through in this. But I guess it’s designed to kind of underline the sort of stakes or make it feel real or whatever. But yeah, finger damage, that’s high on, it’s definitely one of Capcom’s big tricks in this game that it likes to get out of. Yeah, it has a lot of fun with the first person perspective of like, you know, I’m gonna put you through these horrible torture scenes and he really does get mangled. I will say for the story, that like, there was enough of a kind of a mystery of what was going on, that actually I did kind of want to, I did want to see it through to the end, you know, particularly more on the kind of Chris Redfield side. You know, it wasn’t that it’s like particularly great. You know, he, you know, as you’ve seen, if you’ve watched any of the trailers, he appears villainous and it’s kind of like, what? Chris Redfield is like this bad dude, what’s going on? And it’s not so much that, it’s just the, it kind of holds off on that, on what’s going on with him for quite a long time. So I was kind of genuinely interested in like, oh, I don’t know what his deal is. And again, without spoiling it, like, like there’s some quite mad stuff involving some pots, some magical vials, which I was like, oh, I want to know what’s going on here. Just cause it’s, it’s quite abstract. Some of the, the kind of MacGuffin in this game. Yeah, I agree with that. I think you make a really good point about this feeling like it’s got Resident Evil 7 structure, but then it’s kind of got a bit much bigger scale. So the village is your central location, but then for various different reasons, plot wise, you go off to different areas of the map beyond the village. And it’s like a kind of big seamless environment in terms of how it’s sort of portrayed. Obviously probably helped by the PS3, PS5, so SSD. Quick loading in this game is kind of miraculous actually in terms of like showing off what Next Gen can do. But generally speaking, the increase in scale makes a huge difference. We talked a bit about Resident Evil 7 on our Games of the Generation podcast. Neither of us were that big into it. We both found it a little bit sort of overrated. And obviously they kind of went with this template of first-person horror, a little bit infused by PT, a little bit infused by Amnesia. Basically like there was a trend of, you know, streaming horror games that emerged, like a demo scene almost, in the years preceding Resident Evil 7’s release that they were tapping into. This one feels a bit more like it can confidently be Resident Evil-ish in the types of stuff that it does. So the castle they take you to early on, that feels like the Spencer Mansion in Resident Evil 1 or like a traditional kind of like, or the police station in Resident Evil 2. That traditional kind of like knotty sort of environment, different keys unlock different bits. It’s not as complicated as those games. It’s a lot simpler to play. But they’re evoking that clearly. And I think that the huge benefit Village has over 7 is that whereas your diversions in the 7 were just fighting a different hillbilly in like a different barn or a different like part of this estate. Here you feel like you’re in a massive location, going to different places and seeing very different things and fighting very different types of enemies. Yeah, I agree. And it does an interesting thing quite early on where it basically shows you like a lot of what’s to come. It foreshadows a lot of stuff in quite a nice way in that, you know, there’s some quite distinctive villains in this game and they’re introduced quite early on, but they’re not really explained at all. And you’re just like, how the hell is all this gonna hold together? Like there is this sense of, wow, I, you know, I really don’t have a read on what this game is about and what it’s gonna be like. And I think that’s constantly playing on your mind. So that’s, and that’s quite a fun sort of motivating factor throughout this. Yeah, for sure. I think it’s almost like a Metal Gear Solid, kind of like villains, sort of a rogues gallery introduction of these are all the bastards who’ll be fighting in this game. Yeah, yeah. It’s great. I think that scene early on, man, it’s daft, but it’s really, really well done. It’s really effective because they’re quite charismatic and they’re kind of arguing amongst themselves and it’s, you know, just, yeah, very sort of disorientating and, you know, excellently done in terms of silly Resident Evil. It’s a good laugh. Yeah, I will say that while I don’t have much value for Ethan Winters as a character, I do think that the story they give you here is exciting. It’s like a, it’s an exciting ride. It’s like a fun journey into the unknown and it kind of, like I say, by firing out these different set pieces, it just keeps the energy going. So you’re never really bored by it, which overwrites the fact that the main character isn’t that interesting. I too, like you, was kind of curious about how they do the Chris Redfield stuff. And I did think they did it quite well, actually. But yes, I was curious, Matthew, this game’s balance of combat to survival horror. So obviously Seven was, I think Seven was regarded as a kind of scary game. There was like a really bad developer quote doing the rounds before we recorded this about, we consciously, like I’m paraphrasing, but we consciously made this less scary than Seven due to feedback. I personally didn’t think Seven was scary at all, apart from the occasional hillbilly turning around a corner and he’s like, oh, fuck you up. And that was like inspiration, but yeah. I think the opening to Seven is like genuinely quite intense. I think that’s about as scary as it gets, like it’s a proper like haunted house. You don’t really get a read on it. Like Seven at times almost sort of dips into the kind of outlast kind of trick, you know, sort of bag of tricks in terms of it’s an escape game. It’s not really a combat game where here everything is like quite explicitly combat. I’d say that the big difference, and I was surprised a lot of reviews to see people saying they weren’t like wild about the gun play. Cause I actually quite liked the action in Village compared to Seven where I thought basically in Seven, whenever you did action, it’s not very good. Like the gunplay and the monsters were just not fun. It’s why Seven for me, like the third act or the second half, I can’t remember the balance of it. Basically Beyond the Baker Mansion is a very, very weak game. I do not like the end of Seven at all. It’s why I prefer Village, I think. But yeah, I thought the action in this was fun. It’s got really gooey headshots. It’s got a great sniper rifle for doing gooey headshots. Yeah, and that kind of, I don’t know, that taps into the… It’s the same thing that puts a grin on my face when I’m playing like, Resident Evil 4, 5 or 6, is Capcom do very like meaty reactions. When combat goes right for you, it goes right in this really spectacular bloody way. And yeah, I had a pretty wild time with this game and the sniper rifle. I invested a lot, I upgraded the sniper rifle. I crafted a lot of sniper bullets. I basically had so many sniper bullets that, you know, there are a lot of werewolves in this game that kind of hide on rooftops waiting to ambush you. And I just spent my whole time shooting their heads off and sort of cackling to myself. Yeah, I get the impression you weren’t as keen on the action. Yeah, so I do echo that the sniper rifle in this game rules. And I think that they’ve obviously spent a lot more time getting the gunplay right in this. And it has to because, you know, basically when you arrive in the village, you’re almost immediately ambushed by werewolf men. I’m up and down on the combat. So one thing I think is great about this game compared to Village, sorry, compared to Seven, is that Village has loads of different enemy types. Whereas I think one of Seven’s big issues was it had very few enemy types. I think it just had those like goo monsters and the bosses and that was it in the game. Really, really boring enemies to fight. They just felt like bullet sponges. And in this game, there is more interactivity, like you say, there’s good reactions to headshots generally in this. But I don’t find the enemies as like interactive as they were in like four or two remake where you could like shoot off a limb in two remake or you could like shoot their leg and they kind of go down then Leon would do like a physical attack. It doesn’t have that next level to it, I don’t think. It’s version of that is that if you block, you put your hands up to block and then if you press block again, you kind of push them back and then the idea is they’re like stunned for a second and that’s when you can get the clean headshot. But that is just in no way as fun as like pile driving a kind of an old farmer into the mud. Yeah, and there’s obviously a deliberate creative intent behind choosing to do it the way that they have. But I do think that a little bit more physicality to the combat, maybe like an optional kind of like melee attack after you sort of headshot someone, just something a little more to kind of make it feel physical would be good. I think the enemies still lack a little bit of interactivity. When you shoot the rest of their body, it doesn’t ever really do anything in this game. Yeah, that’s fair. I do think that the werewolves who are like basically a baby, you know, they are probably the closest thing to like Resi 4’s villagers that they’ve, you know, in this game, are satisfying to fight. Like, I, you know, I enjoy the gooeyness of it. I like the numbers. I think I’ve seen a lot of reviews say the second half is weaker. I think that maybe speaks to whether you do or don’t kind of click with the action, because the second half, I would say, is where most of the action is. Definitely like the bigger action set pieces are there, because, you know, the way this game sort of segments itself, like, there’s a very specific pace and vibe to each kind of chunk of the game. And some of them are pretty, like, action-free for, like, you know, an hour or an hour and a half or whatever, but then you suddenly have this quite intense rush of action, which I liked. I think, you know, that sort of physicality aside, you know, I think you’re definitely right about the enemy types. I think the final kind of big action stretch for this game, it kind of goes into a setting which isn’t as interesting. It’s a bit of a cliché, but it’s got a lot of enemies with, like, I mean, literal glowing weak spots, which I found really satisfying to fight. Like, I felt it actually really, you know, it made the gunplay very, very tense because all of a sudden, like, you’re trying to land these precious shots that can basically stun enemies that otherwise will absolutely, like, mullet you. Yeah, I’m up and down on that second half. Like you say, the setting they take you to, that’s quite, I thought, quite a boring choice, but the actual enemy types in there were, like you say, just really inventive and, like, really fun to fight. And there were brilliant variations on that enemy type as well that I found really impressive. And trying to suss out as a player was fun. Yeah, definitely. Like, even within that area, which is maybe, like, two hours of the game, perhaps, you know, there is this big escalation of, like, enemy ideas, you know, introduces one, you’re like, oh shit, it’s these guys. And then it’s like, now you’ve got to deal with two of them. And now their weak spots are in a different space, and now they’re armoured, and now they can jump around. And it’s quite impressive, the kind of pace, and that’s what I was talking about, and I think you were talking about, with that pacing thing. It just kind of keeps pushing on through, and doesn’t, like, rest on anything, which is nice, I like it. I’ve seen some people say that section is, like, way too long, but I personally think the enemies kind of kept it fresh, and, you know, some of the stupid boss fights in it. But yeah, I love shooting a giant orange weak spot, what can I say? I would also argue that that section doesn’t so much, like, it’s also the biggest challenge, really, in the game that you face. It’s the first time, I think, that you’re really facing strong peril in terms of combat in the game. And because it’s actually, like, challenging sometimes, it maybe feels like more of a slog than the rest of it, where it’s quite easy. I will say that this game, something I re- I kept coming back to the word, like, handcrafted in this, when I was thought about this game, because obviously, like, all games have to be sort of, you know, carefully constructed in terms of quest design and stuff like that. But it’s something about the specific distribution of, like, enemies, puzzles, pacing of, like, set pieces that felt so, like, considered to me. It felt so like, and then this beat leads to this, and then this leads to this. And it feels like you’re always facing the right number of threats at the right time. Yeah, I think so. And it’s- for me, that’s the- again, that’s like the Resident Evil 4 sweet spot. It’s the- it’s the idea that- and this plays particularly well to the survival horror element, where it favours- it favours, like, different weapons and different approaches at different times. So even though you don’t necessarily have the resources to invest in everything, there are stretches where you will naturally find yourself overpowered if you’ve