"They always feel new - constant, but constantly surprising. They become part of your private autobiography and every time you [play] them a new layer of memory is added to the bond between you. Each performance is a collection of the experiences you have had together. Not many friendships last so long - I suppose the unchanging nature of the music simplifies the dynamic between you - but what would be an unhealthily one-sided affair in your personal life provides a great deal of comfort throughout your professional one. It is even richer if you can always remember the initial naivety, wonder, and thrill that accompanied your first 'date'."

This is a quote from an orchestral conductor about his evolving relationship with great pieces of classical music, but I suspect it's pretty easy for many of us to substitute a couple of words and apply it directly to our experiences with our favorite games. And in the case of RE4 it was a first date to remember.

It was the late spring of 2005, my friend had just bought the game, eight of us crammed into his dorm room at midnight, turned the lights out and the volume up as we played through the first 3 chapters more or less blind. The idea was that we'd pass the controller around whenever the player died, but the first guy somehow stayed alive all the way until chapter 3-2! Us seven spectators had one of the most intense watch-sessions ever, alternating between "AHHHH!" and "EWWWW" and "LOLOL Chuck Norris roundhouse kicks".

Two years later, I bought the Wii version - now I could shoot a Ganado in the leg and then in the face a split second later! It was so damn addictive that I completed the game (for the first time) in one single 16-hour sitting. A friend picked me up to go to a party right after, and I spent the entire time in a hazy half-asleep stupor hovering between RE4 and reality. And while I don't remember this, he said (while laughing his ass off) that at one point I stood in front of a vase and swiped my right arm back and forth in the "break vase" Wiimote gesture for a few seconds.

I've returned to Resident Evil 4 at so many different seasons of my life - playing quick rounds of Mercenaries mode with a warm bottle of milk in my lap waiting for my infant daughter to start fussing, doing a handgun-only pro run when COVID lockdowns first started - that it has to be a five-star game for me. It's not just that I have plenty of memories of it; it's that the game was addictive and fantastic enough that I kept coming back to it to make those memories in the first place, and that's something that no amount of plot contrivances or anticlimactic final acts can take away from it.

Plenty of reviews have waxed lyrical on this game's virtues better than I can, but I wanted to point out how impressed I am with how the iconic village brawl really teaches the new player how to play the game. It establishes from the outset that unlike the zombies from previous games, these guys are capable of running, moving intelligently to flank you, and following you up stairs and through windows. And through a mix of its large enemy swarms, the presence of sloping terrain which means that you will eventually hit an enemy in the face even if you just spray and pray, and the fact that enemies sometimes stagger forwards when hit in the face, and you've created the conditions for even a complete newbie to discover the melee options by accident. And the melee options are part of the extraordinarily robust but viscerally simple gameplay loop that has sustained my interest in this game through countless playthroughs.

I know that this represents the start of the shift away from survival horror that culminated in the all-action RE6 (that's a review I'm kinda dreading to get to) - but taken as it is it's a blockbuster in all the right ways. It looks and sounds fantastic even today, is exceptionally refined in execution, is a bundle of scares on the first run and then unadulterated fun on subsequent playthroughs, and... it's just good, man. Play it!

Quintessential. Nearly everything in this game has purpose and adds to instill a specific feeling. The action is tense and extremely fun, the inventory management and preserving resources remains engaging to this day, and this might be the best version of quick time events integrated into both cutscenes and gameplay. The game effortlessly balances the fear due to the atmosphere with how funny the dialogue is. The dialogue being so cheesy and funny helps reset the tension, keeping the pacing well balanced.

While the controls can be weird if you aren't used to tank controls, it isn't inherently worse. Mastery of these controls is extremely satisfying, and it proves that having a homogenized control scheme isn't always going to be a good thing if a team wants their game to achieve different things.

Even though this game has a remake which is also amazing, the original will always be a fundamental work and worth playing on it's own merits. Don't let there being a prettier and newer version have you miss out on peak video games. The game is iconic for a reason.