It’s always a pleasure to get reacquainted with an old classic, so what’s better than the chance to get reacquainted with of them all at once? It’s a bit of a bumper week on the Nintendo Switch eShop right now, with Resident Evil Zero, the 2002 remake of the original and Resident Evil 4 all suddenly available.
A finer cross-section of Capcom’s series you’d be hard-pressed to find. There’s either ends of Resident Evil’s first era, defined by those slightly awkward camera angles and the pre-rendered backdrops, and perhaps the biggest surprise is how well both games hold up today.
The original Resident Evil – in its sumptuous remade form, of course – is every bit the timeless classic, retaining so much of its majesty and malice. It’s funny how so many of the quirks that were held against it in subsequent years – the fixed camera angles, the tank controls – now feel like conscious design decisions, all playing into the sense of helplessness and fear.
It’s about wilfully withholding information – as is all good horror, really – and the first Resident Evil makes an artform of this, from those famous idiosyncrasies down to subtler details such as how your health points are only ever displayed in the abstract of an oscilloscope, or in how you can never predict exactly how many bullets it will take to down a zombie.
Resident Evil 4 Switch + Resident Evil Zero + Resident Evil Remake Analysis! Watch on YouTube
Resident Evil 0 is a quirky little beast, with its character swapping mechanic and a neat line in opulence all taking aspects of the original game and extending them out towards something like a logical conclusion. Play it today and it’s a treat, though back in 2002 it didn’t go down so well – something, perhaps, with how quickly Capcom had run and re-run through the formula in six short years.