invested in certain things. Like, there are sections where if you have a good sniper rifle and lots of sniper bullets, it’s piss-easy, but you feel, like, unbelievably powerful, because you’re just, like, shooting down birdmen left, right and centre, and you’re like, haha, this is great. But then there are other sections, you know, where you might find yourself in a boss fight and you’re, you know, you’re woefully unprepared, or your sniper rifle is just a bust, because it’s, like, a really close melee fight, very fast moving. And that is something I really associate with Resident Evil 4 as well, like, where all the decisions I was making, it would reward some, it would also punish the same decisions, like, half an hour later. Resident Evil 4 definitely keeps you on that knife edge in a way that this doesn’t. Like, it’s a way more generous game. Like, I don’t think I died outside of boss fights, like, ever. Yeah, I died twice in the entire game, and I think those were both, like, goofs, where I just wasn’t paying attention properly. There were plenty of moments where I was like, oh shit, oh shit, oh shit, and then I was like, oh, phew. And I never did die, but I think it kind of put me in a, like, a suitably tense place. Like, I wasn’t bored, I was happy, you know, for most of the time. Yeah, and I suppose as well, a lot of Resident Evil 4’s deaths are, like, QTE-based. It’s like, you’ve picked up, you know, a Dr. Pepper, and you weren’t holding the controller, and so you suddenly panic and realize that Krauser’s about to knife you, and you’re like, fuck, and then that’s, like, a death. That’s a true answer to Dr. Pepper’s, what’s the worst that could happen. What’s the worst that could happen is there’s a soldier who’s got a giant mutant arm he’s gonna tear my head off. Oh, yeah, and it’s also, like, it’s not as good as Resident Evil 4 as well. Just in a general sense, it’s not, like, it doesn’t reach those same heights in terms of how that game made you feel at the time. No, definitely not. But it’s really, it’s really, like, quite, it’s close enough, it’s close enough to make this a really satisfying game. Yeah, I actually, like, the kind of, that thing of, like, the density of ideas, but well done, is almost kind of what I liked about Resident Evil 6, but it’s better done here. You know, I think if you’ve listened to this podcast, you’ve heard us talk a little bit about Resident Evil 6 before, like, I’ve got a fondness for that game, like, how full on it is. You know, that is a game that goes all out. Unfortunately, it’s just, it’s very, very baggy. But if you like the sillier side of Rezzy, like, this is a pretty silly game, and it gives you, like, lots of boss fights. They die in really gripply ways, which is fun. It’s quite a gooey game. It ticks a lot more of those boxes than Resident Evil 7 did, I’d say. Yeah, I completely agree with that. I think that what’s funny about this game as well is it’s called Resident Evil Village. I don’t feel like I spent that much time in the actual village in this game. Is that how you felt as well? I felt like I was always orbiting the village or doing something somewhere else. There’s a section, probably about a third of the way in, where you kind of return to the village and it opens up almost fully, I’d say. There’s almost a sort of a… I don’t want to say Metroidvania. What I actually liken it to is maybe the new Tomb Raider games, where there’s a relatively linear progress around the world, but it brings you back to this sort of central hub, where every time you return, you’ve got a couple new gadgets and there’s basically a new layer of stuff you can interact with and an extra load of map markers you can tick off. But I think you can scratch most of that stuff off in the central third of the game. There’s not a lot of stuff to lure you back for a final lap, I’d say. It’s quite a nice structure, but I think it maybe kind of shows everything in the first half of the game, and so the village becomes less of a concern. I’d have happily done one more lap of the village with new enemies in it or something else layered on top of it, but it didn’t kind of push it that far. No, it feels quite restrained in how they use it. I would say that none of the game’s most interesting things really happen in the village. There’s a couple of set pieces that are notable, but a lot of the most inventive stuff happens elsewhere, I would say. So it’s kind of coming back and saying, which werewolf lads are going to trouble me this time? Or there might be a larger enemy there that wasn’t there before, but generally speaking, it’s a fairly familiar experience. There’s a nice transitioning night and day cycling in this game as well, which I think just adds a little bit in terms of making the time for it to pass through the story. But I was curious then, as a kind of side note to that, Matthew, do you think this game is scary? Because the village section, while it has like an atmosphere, I can’t say it really spooked me, but there are a couple of moments in this game that I did find scary. And I’m curious what your take on this is as a man who gets quite scared quite easily buying horror games. I think the game does a couple of intense action scenes that kind of tick the same kind of intensity of basically the sort of your surrounded set pieces that they did brilliantly in Resident Evil 4 and had really never really been seen or done that well before. The famous kind of siege in the house or whatever. There’s a few sections in this where it throws a surprising amount at you and it’s kind of hectic rather than scary. The exception is, and we’ve mentioned this before, there are almost sort of segmented areas that have kind of different vibes or different things going on and one of those is basically a self-contained haunted house without spoiling it. And that I thought was actually pretty scary. I also thought it was brilliant. It was probably the best bit of the game. It’s a really inventive, kind of like PT-infused, I would say, experience. It feels like there’s a very strong PT influence on it, more so than even in, like, you saw in Resident Evil 7. And I thought it was fantastic and quite daring and interesting. And I almost wished it was something else that took that to the next level in this. But as a piece of the game, really, really effective, for sure. Yeah, it felt like an evolution of some of the stuff they did in Resi 7 with the, I can never remember his name, the kind of the brother of the family. I can’t remember his name either. You know, his section in Resident Evil 7 is a bit like Saw. You know, he kind of locks you in a death trap. This is kind of a sort of similar-ish, sort of self-contained thing. You know, it’s sort of a puzzle survival section, I guess, is the best way of describing it without going into, like, specifics. But it’s, yeah, it’s a creepy-ass house. Incredible sound design. Like, it’s this creaky, like, windblown. I mean, I was playing this with the old PlayStation Pulse headphones, which I got for Christmas because I wanted some of that 3D headphone audio. And the sound mixing throughout is amazing, but in that particular section, really, really shat me up. It’s, like, just a brilliantly done, you know, hour of the game. And you’re right, you are like, oh, man, I hope it does that again or something akin to that again. But it kind of doesn’t. It kind of, like, moves on from it and then it’s action, action, action. Yeah, it’s sort of, I will say, while it’s never, like, truly so scary you want to turn it off, there’s a couple of moments that, like, made my heart leap. And I thought, that’s kind of enough for me from Resi. That’s enough horror that I need from this particular series. It’s never a series I’ve thought of as being so unbearably scary, you switch it off. That’s, like, Silent Hill’s domain, traditionally, in my head. Right. Whereas this is, yeah, more leans to, like, a balance of entertainment and horror. So, I think that this game thread-sack quite nicely. That said, if they did make a Resident Evil game that was more in that vein of that particular location in this game, I think it would fucking rule, because they’ve proved they’re good at it here, using, like you say, sound techniques. And this game has, like you say, phenomenal sound design, like the deployment of, like, key sort of creaks or, like, rattles or whatever at different moments of the game. Like I say, it’s that word handcrafted again. I kept thinking, this feels so detailed in terms of, I know I’m meant to feel a specific way at this time, because a sound designer decided to put this noise here. And it’s like, there’s a level of sophistication to it that I think goes beyond the kind of, like, you hear an enemy sort of, like, stomping in the distance from, like, I don’t know, PS2 or horror games. It just, it goes beyond that. It’s like next level sound design. Just really, really impressive. Yeah, it’s good in the castle as well, actually. When you get into, like, the upper levels and the kind of windows and the wind kind of bashing against the windows, it feels, like, super lonely. It’s a game that, it does a really good job of just reminding you that you’re kind of completely fucked and by yourself a lot of the time, you know, and if anything does turn up, it’s most likely a scary wolf man who wants to eat you. Yeah, that section is great. I mean, I’m glad it is kind of self-contained. Like, a whole game of that would have probably been, like, too much for me. I mean, I think there you’re getting into the territory of, like, your outlasts or whatever, where it’s just, like, you know, I’m gonna really, really shit you up for, like, eight hours. And I kind of, I liked when it was over. There was, like, a big breath on it. It helps that it’s also followed by, like, like something, an incredibly dumb stretch of the game. I like the sense of, like, Capcom kind of playfully, like, putting their foot to the pedal and being like, I’m gonna squeeze you a little bit more in this bit and then I’m gonna let you go a bit and then I’m gonna squeeze you a little bit more. It’s kind of fun. Like, it’s fun to be played with like that. Yeah, it feels very, very deliberate in how it does that. And, yeah, as kind of blockbuster horror games go, I mean, there aren’t many of them around these days. Resident Evil is pretty much, you know, the only horse in town, a couple of outliers aside. It’s, yeah, it’s definitely doing its bit, I would say. And I would say I found it like at least as scary as Resident Evil 7. Like I said, I just thought that game just kind of had like jump scares and that was basically what it had at its arsenal. I would say it’s probably on a par with Resident Evil 2 Remake and how scary it is as well, like a similar kind of vibe. So, yeah. I will say, actually, a similarity is worth pointing out. I found the giant lady who kind of in the castle sort of serves a similarish role to Mr. X in Resident Evil 2. I’m finding that whole thing less effective every time. Like, I thought that Mr. X kind of pursuing you around the police station Resident Evil 2, like it really got me when I played the remake. And then I didn’t care much for Nemesis in the 3 Remake. And here again, I was a little bit like, yeah, yeah, I’ve kind of done that. Like, I kind of know what I’m doing here. I’ve dealt, you know, I’ve got coping mechanisms in place to deal with like a big thing that kind of comes through doors. But I don’t know, maybe that’s just me. Maybe that’s just my brain reacting to the just fucking endless onslaught of memes about the big lady. But I don’t know, she didn’t really do it for me. Well, there we go. We’ve learned a bit about your sexual peccadilla. Don’t do it for me, it’s a horror thing. Oh, right. I mean, I knew that, but yeah. What’s your sort of whole take on the big lady horny discourse, Matthew? I feel like it’s going to date really badly, actually, if we talk about this, because people will be like, oh yeah, they probably were like locked down and everyone got horny for a fictional big lady in a video game. Yeah, I’m kind of happy that she existed in a way, because it focused all the conversation on her and she’s a relatively small bit of this game. You’re like, oh yeah, like we said, you don’t really know anything else and it’s kind of a lot more interesting. They almost sacrificed her in a way to the discourse to kind of keep the rest of it kind of ticking over. I mean, she is pretty strong and she’s probably like a bit more iconic than some of the other stuff in this. Though I like the kind of weird bloke in it. Catherine always likens to the baddie in Final Fantasy XV, Ardyn. Oh yeah, so you’re referring to Heisenberg. Yeah, Heisenberg. He’s got big Ardyn energy. He’s like a weird bloke. He just keeps turning up. I think what happens with him is probably going to be one of the more divisive elements. Again, without spoiling it. For me, it was a big silly Resident Evil play, so I was fully there for it. But I’ve seen some people being like, oh, that’s daft. And you’re like, well, I don’t know. I kind of like that about this game. I think this game rediscovered a bit of Resident Evil’s extreme silliness, which is something I respond to quite well. Yeah, so I agree with that. I think that that was actually not a section that particularly offended me. I think that a couple of the bosses in this game, I don’t think, work so well. I would say that none of the bosses are