On Resident Evil 4

When I last visited my boyfriend and stayed over for a bit, we decided we needed some horror. So we came up with Horror Night with [Redacted], where we’d play Resident Evil 4 with the lights off and late at night, on the PS5. It’s been a great experience so far, and we still have a few chapters remaining. But there’s something weird about Resident Evil 4 that I can’t quite put my finger on.

First off though, this game is pretty.

Well, it’s not pretty as in generally pleasing to look at, but the game’s scenery is well made, and it nails the horror-y, culty feeling as you play through the game. Everything oozes with evil, and whatever doesn’t still looks good anyway. Everything also feels very abruptly abandoned, as objects have been strewn everywhere and it’s all a massive mess. What really sells the game is the atmosphere. Everything is nice and culty, it’s all doom and gloom and I can genuinely believe that there is horrible, culty things afoot. There’s an air of misery and hatred that is hard to shrug off, whether you are making your way through a mindwarped village or are inside a massive castle.

The gameplay on the other hand is a bit of a tough sell. Every enemy seems to take forever to die, even the normal, basic people. Honestly, it really does impact the… not the realism of the game, but how believable it is. It’s a real stretch, especially when you shoot a normal, boring human in the face and they stagger, rub their eyes and then get up again to attack you. Anyone with the horrible parasitic stuff, you can believe that they can withstand more than one bullet or two. Or three. Or five. But there are plenty of basic humanoids that just shrug off a bullet to the head. Or three bullets to the head. You get the idea. This was on standard difficulty as well, so goodness knows what a harder difficulty would have been like.

The problem is, the game just isn’t very scary. Even when we are sitting in the dark, playing late at night, it’s just not scary at all. There’s a few jump scares here and there, mostly due to enemies grabbing you from behind. And there are plenty of different, gruesome ways to die. Each enemy seems to have a lovely way of tearing your head off, or splitting you in two, or spitting poison and acid in your face. The gruesome deaths aren’t as crazy as, for example, Dead Space, but they’re horrible enough. But the horror factor just isn’t really there.

Then again, maybe I’m expecting the wrong kind of horror. But nothing in the game has made me actually jump yet. And we’re getting near to the end of the game. There’s no psychological horror, nothing really jumping out of the shadows, nothing like that. Some enemies can be scary in a gameplay sense, like two giants suddenly inside a large cavity that you have to fight, or smaller enemies leaping up at you, but it’s not emotionally scary in the slightest.

Still, Resident Evil 4 is a good game and we are enjoying it, even if it’s not as scary as we’d like.