RE Engine

The Racoon City Police Station is perhaps the most iconic location in Resident Evil, whose large marble entrance and tight hallways made 1998’s RE2 simultaneously beautiful and haunting, personal and claustrophobic. This created an oppressive tone that multiplied as supplies dwindled and made fighting the undead horde and mutated freaks inside that much more terrifying. But after that, Resident Evil’s survival horror gradually broke from the slow burn atmospheric terror into the tense action era, which reworked the resource management into revolutionary fast-paced third person shoot outs. But the genes that made Capcom’s viral horror design continued to mutate over the next two decades, until it was time to return to Racoon City and merge the eras, bringing atmosphere, consequence, and vulnerability to the tuned gameplay. The 2019 Resident Evil 2 remake is both the reimagining of an amazing genre classic and the sequel to a legendary remake.

Shortly after trespassing into the abandoned Baker estate, you wake to find yourself sitting at the dining table surrounded by the family of psychotic redneck owners, the left hand that you’d just had chopped off stapled back on. It’s a surprising setting for a Resident Evil game, not only because you’re watching it all from protagonist Ethan Winter’s eyes, but because it fundamentally flips the series’ central ideas on their heads while being loyal to the core design. Rather than taking inspiration from schlocky western zombie flicks, Resident Evil 7 viewed its haunted house item progression and Condemned-esque first-person investigation gameplay to solve a country horror mystery inspired by Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Ethan escapes after dinner and kills Jack Baker when his car explodes, only to be grabbed again by fast healing Jack who blows his brains out for you in a show of his power. It’s here that the player realizes that Resident Evil 7: Biohazard, with its willingness to rethink the series on a cellular level, represents a different kind of coming back from the dead.