actually great. There’s no all-timer boss fight in this, like the Krauser fight in Resident Evil 4, or what it’s like to fight that dude in that barn in Resident Evil 4. There’s a few different enemies that you fight in that game that make for memorable boss encounters, I would say. And this doesn’t have the same sort of, like, invention. It does have a couple of nice ideas in terms of how you actually deal with the enemies. I think it’s quite inventive in how it does that. But to play, they’re not, like, enormously satisfying, the bosses. What did you think? Yeah, it leans quite a lot on… There’s a massive monster and, like, the torso of a person sticks out of it, and you just have to shoot the torso. I did that a lot in this game. Which Resi often leans into, but maybe only once or twice. There’s quite a lot of bosses as well. You probably hit one every hour or so in this game. There’s quite a number of them. I actually really liked the castle, like, the kind of the mini bosses in the castle that it did, because they’re almost like weird little puzzle fights in a way. They were quite nicely done. Yeah, I think you’re right. Like nothing kind of, no all-timers, but like genuinely quite fun and spectacular. Yeah, there’s a few more bits about this game wanted to run past you in terms of specifics, Matthew. So I’m very fond of the merchant in this game, who is like an overweight British dude. You don’t really learn much about him. He’s got that same sort of slightly unsettling, well, what are you doing here vibe that the Resident Evil 4 merchant has? And indeed, this game leans into the fact that he is a merchant who just happens to pop up in these different strange places in the game. And it’s a lot of fun. I was very fond of his energy. What about you? Yeah, I liked it. I liked the role he served. I’ve always liked the Resident Evil 4 upgrade system. This does the same thing Resident Evil 4 does instantly, where it gives you a treasure, which you can trade in for the instant hit of money, or you might be able to hold on to it and combine it with another treasure later for something that’s worth loads. I’ve always liked that risk reward mechanic of should I hold? There’s almost hidden mechanics in the loot, which I think is quite fun. Yeah, he’s quite jolly. It’s quite funny how he keeps turning up, because he’s a big boy, and he turns up in some quite weird places. But again, that does feel like a shift away from Resident Evil 7, kind of felt much closer to a, you know, if Resident Evil was real, which I know is preposterous, it would probably look more like this. Where this was like, no, there’s a magical merchant who’s like always fine somehow. And you’re like, okay, I know where I am with this. This is fine. Yeah, it’s quite fun. It takes the urge of it sometimes. There was a lot of me running away from big lady in this and just going to hide out in the room where the merchant is. And you go from her screaming at you about her daughters to running in and he’s having a nap and he just wakes up. It’s like, okay, the contrast here has really good energy, I think. Yeah. And that’s… I wish they… You can kill animals and he’ll cook food, which gives you some permanent upgrades. I wish they’d done some proper Monster Hunter cooking animations. That’s one of very few corners that is cut in this game, is you don’t get to see him cook. Yeah, I thought that, too, when it went down, which made me think was like the animal stuff added relatively late in this game, because it is a little bit detached from the rest of the game. Yeah, it’s a bit weak, the kind of kill these chickens and, you know, you get a bit faster at running or something. I don’t know. Because it… Yeah, I agree with you. It’s just a bit bolted on, I think. But I did think with the merchant, because his tummy is kind of sticking out slightly, I kept thinking in my head, his belly button must be a fucking state. That’s what I thought. I just thought… Surely he’s airing it, so it’s, like, healthier. Well, I just hope someone’s, like, hosing it down every now and then. That was just, you know… That’s what I thought playing it. But, yeah, I was also curious, Matthew, like, I really like the fact that the Resident Evil 4 inventory system has returned. So you could even press the same buttons that you could in the PS2 version of Resi to, like, pick up an item and move it, and you have that kind of, like, you know, sort of slightly Tetris-y, sort of grid-based puzzle management game. And that’s cool to see return, right? Yeah, definitely. I think maybe the game’s, like, a little generous with the gold on standard difficulty, which is what I played it on, in that, you know, I could afford the upgrades to the inventory quite comfortably. So I never found myself wrestling with space. There were, like, maybe, like, two or three moments towards the end where I just had so many bullets that I was trying to, like, shift stuff around to, like, bring in a big gun or something. Like, having all the weapons is a bit of a stay. I actually had to sell all the weapons towards the end to make room for something else. But, yeah, a fun thing. I mean, they could have… And maybe you sense this more on difficulty. You know, maybe the economy of the game on, like, hard mode or extra hard or whatever it’s called will make that a bit of a stiffer challenge. But on standard, it was, I think, just too generously balanced for that stuff to, like, properly kick in. Also, like, I’ve seen a couple of people mention that they sort of missed the quite aggressive inventory management that was needed in Resident Evil 7. Though I think Resident Evil 7, because it was like a smaller, like, more of a survival horror game, this is more explicitly, like, action leaning, I think it would have probably been quite miserable if you were stopping every, like, two minutes to, like, bin off a load of machine gun bullets or whatever. Yeah, the way they’ve done it here is, like, perfectly fine, I think. My only regret is I got to the end of the game and didn’t unlock some of the juicier guns that the merchant has. Like, there’s, like, a second shotgun you can get and, like, machine guns that everyone touched in this game. Yeah, yeah, I got the shotguns. I invested big in the magnum, which I always do, which is so dumb, because you get, like, ten bullets in the whole game. But they’re kind of like, if you get hit by one of those bullets, it will kill, like, anything. But it costs just millions, and it’s literally like a million dollar bullet by the end. The amount of money you’ve spent, like, upgrading the damage or upgrading the kind of reload time on the magnum is absolutely preposterous, but it, you know, it saw me through the boss fights, so a good investment. That’s what I did, too. I almost treat the magnum like it’s, like, the Rocket Launcher, Resident Evil 4, where it’s like, this is so precious. You always sit on it, you always sit on it right till the end. And I don’t know if you do this with bosses, but I always start with my weakest ammo and work my way up in bosses. So I get through all the pistol, then they start getting the shotgun, then they start getting the sniper rifle, and only then would they get the magnum if I’m all out. That’s always been my technique. It varied, actually. I feel like, in a lot of ways, while I didn’t find this game difficult, it did put me in the mindset of I have a finite number of health items and a finite number of items to craft more health items with. So it’s kind of a race against time to get the boss dead before I ran out of all of those. And some enemies just have unavoidable attacks or a right pain in the arse to evade, so you just end up taking quite significant damage. And so I was actually quite proactive with, okay, right, time to get all the pipe bombs out and lay all the mines and absolutely unload rifle bullets into this enemy’s head and stuff like that. And so I actually think less so than normal I was being stingy with my inventory. So that wasn’t as big a factor for me. But you are reminding me of how much I did enjoy the combat in this game generally. It’s fun. It’s gooey. The headshots are really good. And the problem is the headshots are so good that shooting the rest of the body is very unsatisfying. And I would say the opening hour of this game is maybe not the strongest. When you first get to the village, because you are emptying 10 bullets into one werewolf to take it down, you’re like, oh shit, this is going to be hard work. It’s instantly why I didn’t like the demo, because that’s exactly the period of game that the demo taps into. You’re like, oh, this is not fun at all. But it only takes a couple of upgrades. For even the handgun to be like exploding heads in a couple of shots, they’re really gooey. The shotguns in this are so much fun. It’s very generous with the bullets as well. If you like exploding heads with shotguns, this is a good game. I just felt like I was on top of the werewolves, that I could do it quite regularly. There’s a big fortress, which is a big werewolf action set piece. I felt like I was properly Rambo-ing it as I went in. They were just exploding left, right and center. I was having a great time. I got a big cluster of them into one place and just lobbed a pipe bomb. It was just beautiful to watch them all just evaporate. That was good. I was less into the weird monks that you occasionally fought. I guess they’re zombies, the prisoners. The humanoid enemies. I wasn’t as bothered about them. No, they were quite badly designed, I thought, because I fought some of those later in the game. I had to headshot one four times to kill him. They felt like a Resident Evil 7 baddie. That’s why I think the combat in this game, while the guns do feel really good, they haven’t captured that thing that was so great about some of the modern Resident Evil games. I think that’s a slight shame. It’s one area where these first-person Resident Evil games can improve. What I found very funny, Matthew, is that the review code, I think they gave us the limited edition game for the review, and it comes with Albert Wesker’s pistol, and it is worse than the default pistol in the game. I found that really funny. I had bought and sold Albert Wesker’s pistol within about two hours because you can’t upgrade it, and it does tiny, tiny damage. I found that really funny that this pre-order incentive looks cool, but it’s actually worse than any other gun in the game. You just sell it. I love the idea of selling a pre-order incentive. You’re like, junk, junk, just give me some herbs. Actually, mentioning Albert Wesker, and this isn’t a spoiler, I’m interested in how you feel this ties in to Rezzy lore, because one criticism I do have of it is that while I think it rediscovers the silly side of Rezzy, I am a little… I’m not massively in love with the kind of distance seven and eight seem to have from the rest of this series. Yeah, I think this is still the aftershocks of the reaction to six, kind of like filtering through to how Capcom’s doing stuff. I think that they’re so wary of… I mean, that was like an overload of characters and lore, and basically every part of Rezny lore history was represented. That’s like the Resident Evil cinematic universe, but instead of across ten films, it’s all at once. It’s like one game. Yeah, and you sense that Capcom’s not entirely down on that stuff, because A, I think some of those characters are appearing again in a new Netflix TV show that’s launching, but also obviously they did 3 Remake and they did Rezzy 2 Remake, and they know there’s a lot of love for those characters. I agree with you, it’s weirdly ashamed of that stuff. Or at least it’s… Yeah. Yeah, I just don’t really understand the new Chris Redfield. I don’t really understand what he’s meant to be, because he’s so different from the old Chris Redfield. And as far as I can tell, it isn’t really explained. Like, he’s a very… It’s almost like a… Like, if someone was to say, this is an alternative timeline, I’d happily believe that, because it’s so far removed. You know, there’s a little… There’s like a little nod in there that kind of ties maybe the events of these games to, like, the wider series. But this used to be a game that, like… This used to be a series that, like, lent in pretty hard to that stuff, and I feel like it’s quite integral to a lot of its appeal, and, like, people like these characters. You know, they like Claire, they like Leon, they’ve got a lot of kind of attachment to them. So the idea that, you know, the only connective tissue is Chris Redfield, and he’s kind of unrecognisable, like, physically. He’s a different man. I mean, it’s very odd. Yeah, he’s got, like, a very naff haircut, this sort of, like, half-fringe thing that he’s got going on. I think that I, like you, would have preferred it if they’d just said, oh, yeah, okay, we’ve rebooted Resident Evil, so all the previous events didn’t take place or whatever. But the kind of, yeah, the way they use him in this, it’s like we are supposed to believe this is the same man who beat Albert Wesker in a volcano, like years before. And, you know, it doesn’t, it does not add up in terms of like, he was fighting, yeah, giant monsters in Resident Evil 6, you know. Yeah, I just think the silliness of this game meant that the whole time I really was expecting at some point like fucking Leon to walk in and I’d be like, yes, this is so much fun. This is like old Rezzy through and through