Seeing Stars: Why the Resident Evil 3 Remake is Precisely The Game It Needs To Be
Aside from being about zombies, 2019’s Resident Evil 2 is fundamentally a game about Discovery, Familiarity and Mastery of space. For most environments in the game, particularly the iconic Racoon City Police Department, you spend a lot of time intimately backtracking its rooms and hallways, discovering new pathways and shortcuts, and stockpiling new weapons and items. Discovery of your environment is perhaps the most tense phase of the game’s loop, a cautious journey into the unknown where any corner turned could yield new dangers you’re not prepared for. But once you’ve walked those halls and know your foes, you begin making complex and informed decisions about your routes and what equipment you might need to get where you’re going. You may opt for a short route through the Library to reach the Stars Office, or a longer and more dangerous path across the lower floors to gather resources or equipment you couldn’t fit into your limited inventory on your first visit. This second phase is one of Familiarity with the space, it’s more comfortable and satisfying than it is scary, but has its own tensions by putting those micro-decisions — and the consequences — in your hands.
But after Familiarity comes Mastery, and you don’t get Mastery over an environment without being tested. That’s where Mr. X comes in.
With Mr. X chasing you down, you’re suddenly tasked with making those same considered decisions that you did during the Familiarity phase, but under the pressure of constant danger. You’re effectively forced to speedrun areas you were previously tiptoeing around, and if he cuts off your planned route you’ll need to have contingencies ready. Walking carefully past a licker to avoid detection is no longer a viable strategy with X on your back, so you might find yourself wishing you’d brought those flash grenades you’ve been stashing as you’re suddenly forced to take a more populated alternate route. Mr. X, despite not being a traditional boss fight in those earlier portions of the game, serves the function of any good game boss: testing the player’s Mastery over the game’s systems, particularly the game’s space.
Many people would tell you that this is Resident Evil 3’s biggest shortcoming: it doesn’t offer the same developing relationship with your environment. You walk into the RPD a rookie, but you walk out of it a weathered and resourceful badass. But the problem with creating a follow-up to that experience is that most of your players will be entering the new game having already become weathered and resourceful badasses alongside Leon and Claire. Replicating that same arc simply isn’t an option anymore, no deep and complex puzzle box of an environment is going to be a match for the player raised by Resident Evil 2’s RPD. They’re naturally going to chew through that carefully constructed loop much faster than they did the first time, and the sequel needs to be built to accommodate what they’ve become. And that’s precisely what Resident Evil 3 remake does: it tightens the loop.
RE3make flattens Discovery and Familiarity into a single step, and then puts your Mastery to the test almost immediately.
You cover the streets of Racoon City once over — perhaps twice if you’re thorough —before you’re tasked with an intense race to the opposite side with the Nemesis in close pursuit, dodging around enemies you’ve already mapped out in your mind, and luring Nemmy into electrical traps to gain distance on him. Carlos’ mid-game trek through Resident Evil 2’s RPD assumes Mastery right out the gate, as you make your way through a building you already know intimately from the previous game, but with an increased enemy count and an arsenal of military firearms. The late-game Spencer Memorial Hospital location barely has you cover its ground once as Carlos before it fills the halls with Hunter Gammas. Covering that same ground again later as Jill is optional if you want to pick all those locks you couldn’t open as Carlos, and so it makes sure to pepper in a few extra surprises for your third visit.
This isn’t a lack of depth, it’s recognition of the player’s assumed experience with the previous game. Truncating the formula is a trick the Resident Evil 2 remake already pulled off in its own right, with the B scenarios throwing Mr. X and lickers at you almost immediately, and subtly altering some key item and enemy placements to keep you on your toes. Once both campaigns are completed, you’re treated to a 10-minute action packed gauntlet mode that puts you in the elite combat boots of an Umbrella operative armed to the teeth and with only 11 minutes to carve a path from the sewers all the way to the front gates of the RPD, the reverse of a journey that took you hours in the main game. It’s a mode that centres the player’s Mastery over these environments and mechanics.
Resident Evil 3 remake needed to be a sequel that understood the player’s learned competence every bit as much as Resident Evil 2 does, and it could only do that by skipping the entry exam. The loop tightens out of necessity, and the pace quickens as a result. You’ve been through way too much shit to be treated like a rookie again, and so it doesn’t bother trying to lay down that delicate arc for you this time. You’re no longer Leon Kennedy wandering into his first disastrous day on the force, or civilian Claire Redfield on the hunt for her missing brother. You’re Jill fucking Valentine, badass super-cop and survivor of the Spencer Mansion Incident. She’s been through all this before, and so have you.
So get your gun and get the fuck out of town.
Hi, I’m Gary. I make games sometimes, write games sometimes, and make trailers for games sometimes. You can find those games I make right here. And if you enjoyed these game thoughts enough you can throw me a dollar or three via ko-fi. Thanks for reading. ❤
