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

3. Everything Is A Puzzle

All of these mechanics coalesce into one incredibly compelling gameplay loop, where pretty much every decision the developers made compliments the larger puzzle of how to survive.

The fun of Resident Evil Remake isn’t in the action, it’s in planning and executing specific routes through the mansion, in thinking five steps ahead, in doing something difficult in the moment and expending your resources in the hopes it will pay off later.

There’s a lot of methodical downtime, but there’s a certain satisfaction that comes with loading your weapons up with just enough ammo, backtracking through three doors to make sure a zombie is burned, and knowing a problem has been dealt with as efficiently as possible. You might kill one enemy and it might take 15 minutes, but it’s unbelievably rewarding.

Of course, it’s also about these best laid plans coming tumbling down, going from thinking you have a handle on everything, to making one mistake and barely scraping through alive, and then learning from that experience. Most Resi games are fuelled by this rhythm in some way - with scarcity of resources popping up in 2’s remake and even present in 4’s limited inventory management - but no other one commits its systems as holistically to the idea as Remake.