and it just, it never really took that step. And I felt like, you know, it’s unfair to rate games for not doing things you wanted them to do. But, you know, tonally, it’s in a place where you’re like, it feels like it’s ready to like come home to old Rezzy. But instead it’s kind of, no. And if it is a reboot, it’s wrapping up its like story, you know, in the second part. You know, it’s the, you know, it’s the Ethan Winters arc. It’s quite, I’d love to know what their overarching plan is for this, because, you know, it’s like, there will be more Rezzy, for sure. But I just have no read on like what it could possibly be. Yeah. Let me like give you one of my really like specific problems with this game. It’s a small problem. But like you say, they’ve kind of thrown out that hokey Resident Evil stuff and while this game does discover a bit of the fun, I kept thinking this game has like the kind of wrapping of some like a prestige horror film or something, but it doesn’t have any themes as a story. Like it has no themes and no like it. There is a story fundamentally an A to B kind of story, but there’s no like there’s like the aesthetics of like like, you know, the elevated horror. I know that term that horror fans hate on Twitter, but that kind of like it feels like it’s reaching for something quite grand in terms of how it’s presented visually and in terms of the audio. But yeah, because there are no themes to the story. There’s no like large like deeper sort of meaning to any of it. I found that kind of slightly odd. Sometimes I just thought if this had a little bit more going on in terms of subject matter, I think it would offset the fact that it feels quite disconnected from Resi generally. But as it stands, I don’t know, Ethan is such a blank slate of a man that he just he doesn’t do any of the heavy lifting in that department. There are no themes in this game. It’s just a man trying to retrieve his daughter and then encounters some absolute fucking weirdos along the way. Yeah, it almost uses the first person perspective to say like this is a more like personal lived in Resident Evil. You’re just that much closer to the action. You know, this is kind of a, you know, it clearly thinks itself a more like emotional, sophisticated drama, I think, in terms of its characters. I think they think Ethan is a better character. But like the universe is… I wouldn’t say the old Resident Evil’s have any kind of themes. Like they’re pure cheese, but they commit to it in a big way. And they’ve got these big cheesy heroes who are good fun. But when you try and, you know, ground it or have some sort of emotional resolution, it doesn’t quite add up. It doesn’t really click together and work. That’s completely like, completely true. They do, I think, see Ethan as better than we think he is. But… I mean, some of the bosses towards the end of this are so dumb. Like, the stuff that happens. Like, you wish it was Chris Redfield like shouting mad bullshit as it happened. Like, I think there’s stuff in this which is kind of close to boulder punching in terms of how silly it is. Yeah, I think so too. But yeah, like you say, they won’t go the whole way. I think people will dig it though. If you’re a Resident Evil fan, like, it’s close enough to that old start of Resi that you will like it. Even if like us, you’re a bit ambivalent towards 7. So yeah, I think we’re almost at the end there, Matthew, of like talking about this game. Is there anything else you wanted to talk about in terms of where Capcom is at with Resident Evil these days? Do you think it tells us anything about where they’re going next? You know, without getting into like massive spoiler territory, like they seem to set up certain things, like there seems to be a very clear direction that they have in mind. You know, I think there’s still mileage in the first person perspective. You know, I’d happily go back to third. I don’t think it’s played out though, the first person thing. You know, there’s a lot more kind of sophisticated fun stuff in this than there was in seven. You know, like we say, there’s those kind of killer kind of killer horror segments which could easily be explored further. You know, it’d be a shame to have amassed the kind of skills to make a game like this and then tear off in a different direction. You know, I definitely don’t think this kind of Resi is played out for my money. Yeah, I agree with you. I think that I’m largely speculating here based on what we know about Capcom or what we’ve seen reported about Capcom, I should say. But it’s rumored they’re remaking Resident Evil 4. I don’t think they need to do that. I think that’s not a good use of their time, but I’m sure it will do very well. And I have no doubt that the talented teams have made the last few Resident Evils. It’s had a good few years in terms of fan reception. We’ll do a good job remaking Resident Evil 4. And in my mind, I sort of think Capcom has split it down into there’s these parallel tracks with Resi. In fact, they’ve always been a bit like this, even when they were making the Revelations games alongside Resi 6, for example. This has happened before, but it’s more that thing of now there’s first-person, sort of innovative, new Resi, and then third-person remakes of Resi. And those seem to be the two tracks they have at the moment of different takes on the series. I, like you, would like to see another first-person game. I would also like to see a third-person Resi game that’s, like, original and kind of in the sort of vein of the Resi 2 and 3 remakes in terms of how it plays. I think there’s room for both. Yeah, they’re such skillfully made games, but they are, you know, the only weakness of the remakes is that it’s such well-trodden ground and you kind of know what’s coming. And it plays with those expectations, but to have that kind of experience properly, kind of off the chain, would be great. Yeah, I feel like 2 already sort of peaked with how much joy I could extract from revisiting an old Resident Evil setting in that sort of template. So, yeah. So, finally, Matthew, I was curious if what you thought of this as like a next-gen showcase, because like you say, this is one of the first big PS5, Xbox Series X games. You can obviously play on old formats. Apparently, it scales very well on PC. It does look extraordinary, I think. It’s worth playing just to see what it looks like in a lot of places. What do you think? Yeah, yeah. Really gorgeous. Like a big step up. Like the level of detail in some of the environments is absolutely amazing. Especially in the castle with all the chandeliers and everything. It’s very impressive. The sound design, absolutely brilliant. The 3D audio or whatever they call it on PlayStation is brilliantly done. I was really impressed with that. Yeah, I played a chunk of it on PC as well. Where it’s even better looking. I mean, it’s a really gorgeous game. I think it will push PCs quite hard. And it will scale for a few years to come and only be looking better. I’d say the one complaint I had is I actually had to do quite a lot of tweaking before I got the controls feeling just right on PlayStation 5. I don’t think out of the box that aiming… I think the aim is a little sluggish. And even on the maximum settings, which are basically to dial everything up, I was never 100% happy with it. But I don’t know if that’s just because obviously on PC you’ve got the mouse and it’s super fast and smooth. But I don’t normally have problems with analog stick aiming. But this one, it did take me a while to click. But that might just be me. Well, I mean, you could argue that they did it liberally to increase the sense of struggle or to make it slightly harder to aim. But I don’t know, maybe I’m just sort of defending bad shooting. Yeah, I don’t know. But then that also early, like I said, that early stretch of the game where you’ve got slightly underpowered weapons, you know, you don’t hit very hard by design and it’s not ideal. There were a few times when I played this where I thought if my fingers weren’t as strong as they are, I don’t think I could like press the triggers on the DualShock or whatever it’s called, the DualSense PS5 controller. I had this when I played the PS5 version of Avengers actually. And it’s like, you know, aiming as Tony Stark Iron Man. I have to really fucking push that button down. It’s like a workout. It is a little bit, yeah. I’m going to have like absolutely fucking like roided kind of fingers in a year from playing this. They’re trying to make your hands feel the pain that Ethan Winter’s hands go through. I’m surprised it didn’t like shoot nails out of the controller through your hands. Yeah. So I agree. It’s really good as a next-gen showcase. And as someone who’s like looking to not spend time at his desk at the moment, because my desk in my flat is no longer synonymous with fun PC gaming times, it’s synonymous with working at home for a year. So it’s not a fun space to sit in now. I like playing console games that have really good like 60 FPS kind of modes in them. And this runs great at 60 FPS on PS5. So yeah, a really good next-gen showcase. So finally, Matthew, I was curious, we haven’t done this before, but what would you give this out of 10 if you were reviewing it for someone? I’d probably give it a very enthusiastic 8. Yeah, agreed. 8 is the right score. I thought I read a lot of reviews this afternoon, and I think the one I genuinely agreed with most was Andy Kelly. I think he gave it 85 for PC Gamer. Yeah, it was interesting to see people’s different mileage on them, stuff they liked and didn’t like in the game, but I agree that Andy seemed to like all the same stuff that I did. So his review is the best. Good stuff. So Matthew, we’ll take a short break then, after talking about Resident Evil Village there. Our listeners can digest that and decide whether they want to buy it or not, or maybe they’ve already played it and they’re listening to this and thinking, oh, what an interesting set of observations. I mean, it won’t take you longer than a weekend to beat. So, you know, you can kind of listen to this on the Monday after you finish it on the Sunday, really. But we’ll take a short break and then we’re going to come back with our top five Resident Evil games. Let’s do it. Welcome back to the podcast. In this section, we’re gonna count down our top five Resident Evil games. We’re gonna do a usual thing of alternating and going through a top five list. But before we get to that, Matthew, I was curious if you could tell me about your personal history with Resident Evil, and what’s like the first entry you played in the series? So the first one I owned and played was actually Resident Evil Remake on the GameCube, which I would say is coming to the series quite late, but given the tale on it, actually feels quite early these days. I was always envious, like reading Games Master. I mean, this is just a series I associate with PlayStation. We didn’t have a PlayStation 1 until very late in it, like after basically PlayStation 1 era. So it was something I saw played at friends’ houses. Weirdly, like my defining early Resident Evil experience was in secondary school. I used to be a student librarian, which will no doubt shock you. And one of the perks of being a librarian was we got to have lunch in the library office, which had a TV. So while all the punks outside were like laughing at you because you’re a librarian, you’re like, well, I got access to a TV, which is exactly what punks like. So jokes on them. Brackets, allegedly. Allegedly. I think when we add it all up at the end, you will agree the joke is on them. Yeah, after careful deliberation, we have decided the joke is on them. Yes. We have it. Seven to five, the joke is on them. But anyway, this is a very long, stupid story. I remember there was like a week where the librarian’s son, who wasn’t at our school, like for whatever reason couldn’t stay at home. So to come and basically like live in the library and he bought his PlayStation One in. So all of a sudden the library office was like, PlayStation One Central must have been when Resi 2 was out because every lunchtime, we just got to watch him playing Resi 2. Fucking amazing. Like what a killer school day is that? It’s like, I know that when this boring science lesson finishes, I’m going to go to the library and watch someone play Resi 2. That’s amazing. So yeah, I watched that, incredibly jealous. I always used to think it just looked like the most amazing, amazing thing. But yeah, it wasn’t until GameCube and the astonishing Resident Evil 1 remake that I really got into it. But I’ve liked the series ever since. I’ve tried to go back and play as many of them as I can. I like how daft and silly it is. That’s really reflected in my list, which is a pretty unconventional one, I’d say. What about you? When did your Resi relationship start? Yeah, so I missed the original Resident Evil. I would say that one of the things we want to own up to is the fact that we’ve not played every game in the series between us. But neither of us have really played Code Veronica that much, for example. I haven’t played the original version of 3. I haven’t played Code Veronica and what else? I didn’t play the original Resident Evil, like I say. I haven’t played Zero either, but Zero I didn’t mind skipping for this list because I understand it’s a lesser entry. And I also haven’t played the Outbreak games, which I don’t believe were