Resident Evil Remake Has Always Secretly Been The Best Resident Evil Game

4. A House Is Not A Home

Perhaps the biggest strength of Remake is the Spencer Mansion, an iconic gaming location that’s memorable because of how it interacts with the feeling of powerlessness, and later powerfulness, you get as a player.

Initially you’re overwhelmed with options: you can check out the bottom floors of the East and West wing, explore their offshoots, run up to the first floor via the stairs, or investigate a brand new area tucked away behind a door in the main room that leads out to the graveyard.

It’s an overwhelming amount of options (even if there is an optimal route the game ushers you down), and fighting the sheer size of this house that's trying to kill you is spookier than any zombies.

This, again, becomes a puzzle to solve. As you familiarise yourself with the environment, you eventually gain a mastery over it, as you’re able to minimise interacting with enemies and figure out the shortest way from point A to point B.

It’s another subtle progression system that interacts with the moment-to-moment gameplay, and aids your growth as a player and a survivor in a way that isn’t just tied you gaining more powerful weaponry and more items.

Again, all this was present in the original, but Remake adds a bunch of elements to make the ebb and flow over your understanding of the location even more challenging; for instance a door with a dodgy handle that’ll break if you backtrack through it too many times, forcing you to juggle the risk/reward of taking the long or short way around; new enemies who can break through doors usually separated by a loading screen, and even greater interconnectivity between rooms via shortcuts.

Unlike the original, these additions inform the pacing of how the game makes you feel comfortable, and then totally lost, in this environment, throwing players new challenges that tests their mastery of the space in order to keep that growth as a survivor constantly happening.

Like how having a stash of guns and ammo doesn’t automatically mean you’re safe, simply knowing the layout of the map screen doesn’t translate to total mastery over the game space. This comes in knowing which enemies are where, the safest routes to the next objective and which hallways you need to clear out.