online when they were released in Europe, but I understand that they’re actually like, it’s got a really like passionate co-audience, this one. This kind of subset of online games as a kind of co-op, online fixed view Resident Evil games. So it’s quite a few that I haven’t played. And I would blame that on Shinji Mikami, who seemed to be able to like keep switching formats whenever it suited him, which is particularly true when you get to the GameCube era of Resi. But for my first experience, this felt like a series I read about in magazines for a long time. And my parents were quite sensitive to games that were like rated older than me. I don’t know why. I don’t know if they thought that like playing them would expose me to some kind of like, I don’t really know. I guess they’re just obeying the law, but either way, it meant I didn’t have like ready access to these games. When I knew like, you know, I knew like nine and 10 year olds who were playing the original Grand Theft Auto, and it was just surreal by comparison. So the first one I played was Resident Evil 2. There was a PC port for that. I didn’t ever have a PS1. I didn’t have an N64 either for a long time. So I ended up playing the PC port of Resident Evil 2, which was released by Virgin Interactive in the UK. And that was my first taste of it. And I played it with a joystick, like a flight simulator style joystick, which is not the optimal way to play, I would say, but yeah. Were you controlling with the flight simulator, like pedals under the desk? Yeah. So like raise and lower his gun arm, you were pressing the pedal down and lifting. Yeah, hammering the eject button to swipe the knife. So I’ve got quite a lot of affection for Resident Evil 2 as a result of that. But I would say that then there’s a kind of like later period where suddenly Resident Evil becomes very important to me and I become like deep into it. And this is around the kind of late noughties where Resident Evil 4 releases. And then I aggressively get into like, you know, start tracking down older entries in the series. And I got really deep into the HD era ones as we’ve discussed in previous episodes. So yeah, I’ve got a long history with it. But yeah, like I say, I mostly blame Shinji Mikami for switching formats too many times with this series. For my missing bits there. But yeah, I was curious, Matthew, if you have any comprehensive take on what makes a great Resident Evil game. Is it like purely horror? Is it a bit of action? What’s your sort of take on what makes a good one? I mean, it feels like a series which splits into like, a couple of phases, like the older game, you know, basically, you know, pivots at Resident Evil 4 and then maybe pivots again in 7. Weirdly, I like both, you know, I like both the survival horror, you know, I like the scary kind of like, slightly awkward kind of tank controls of the early games and wrestling with them and the kind of fixed angles. I love the over the shoulder action as well. And, you know, I even like the, I like the sequels to form more than most, I would say. I think they’re both united by like a real commitment to the sort of silliness of the Resi world. Often games have like two halves in that they have, you know, setting that kind of gives way to the slightly more kind of sci-fi trope of, you know, so it’s kind of horror into sci-fi, you know, the monsters that keep coming back, the ridiculous boss fights. I think some of that tone, like, doesn’t really match the series until you get to Resident Evil 4. I don’t think until you get to Resident Evil 4 that it’s actually like an action game that kind of fits the sort of blockbuster scale of some of its action. Like, you know, as important as they are, I would say like, you know, Resident Evil 1 to 3 are slightly mismatched in terms of they’re so awkward, but they’re trying to do quite kind of ambitious action, which is reflected in one of my list choices, actually. So yeah, it’s kind of a weird series, but I love the silliness of it. I love the kind of melodrama of it. I love the boss that always comes back in one big last form. They’re really old school video games, even now. Like I’ve said it before, I like, you know, fighting a boss the size of a planet or fighting God at the end of a game. Resident Evil kind of has that vibe, has that energy. Charmingly daft enough, and I just don’t need to grow up. Yeah, so for anyone who’s listening at home and playing the Back Page drinking game, you can tick off Matthew Mentions Fighting God at the end of a video game. That’s right next to Matthew Mentions the Dyson on your bingo card. So yeah, tone-wise, I kind of agree with you. I do think that when you get to Resident Evil 4, the match between like the type of action you’re doing and the kind of silly tone makes sense. I think that so much of the early kind of like chatter around the PS1 resies were, oh, look how bad the voice acting is, or look how kind of like silly these games are. And I think in retrospect, people have a lot of respect for those games. I don’t underestimate the amount that silliness brings to the series in terms of tone. That’s one of the reasons I did bounce off of Seven. It’s because it’s so like, oh, look what a serious horror game we are. And yet it was, yet to me, it was more boring than a lot of its entries that were far after and lent into the law of the series. So it varies vastly. And I’ve got a lot of time for Capcom being experimental when it’s good. I don’t know why they keep trying to make like bad multiplayer games involving Rezzy. That’s been like very frustrating to see play out like competitive multiplayer. They’re constantly trying to crack it. Like they did the terrible Operation Raccoon City. I never played that in competitive, but one of the most miserable campaigns I’ve ever played. Probably the worst like exponent of Japanese publishers is just panicking and harvesting out all of their big series to Western studios in the HD era. Like that was one of the lowest points. It’s just a rotten game. Unless it’s just this sort of sense that to kind of compete in the modern age, you know, the package has to be so big. I mean, that’s actually another thing I didn’t mention with Village. Like I haven’t had a chance to play The Mercenaries. I didn’t actually see it in there. I don’t know, do you have to buy it or unlock it? I don’t know, but there is a Mercenaries mode in this. And I think Village, there seems to be a lot more going on as a wider package than you’ve got with Seven. Like Seven rather infamously stuck all its bonus content basically as paid for DLC, where Resident Evil has always been quite generous outside of its main campaign. I don’t think they need to do crap multiplayer modes. You’re right. I mean, they’ve actually like in Mercenaries hit upon something that is genuinely brilliant and is by no means played out. So they should just stick to that and just keep banging out Mercenaries. Yeah. Is anyone going to play that reverse? It looks ghastly. It really does. Like I’ve tweeted this before, but my big pitch for the ideal Resident Evil multiplayer game is Mercenaries, like you say, where it’s basically like settings and characters from the entire series. So like what they’ve done with that terrible looking reverse thing, like, you know, loads and loads of kind of fan service, different sort of costumes of, you know, the heroes and villains throughout the ages, fighting every different type of monster you can name from like, you know, village all the way back to the original Resident Evil across like, and then they just keep adding like, maybe like the levels are free, but then they like release new paid for characters and it becomes, you know, this kind of like ongoing thing. Like that’s, that is a kind of like a big score attack online co-op game. That’s like my dream Resi spin-off, but they won’t make it. They’ll instead keep making very boring looking kind of like shooters, military shooters and competitive games that are awkwardly fit into the worlds of those series. It’s weird, cause like what you’re describing is sort of what I think, isn’t that what killing floor basically is? Like a sort of set, I think that’s free to play. As you know, and it’s just like a big mercenary. It’s, you know, it’s a big PvE co-op thing that they just keep adding stuff to and it rakes it in. Yeah, mercenaries, they need to do more with it. But, you know, it’s a good bonus mode in Village, or I imagine it will be, I haven’t played it yet. Yeah, one day maybe they’ll get there. But yeah, should we get on to our top five, Sir Matthew? Let’s do it. Sure, do you want to go first? Yeah, so this is probably the most controversial one on my list and please don’t switch off this podcast when you hear it. But I am picking the light gun shooter, Resident Evil Dark Side Chronicles on the Wii. That’s number five for you, right? That’s number five. Is that higher on your list? I’ll be honest, it’s not. So yeah, we’ve talked a bit about this one before, but I don’t think this is that controversial. This is, as ever, these are like heartless, right? So yeah. So this is, they made two light gun games, Umbrella Chronicles, Dark Side Chronicles for the Wii. Dark Side Chronicles is a light gun, basically retelling of Resident Evil 2 and Resident Evil Code Veronica. And it also has an original campaign, which is the kind of the backstory of Krauser and Leon before Resident Evil 4. So you basically find out like why he is, why he is in Resident Evil 4, and why you fight him and what his beef is, which I think is actually like an interesting enough nugget to tell. And as a little campaign, that’s quite good. What I like about this, and it’s that thing I was talking about about the match of like mechanics to tone. I actually think the bombast of Resident Evil 2 and Code Veronica, the mad like boss-rust nature of them, the intensity of them suits a light gun game probably slightly better than a sort of slow shambling survival horror. Obviously, I’m not denying it like Resident Evil 2 may even be in my list. Like, it’s a brilliant combination of things, but it also fits the madcap energy of a light gun game really well. Because, you know, it’s a load of locations that you’re trying to move through quite fast. There are huge boss monsters. They keep coming back. If anything, it shows those boss fights in a way more cinematic light than you’d ever imagined you were going to see them. I’d argue that actually like the boss fights re-dos of Resident Evil 2 in Darkseid Chronicles are more exciting than the boss fight re-dos in Resident Evil 2 Remake. Because with that fixed perspective, you can choreograph them, you can just do, you know, you can have the mad kind of tyrant bursting out of things and smashing stuff up for a Wii game. It looks spectacular. I will put my hand up and say I haven’t played Code Veronica, the original, but I loved it in Darkseid Chronicles. Like, I loved the tone of it, it was like this mad, you know, whether this is entirely true to it, I don’t know. It’s like another mad mansion with like these two twisted siblings who are kind of playing mind games with you. It’s really good fun. I mean, this is quite a substantial, it’s like 12 hour, you know, 10, 12 hour game for a light gun campaign. It’s, you know, it takes its time telling those stories. But yeah, I thought this took the silliness of Resident Evil and just recycled it in a really apt form. I’m a big fan. Oh, you’re making me want to play it. It was pretty acclaimed this as well, like, right? It was pretty… Yeah, it’s like 75 on Metacritic, but like, there are plenty of 80s from people in the know. I will say it’s not like a pure, it’s not a great light gun game. Like, it’s absolutely fine, but it’s not like, you know, a chunky house of the dead. It’s not like big chunks of them coming off. If you hit them in the heads, they, you know, the headshots are quite nice, but it’s almost a little too, like, well behaved as a light gun game. It’s also too long, you know, it’s too long for just that kind of arcade energy. But like, as a vehicle for, you know, this particular story, it’s pretty good. I think you can, they did the HD remakes for PS3, I think. Yeah, that’s right. If you’ve got a PlayStation Move controller, it works with that. So that might be the nicest way to play it visually. Yeah, but yeah, I was just, yeah, I was a really big fan of this. Yeah, it’s funny, because when I remember interviewing the guy about the producer of this when he came over to Capcom, and I was asking, it’s got co-op stuff, but you can see your co-op partner on screen, and I thought that was a little odd, like, that they were kind of in the action, but they’re also meant to, you know, you don’t see them doing the stuff that your co-op partner would be doing, and I think the translator really mangled my question, and then the guy was like, oh, I understand, you just want to look at their arses, he said. And I was like, no, that’s not what I asked Atto, and he was like, you just want to look at, like, Claire’s butt the whole time, is that what you’re saying? I was like, no, I really am, that’s not what I’m saying at all, I got quite flustered about it. That’s my Dark Side Chronicles anecdote. Well, there you go, lots of great value there. I mean, first we got an absolutely blistering take that a light gun Resi game is better than like several main light entries in the series. I already retract that. No, I think that’s a good choice for the type of list we’re doing here, right? Umbrella Chronicles is incredibly boring and flat and that’s because it retells Resident Evil 1, which actually doesn’t suit this. It isn’t fast paced enough a story, it isn’t interesting enough a kind of mix of action to work in the light gun setting. But 2 definitely does. Good stuff. That’s a fine, interesting choice to kick us off. So what’s your number 5? I’ve gone with original Resident Evil 2. Is that on your list? That’s higher on my list. Good stuff. We’ll circle back to it. What have you got in the meantime, Matthew, for your number 4? Number 4, I’ve got Resident Evil Revelations 2. Interesting. This is not on my list. It’s another, Samuel Roberts has not played this one. People say it’s good, right? People like this one. But it’s kind of the weird episodic one that I guess they went episodic because like Telltale was doing well at the time with Walking Dead. It’s kind of that era. The sequel to Revelations, which was on 3DS, which was like a gorgeous 3DS game, but only a moderately successful combination of kind of Resident Evil 4 style and maybe the slower tone. It wasn’t gory or gooey enough, bad monsters. I got that wrong in the review. I gave that 90 on 3DS. That was pure 3DS madness. Yeah, but it did seem exciting at the time. It was exciting at the time, but yeah, anyway. Revelations 2. The interesting thing with this is like it’s a really great co-op game and it’s an interesting co-op game in that the partner character is way underpowered. It’s not just two like for like action heroes. You have your traditional rezi hero. It’s, oh, I can never remember which combination it is. I know it’s Barry Burton is one of them, but I can’t remember. Is it Claire? Claire’s in the game, yeah. Claire’s in the game. Claire and Barry? But the characters they’re partnered with are basically sort of frail and have like distraction or sort of stun powers. Barry’s partnered with a little girl who’s got sort of paranormal abilities and she can sort of see invisible enemies that Barry can’t, so she has to like point them out to him, which as a co-op mechanic is quite interesting. It did a bit more than the straight kind of two-player co-op of like 5 and 6, for example. It had a bit more of an interesting dynamic. It’s not like mega production values. It feels like slightly cheaper than mainline Resi at the time, like it was a spin-off. But even so, like it ticked off, you know, it went through all the tropes. It had like a kind of creepy prison. There was like a mad sort of fun house, which kind of ticked off your like weird house, which you always need in a Resi. It ends with a really spectacular action scene. Yeah, just as a different co-op take, I really, really like this. Yeah, that’s why this game kind of passed me by a little bit. So it sort of launches in that sort of like weird period between Resi 6 and Resi 7, right, where Capcom doesn’t do anything for a while, basically. And yeah, you’re kind of curious about where it’s going to go next. But yeah, no, this kind of passed me by. It’s also on like such a massive variety of formats. Like this is a game you can play on both PS3 and Nintendo Switch, which is quite wild. So yeah. It’s good if I definitely play through it caught though, because the funny thing is the little girl, Italia, like her power is like pointing at things for Barry to shoot. And she’s quite creepy. She’s like a little girl in like a sort of like Victorian nightdress. And when she points, you can sort of spin her on the spot. And I remember playing with Catherine, we’ve got like a funny clip saved on the Xbox One of like she was looking down the sights as Barry of like a sniper rifle and sort of saw her and then she very slowly just pivots on the spot pointing to be pointing down the sniper rifle sights. And it was like a proper like Damien in the Omen type thing. It was just really freaky, creepy little girl. I’m surprised she didn’t get like memed to death. She feels very meme worthy. That’s probably because the game didn’t sell as well as another kind of like mainline Resident Evil would. Yeah. But yeah, shame. People missed out on a lot of memeing material. What a shame. What a tragedy. I bought this on at least two formats, so I should probably play it at some point. Will I ever convince my girlfriend to play it with me? That’s a larger question. That’s good. It’s a romp. It’s like eight hours or something. It’s like each episode is like a couple of hours. It’s nice. Swift gets the job done. Nice. Good shout. So it’s my number four, right? I’ve got Resident Evil 5 at number four. Is this in your list? This isn’t in my list. Yeah. So, Pith’s probably one that would be a massive surprise to people who have listened to game review scores. We got right where I defended this game while also pointing out it’s problematic, as you might say. So I definitely copped to that just to make that very clear again. Listen, you didn’t make it. No, that’s true. I own up. I mean, Capcom have done a number on you. Well, I am saying it’s good, whilst acknowledging that. Yeah. Like a lot of 80s and 90s movies, it’s good, while also having some issues in terms of what it portrays. But yeah, so I’m big on this game. This is the co-op Resi game that is largely credited with taking the series into more action-oriented territory in a way that wasn’t so good. People see this as the bad end result of what Resident Evil 4 was doing in terms of reinventing the series. I don’t really feel that way. I think this does a bunch of stuff really well. You mentioned that this is a bit more of a conventional co-op experience. I actually think this has got some really good co-op mechanics. So it’s got a fun item switch inventory management system where you can request a specific item from a different character and then hand it to them and you can basically swap your inventories around to make sure you got the right stuff. But this is particularly good because it’s got good comedy values. So when you can have a character say, I need an egg and then be given an egg by another character because eggs are things you can collect in that game. That’s quite funny. But also it’s got like a button to say thank you. So you can say, I need an egg and then someone will hand you an egg and go here and then you’ll go, thanks very much. And it’s like that having that kind of power as a player creates so many funny instances of like, especially when you’re sat in the same room as someone and you don’t say anything to them. But in the game, you say thanks very much. Like when playing this game with friends on in split screen, that is so funny to just like hit the thanks very much button when you’re sat in the same room, that endlessly funny. Too lazy to say it for yourself. Yeah, exactly. And the other area where I think that the sort of co-op mechanics work very well is, obviously, I think this has got the best Mercenaries mode of the series. I think Six has got a good Mercenaries mode too, including an absolutely bonkers, kind of like current gen console only version where it adds like tons more enemies on screen. So it’s an absolute, it’s absolutely chaotic. It’s like fighting a war. That’s quite fun and silly. I think it’s called No Mercy. It’s like fighting a war, except you’re demanding eggs over your radio the whole time. Sadly, I don’t think it has that system in there, in Six. No more egg demands, but Five has a really good spread of different characters. There’s Albert Wesker is like, I think I mentioned this in a previous episode, but he can basically chain together attacks and like reload in a certain way that means that he’s always accumulating time so you can basically eliminate every single one of the enemies that appears in the mercenaries arena because he’s so efficient at you shoot you use a melee attack and then you quickly open the menu screen and you like pick up ammo and drop it onto the gun in the menu screen and you’ve reloaded without having to watch the reload animation in the game, therefore accumulating seconds as you go. And it’s got all of these kind of like mad kind of shortcuts to increase your time basically and I really love that it’s got that depth to it and when you’re playing it with another player you can spec so you know you might have a character who comes in with a sniper rifle but you’ve got a shotgun so okay they’ll go stand on this rooftop over here while you go deal with some characters up close. Just really really rich as a co-op game I think and a bit underrated for it. I think it’s because the campaign is a little bit flabby and odd it has a few down moments. It isn’t as good a campaign as 4 I would never argue that but I’ve got a lot of affection for this one. Yeah, you got any take on this one Matthew? Not really, I’ve not done the proper co-op thing in it which is probably why it doesn’t rate as high. Like in my head this was a game that kind of like it felt like it lent into a lot of the kind of the highlights of 4 without like 100% understanding what made them brilliant but it’s kind of my memory of it. I also I haven’t played the there’s a DLC for this I’ve always wanted to play that’s sort of set in there is it the original Spencer Mansion? I don’t know if it is I think it’s set in a different location but then there’s all kinds of like riffs from Chris and Jill about oh remember doesn’t this feel familiar that sort of thing. Right it looked like that and in my head you know that was like if you remade Rezi 1 with the kind of the over-the-shoulder controls a la Rezi 2 and 3 that might be what it looked like so the appeal you know I remember just seeing little videos of it and little screenshots and thinking oh yeah I should I should play that. Yeah that’s a classy DLC I really like that one and I think it’s in all of the different re-release versions they did on consoles too so yeah they’re good if you yeah if you I really really recommend the the five and six ports on Xbox One and PS4 were pretty tasty and pretty good value as well. They’ve made it very easy to access like basically the entire series now on particular Xbox where you can play Code Veronica but yeah what’s your number three then Matthew? Oh that’s Resident Evil 2 original. Ah nice yeah so what’s your relationship to this one? I guess you that was the one you mentioned you’re watching in your library. Yeah this is the one I watched in the library while all those suckers stood outside playing football and kissing girls. Yeah no so I didn’t actually play this until like super late. I played this on Vita after basically wiping my Vita so I could download it from the US store. Which was dumb but you know nice to play it. I felt like I needed to play it with the remake coming out. Yeah I just yeah I love the kind of the the sort of chunky action style of it. I prefer the action bent of this one. I really really loved the kind of the campaign structure with the kind of the sort of flip flopping stories. Weirdly I thought the way they changed it in the remake like wasn’t anywhere near as good. I think the remakes got like less legs to it weirdly than the original does. Just because you know it felt like you were repeating a lot more. It’s just classic, it’s like big big big silly monsters, big silly bosses, lots of variety, lots of surprising areas. Like it didn’t it didn’t really scare me when I played it because I was that much older but you know I really have it burnt into my head of you know watching it when I was you know a teenager in that in that library office which isn’t like the scariest place to play a game but I remember the the zombies kind of pulling themselves out of the morgue out of the the kind of body drawers or whatever they’re called and being like that is the scariest shit ever I cannot imagine how horrible that would be yeah just a really just a really classy atmospheric game. Yeah you might be right about it having more legs than Resident Evil 2 remakes so it’s the zapping system you’re referring to right? Yeah I just think there’s I think there’s like playing both versions of it you get a different you get like I don’t know it feels like four quite different things happen wherein in in the remake it’s much more simplified like it does change some things but they’re basically either there’s only like two versions of eight I can’t I find it quite hard to explain but it’s definitely uh it covers a lot more of the same ground and it you know like the big difference being that like whatever you play in the remake Mr. X is like integral to the police station wherein the original Mr. X only comes in on the B paths I think is right um and he’s much scarier for being kind of like a little short shot shock yeah I think that in this one so in the remake they um they do actually use Mr. X in a similar way right like he basically spends the entirety of the second playthrough chasing you and then he just appears briefly in the first playthrough it’s my understanding of how they do it but um yeah maybe I’m getting muddled maybe I’m getting muddled with it but no I think you’re right in that the system was like portrayed differently they did change it to make it more simplified and um yeah I love to because I think that the setting is iconic I think that Leon and Claire are are just like you know burned my brain as like 90s iconography that I have a lot of affinity for um I wouldn’t argue that the Resident Evil characters are particularly deep or anything like that they are very silly um sort of protagonists but they’re quite winning protagonists I think um the intro to this game is unbelievably good one of like yeah you know considering the time these are like early 3D games the arrival in Raccoon City and the explosion and running through streets filled with zombies just such a tense scary opening particularly when you’re it’s It’s funny, they’re 15 rated games, but I think these are perfect games to play when you’re 11 or 12, where you’re just getting into horror, and this just has enough things to really freak you out. Whereas I think when you play this when you’re older, it can’t quite have the same effect on you. I think that I just hit the age that when I discovered this was the right age to play it. Yeah, I really loved it. Obviously, the police station setting is the main event in this. I think the Resi 2 remake illustrates that when it takes you to the later lab settings, it’s not quite as interesting a location. But nonetheless, I think just when you first get into this police station, the original, it feels like an impossible labyrinth to unpick. It feels a lot bigger than it does in Resi 2 remake. I think it’s just because in terms of the dimensions, it has to be a certain size in Resi 2 remake to make sense. But there’s something about it, it just feels so big and hard to map out in your head when you first play the original. Magic, just pure magic, absolutely brilliant game. Yeah, I’d still recommend it. The reason I put this in the list is because even with the remake around, I still think this is worth playing in its own right. The remake does not erase this basically. No. Yeah. Whereas there’s another game on this list, and probably on your list, I would argue does erase the original somewhat. But yes, nonetheless. Anything more to add on that one, Matthew? Cool. Right, so my number three, right? Yeah. Okay, so my number three I think will be higher on your list. The Resident Evil remake on Gamecube. That is, but that’s my number two, so let’s talk about it now. Perfect, yeah. So, Matthew, in the time that a game was released, is this one of the five nicest looking games ever made? Yeah, this is like a, like, the Gamecube isn’t the most powerful console, because this sure looks like the best game at the moment. Absolutely stunning, absolutely stunning. I couldn’t believe it. I remember watching, like, footage of this on, like, a DVD or something that came with a magazine and being like, this can’t be right, this doesn’t look right at all. How does this work? Like, the character just looks so sort of one with the world, but the world looks photorealistic. Yeah, amazing. Really ahead of its time. Like a bit of a wake up call in that it looks so amazing and actually playing it, you know, because it is still quite true to the kind of the old controls, does feel quite old to play and, you know, part of why it works as a survival horror is there’s the constant threat that you’re going to like fuck up and mess up with the controls, which I don’t know if that’s genius design or it’s broken and it’s accidental, but it’s there and it works. Yeah, I actually, it was funny you were saying earlier, like, you never found Resident Evil properly scary, like that was the domain of like Silent Hill. This really, really, really did shit me up. I was terrified of this game, like even when I played, I know I was like what, 16, 17 when this came out, I was terrified of the Resident Evil remake. The crimson heads, like, there were just rooms I didn’t want to go back into because I knew that they were like bad news. I was like, I’d have to like really kind of like, sort of hype myself up to go in there. So you know, you’re not going to like it, but let’s do it. Creeping around that house, scary shit, scary shit. Just amazing, amazing thing, like, maybe I played it at the right time. But yeah, it’s lodged in my head as just this spectacular, chilling, chilling game. How was it for you? I think you’re right, actually, like I am being, I did miss this when I was assessing the series and how scary it was. I think the magic of this is that it, I think it’s sort of the model remake in a lot of ways. We are, this was kind of before, this was like the first of its form, really, this kind of like contemporary reimagining of an old game, but I mean, the game wasn’t that old, it was six years old, the original Resident Evil when this was made. When you look at the screenshots of the two games, they look about, I don’t know, 15 years apart. It’s like some fucking magic, I tell you that. And this subverts expectations in a way that’s really exciting and terrifying, like there’s like some shark related content in this game that is really like quite pedestrian enough in the original Resident Evil. Like I’ve seen the what the original looks like, and having played this, the sharks, the shark stuff in this is fucking awful. Like it’s like, it’s so it’s such a step up in spectacle. And I feel like it’s constantly playing on the fact that it knows that most people playing this will have such a good knowledge of the different beats of Resident Evil. So when you come up to like a familiar location, it will make that monster that much scarier or that environment feels so much more dreadful to step into. There’s like loads of different little tricks they pull to make this feel to feel scarier than the than. Yeah, I think this is a really clever use of player expectation. Yeah, I just the stuff in this game that’s just like burnt into my memory is like basically infernal game design. Like what’s her name moves out in the sort of shed, that sort of boiler room out back? Oh, I don’t remember. There’s like a woman out there. It’s like a woman in a shed, which when you say it isn’t scary. Is that Lisa Trevor? Is that where she comes in? Someone who like, but like in this like boiler room, it’s like lit up red. It’s evil. Like there’s actually evil rooms in Resident Evil Remake that are cursed and like, I can remember like, you know, having to get like my brother in or whatever because I was playing it because I didn’t want to go through certain doors. I never really understood the crimson heads in terms of the mechanics of them. It’s like zombies you’d killed could come back to life and then basically chase you around. So like, your punishment for like making the game a bit safer was that it would then become like a whole lot worse in like an hour or something. But I never really understood how they worked. But not understanding it is like integral to that game because it just means you’re on edge the whole time. The problem I have with a lot of horror game stuff now is that I see through everything too easily. It’s quite hard to get scared when you know the tricks. But back then, because I don’t know, maybe I just wasn’t thinking in those terms, there was this real sense of this evil thing can happen in this game by random. I doubt it was random. But because of that you’re just constantly on edge. This game’s… this is a scare… If I was talking about the top 5 scariest games of all time, I legitimately think this has a place. Yeah. I’m just looking at pictures of Lisa Trevor and it is so awful to look at even now. And it feels like one of that generation of GameCube games where, like you say, I know it wasn’t the most powerful console by default, but it was a console that had Rogue Leader on it, for example, and was doing all kinds of magic tricks and shit that I just, I don’t know, it just seemed like it was capable of a lot. And this, weirdly, a remake of a six-year-old game was one of the games that really showed it at its best. Yeah, terrifying stuff. Yeah, I really loved it. And a game I’ve been kicking around replaying, because I did play this in about 2007 now, so it’s been a while. And it’s mad that they could re-release this as the HD version of modern consoles, and it’s still one of the best-looking games ever. You’re like, oh yeah, okay. That would have held up. If they’d done the remake then, in 2013, 14, people would have been, fair enough, astonishing. But the fact that it happened in, like, whatever, 2002? Yeah, 2002. I mean, god. What a thing. Yeah, amazing. I’m slightly jealous you played it at the time on GameCube, because it was one of the few games, as a PS2 owner, I did cover on another system, but didn’t have any friends apart who actually owned a GameCube, so it took a few years, but yeah. So what’s your… Oh, that was your number two, wasn’t it, Matthew? So my number two is Resident Evil 4. Oh, okay. Higher on your list? Yeah. Okay, yeah. Were you shocked? I’m intrigued what your number one is, but yeah, let’s get… I mean, yeah, this, again, like, a very important, like, games magazine game in that I’d seen it only on the page for so long, and I remember looking at images of it and thinking, well, that can’t be. Like, that can’t be right. That doesn’t… There’s no game that’s going to look as good as that. That can’t possibly be a thing. I remember buying this. I’d managed to avoid… a lot of times games could come out, even when Resident Evil 4 was coming out. And I hadn’t seen videos of it in action. I’d only seen pictures of it. I remember that Game was running a… Trade in any four games except the FIFA games. Any four games, get another game for 99p. So I just had to give them my four shittiest games, because I was at university at the time, and I got Resident Evil 4 for 99p. I took it home, put it on the TV, and I couldn’t believe what I was looking at. I couldn’t believe that something looked as good as that. And I don’t know if that sounds dumb, looking at it now, but there was stuff in this… Like the fire with the moths flying around it. I remember looking at it and being like, no way, no way, that’s actual fire, that’s moths. That’s how nature works. How have they done that? Like, just before you get to what an amazing action game it is, just the look of it was just… Oh my god, what a thing. Unbelievable. That was like one of the few times I’ve witnessed a genuine leap and felt like that’s the new level. That was one of them. And weirdly, I hadn’t even factored into my head that… I just wanted to see it. I just wanted to play it as a beautiful thing. And it hadn’t really factored into my head that it was going to be this super intense action game that just completely consumed me for weeks. I was obsessed with Resident Evil 4 when it came out. I just couldn’t stop playing it. I think I played through it several times in a row, just endlessly doing it. Still the best paced action game of all time. Killer set piece after killer set piece. There’s not a five minute stretch of this game that repeats itself. It is the definitive everything that’s great about Mikami in one game. This is it. I think I completely agree with that. It’s a game that was famously rebooted several times during development. It started life as several different versions of Leon doing various sort of things in like 3D environments, being chased by a hook hand man, dealing with some weird ghost monsters. The only thing that seemed to stay the same with his jacket, that was consistent across the different versions and then, yeah, end up coming with this over the shoulder, revolutionary third person action game that has still to this day changed how that genre controls and works and everything about it really. The only reason this isn’t my number one Matthew is I’ve played it so many times that I can’t, I played it, when I started playing again the Switch version a couple of years ago, I realised I’d just played it too many times to play it again. I swear I haven’t played it since Gamecube, I’ve not played any of the re-releases, I mean, it’s kind of locked in my head as just an all-timer. This isn’t easy in my top five games of all time. Even though I don’t really revisit it and I don’t really replay it, it’s just an incredibly happy memory. Everything about this game is just amazing. I’d struggle to name any bit of it, that kind of sucks. I think if I’m being completely honest, this probably should be number number one, just based on my memories of playing it. I played the PS2 version that released about nine months after, I think, the Gamecube version. That was famously contentious at the time. The compromise we had to pay is that we had worse fire than the Gamecube version. Oh, you should have seen this fire. You should have seen them moths. Oh my god. The best moths ever, better than real moths. I was curious. I was curious, actually. We haven’t really talked much about your life as a Gamecube owner, because I definitely think that would be a good subject for a future episode. I was curious if what this game represented in the trajectory of the Gamecube’s lifespan. Was this like the kind of gold at the end of the rainbow in some quite fallow years, or did you not really see it that way at the time? Yeah, I didn’t really see it that way at the time, because this came out in my second year of university. My first year of university was pretty much just defined by playing Mario Kart Double Dash. Like, we loved that Mario Kart. So it stopped being a console I bought games for. I didn’t buy a lot of games in the later years of Gamecube. I guess those were the mid-years. I’m quite a short generation in respect. I just didn’t have the money for it and we were happy playing. We played a lot of Double Dash. We played an awful lot of the WarioWare party game, which the name of it escapes me. Ah, what the fuck’s it called? Anyway, apologies to WarioWare fans. Like mega minigames? Oh, that’s the one. Yeah. It had a game in it where by winning minigames, you basically earn these sort of turtles that sort of wobble. You were standing on these turtles called Wobbly Bobbly and you just knock them over. And I remember playing that mode for about eight hours straight until like four in the morning with a load of friends once. Oh, it was good times. Good times. But yeah, this was just, you know. I knew this one was coming and I knew that like whatever happened, I had to own it just to see how it worked. Just to see if it actually, you know, really, really, you know, looks as amazing as it did. Like even in static images, it looked like cutscenes. Everything looked like a cutscene. Like Leon’s stupid hair. You’re like, oh my God, how does someone have hair that good? There’s hair that good and moths that good. Yeah, the only bit that was bad in this game that I remember, the only time I ever cursed this was the first time I ever played it through. I ran out of bullets in that fight with the two giant, are they El Gigantes? Yeah, yeah. And that kind of like little arena. There’s like a fight in it, like a big room with like fiery pits. And I had to like do them by like slashing at them with a knife. And that was the only time I was like, fuck this game. But apart from that is it’s pure. It’s a pure 10 out of 10. Oh my god. I hope someone makes a game as good as that again. You know, I think like Mikami has tapped into like what made that game good in other things, but never as a complete package. Like there’s bits of it in Evil Within. Not even close in terms of pacing. No, but I think there’s bits of like things swarming you, the kind of the tension, the excitement of like, oh my god, I really have to make these five bullet count. Like where he’s tapped into the same energy. Like there’s, you know, there’s the tiniest hints of it in like the upgrades or whatever in that dumb one he did with Suda 51, but there’s bits of it, but it’s never ever the full. But yeah. Why did he have to go away and not make any more? What a nightmare game to work in the shadow of as well. I do not envy the Resident Evil team. You know, if anything, you know, even I’m a little bit down on it, Resident Evil 7, I will say to them, like, fair play for like moving it on and changing the conversation a bit. Yeah, absolutely. That’s a hard thing to do with a series that big. I mean, they’re a series that go away quite easily because they’re not able to do that or they disappoint and they kind of vanish into thin air. And, yeah, like, Resident Evil has never gone away. What I think is, like, crazy about this in retrospect is 1996, Resident Evil is created. 2004, this comes out. So like, by comparison, Matthew, like, as we’re recording this, you know, eight years ago was 2013. You know, that’s when, like, the PS4 launched and it feels like no time at all. But like, think of all the shit that Capcom did in that, like, short period. It’s, you know, even in the trajectory of just Resident Evil, you have the Resident Evil remake nestled within that as well. And like, what an absolutely, like, absurd, creative kind of, like, evolution in that time. Just like, yeah, just magic, really. But they deliver. I think they’ve, yeah, that’s a, the more we’ve talked about it on this episode, the more it’s really felt to me like, that is, I think they are, that is a hugely underrated team. I think they’ve made loads of fucking great games in that time. And they’re not pretentious at all. They haven’t, like, they don’t talk it up. They just got on with it. They’ve made, there’s loads of Resident Evil games I love. Yeah. I’m so glad it’s still around. Yeah, absolutely. So yeah, I, I agree. Like, just because I haven’t really said anything about the specifics of 4, I do think that this game, when I played it again recently, like, some of the boss fights aged a little bit and obviously, like, the leaning towards QTE stuff was very much, like, of its time. I think this game got away with it by making those cutscenes so exciting to watch. In the moment, like, I had no problems with the QTEs whatsoever because they were just, like, it was thrilling to watch, you know, Leon and Krause have a knife fight and to see the way the QTEs would later be integrated into that, like, full boss fight you have with Krause in that kind of, like, mad, collapsed castle area, that’s, like, an absolute highlight of that game. But, yeah, like you say, it’s a similar thing we were discussing earlier with Village. It’s just that kind of volley of ideas. It’s like, okay, well, now you’re fighting, like, a massive monster in a lake and now you’re kind of, like, trapped inside a house and you’ve got endless waves of zombies to kind of fend off and now the player character that you’re protecting, she’s all the way over there and she’s chained up and there are these, like, dudes in, like, hoods walking towards her with knives and you have to snipe them all. Just like Sheer Invention, I think this was the first time I ever really stopped and thought about, like, what it means to pace a game well. Because here I was watching it done perfectly. It was just a game that was finding new ways to thrill me and new inventive ways to excite me. I should have put this at number one. I bitterly regret that idea. I am so interested what is better than this. Well, it’s not that exciting. It’s Resident Evil 2 Remake. I put that at number one. That is purely because if I was to recommend a Resident Evil game to someone now, picking up the series, this feels like the easiest starting point to me. You’ve got a very contemporary feeling game. There’s nothing about it that feels a bit old. Like, the Resident Evil 4 remake, sorry, not remake, but re-release, they did on the newer formats, definitely has some good customizable controls, but the default controls to Resi 4 are a little bit old feeling, whereas I think that picking up Resi 2 remake, it feels like a contemporary game. Obviously, it’s a game from 2019, it’s not that old. And I really like this as a good middle ground between Resi 2, I guess it’s two lineages of action and survival horror. This is kind of splits the difference and does a really good job of balancing both. I get the impression you’re slightly cooler on this than me though, Matthew. I love the police section segment. I love the shooting the limbs of zombies. I love that it’s kind of more about like long term zombie management, that you can kind of leave them around but you’ve just sort of like defanged them a bit by like shooting off a leg or whatever. So you’re just like, I just have to remember there’ll always be a zombie crawling there. I think that section is incredibly strong. I just think the second half of it is a lot weaker. I also think in the remake, the bits where you’re in the streets of Raccoon City are like incredibly ugly, which is odd because that’s something like you said in the original, that had like blow you away energy of like, oh my god, the scale of this, this is amazing. Like, I mean, Raccoon City, I just thought they were quite undercooked in the remake, which is a really petty complaint, but there’s honestly, there’s a bit in this game where I think it’s when Claire goes to the orphanage and she goes through like the weirdest dimension basketball court I’ve ever seen. Like, it’s like square, like it’s really, I just can’t get my head around it. Yeah, it’s, but that isn’t any reason to put down your number one choice. I really loved this game. I had a lot of fun. If anything, I think one of the problems I had with this game, and this isn’t his fault at all, was like, I went through like, I think I previewed this like several times before I played it. And I felt like that robbed it of something. You know, it’s a game that has like mega impact the first time you play it. But I played like two quite substantial chunks of it, which isn’t the game’s fault. It’s a quirk of the job. But in that particular case, maybe it didn’t have the kind of absolute wallop of an impact it probably should have. It does look absolutely amazing, though. I mean, it’s a really, it’s a gorgeous update. Shooting a zombie’s limb off and seeing its arm like hang by a few tendons is like brilliantly gruesome. Yeah, I should have probably put this on my list instead of like fucking Dark Cyclorical. That’s fine. The listeners have had two top five lists filled with regret. So that’s the content people are tuning for. I did really like this. I didn’t mind the three remake either. I thought that was like fine. It’s just not as a, I don’t know, not as kind of a few iconic moments to kind of hook on to, I think, but whatever. It’s one I haven’t played still either, but it’s only four and a half hours long. So it’s just now I’ve done Resident Evil Village, I might as well just get to it and play it. I think this just reinforces that they’re making so much Resident Evil and it’s all pretty good. It’s a good time to be a Resident Evil fan and it’s a good time to be discovering it. They’ve brought so much of the library with them in quite respectable forms as well. You know, you could pick it all up, you know, probably quite cheap these days, have a whale of a time. Yeah, well said, Matthew. So yeah, those are the top five lists. I feel, I actually do feel like my number one is something I firmly believe. I put it on my games for the generation and I think as someone who carries so much kind of affection for the original Resident Evil 2, from having a similar experience like you, playing with friends and sharing that experience and being freaked out by it, I did just love how kind of reverent this was but also inventive at the same time. It was nice to play a Resident Evil 2 remake that was worthy of that Resident Evil 1 remake and I feel like it was. Yeah, that’s true. I think the problem with this one is, like, I wasn’t in the ideal environment to review it. I needed to go back to that librarian’s office. I needed to get tanked up on LucasAid-flavoured panda pops, which would have basically been my diet back then, you know, hire a woman to kind of look unimpressed at me and yeah, we would have engulfed. And see if that boy still lives in the library. I think he went home. Okay, fair enough. Can I tell you one story about the library? Please do, please do. Towards the end of term, there was this terrible smell in the library and the librarian, it was after the 11th year students had left, she was absolutely sure that someone had hidden a fish in the library or hidden something in the library is like a going away prank because that’s what the year 11s did. They’d sort of, you know, get up to cheeky hijinks and she spent ages looking for like, what, you know, what have these students done? What have they hidden in the library? And it turned out it wasn’t the year 11 students. It was the staff toilets next to the library. Just one of the teachers done like a mega lock left in there. Wow. Totally stung the joints out. So that’s my library story. Yeah. I was curious about how dark that was going to get. I think in my head, I thought, was it going to turn out that there was a dead student and that their body was in a particularly unpopular part of the library? Like no, no, the punchline was a teacher had done a shit. Oh, good. Well, that’s kind of like a sort of high-end humor that people have come to expect. Listen, you can choose to cut that out or leave that with you. No, I mean, I’ll be leaving that in. That’s good content, a good way to cap off this podcast. That was the true Resident Evil. Yeah. Very good. Twilight Zone-esque kind of a message to leave us on. So Matthew, it was fun going through those games with you. There’s no doubt more to be said about Resident Evil in the future. I’m sure it will come up again in our future best games of X year episodes. And who knows if there are more Resident Evil games in the future. We’ll find new ways to talk about this stuff. I’d love to talk about Resident Evil 4 in more depth actually, because I’ve always got things to say about that. So thank you very much for listening at home. If you’d like to leave us a review on the platform of your choice, Apple Podcast is a great place to do that if you’re listening on there. That helps us find new people. We’ve had a really good run of finding new audience members lately. I think there’s some good word of mouth going on the podcast. So if you’re out there telling people about the podcast, I really do appreciate it. We see it on Twitter all the time. So thank you so much for your support. We really appreciate it. And at the same time, if you’d like to tweet us or follow us on Twitter, we’re BackpagePod on Twitter. You can also email us at BackpageGames at gmail.com. Matthew, where can people find you on Twitter? I am at MrBazzill underscore Pesty. I’m Samuel Dobby Roberts on Twitter. We’ll be back next week with an episode all about Mass Effect, which we actually recorded before this one, which is kind of confusing timeline-wise, but not to you listening at home. So it should be OK. But yeah, and just to kind of like reiterate, this podcast did end with Matthew telling a story about a man doing a poo. So that’s, you know, what are the… Resident Evil. Which other games podcast gives you that kind of content on a regular basis? Thank you very much for listening, and we’ll be back next week. You will give me an egg.