Having Jill pick up boltcutters and go "these could be used to cut the chains on a door..." while looking straight ahead at a bolted door sets the tone early on, but critiquing the game for this would be treading too closely on its father's hallowed ground; almost everything dumb and gung about this RE3 was present in that RE4 too, so let RE who is without sin cast the first stone.
With the bar set low, there's an unsurprising consistency to how every subsequent puzzle operates precisely one rung below what would be considered an entertaingly 'clever' solution. You'll often pick up an item and think "Aha! So if I just take this to...", only to find the game is all but making it unavoidable that you and your Clown Key will see the Clown Door on your way down the only unbarricaded corridor in a dozen-block radius. It's merely an Imagine Babiez simulation of the Resident Evil mansion-crawler, but nonetheless an enjoyable one. To unload 125 bullets into a zombie and still have enough rounds to glibly massacre twelve more feels positively philistinic when coming straight off the train from Resident Evil 2, but I think this is an admirably different experience - especially given they're in the same engine. RE3 is impressive in its own way - I could actually feel the old Mercenaries DNA bubbling up to the surface during the hospital holdout, and that made me really glad I finally gave up a few hours to play through it. Good times.
I remember borrowing a friend's copy of this game midway through 2020, but ultimately decided against inserting the disc. Something instinctive told me that this game would be Too Much during a pandemic, and I'm sad-glad to learn my gut was right. As I alluded to way back when, 2020 was the first and hopefully last time in my life I'll watch a real human body in a plastic bag be dropped into a makeshift grave, and this game was full to the brim with that same image. Just surreal to think about April 2020 again, isn't it? That unpleasant memory mingled with the game's, giving those opening street sections a unique morbidity that zombie movies never used to have for me; something formerly cartoonish is now psychologically horrific, closing the gap between survival horror as it exists in reality and in fiction. Kinda funny that I was thinking about all of it, again, in a computer game where someone shouts "suck on this, bitch!" while unloading a railgun into a giant tentacle monster. But that's exactly what I wanted to do to the killer virus too.
With the bar set low, there's an unsurprising consistency to how every subsequent puzzle operates precisely one rung below what would be considered an entertaingly 'clever' solution. You'll often pick up an item and think "Aha! So if I just take this to...", only to find the game is all but making it unavoidable that you and your Clown Key will see the Clown Door on your way down the only unbarricaded corridor in a dozen-block radius. It's merely an Imagine Babiez simulation of the Resident Evil mansion-crawler, but nonetheless an enjoyable one. To unload 125 bullets into a zombie and still have enough rounds to glibly massacre twelve more feels positively philistinic when coming straight off the train from Resident Evil 2, but I think this is an admirably different experience - especially given they're in the same engine. RE3 is impressive in its own way - I could actually feel the old Mercenaries DNA bubbling up to the surface during the hospital holdout, and that made me really glad I finally gave up a few hours to play through it. Good times.
I remember borrowing a friend's copy of this game midway through 2020, but ultimately decided against inserting the disc. Something instinctive told me that this game would be Too Much during a pandemic, and I'm sad-glad to learn my gut was right. As I alluded to way back when, 2020 was the first and hopefully last time in my life I'll watch a real human body in a plastic bag be dropped into a makeshift grave, and this game was full to the brim with that same image. Just surreal to think about April 2020 again, isn't it? That unpleasant memory mingled with the game's, giving those opening street sections a unique morbidity that zombie movies never used to have for me; something formerly cartoonish is now psychologically horrific, closing the gap between survival horror as it exists in reality and in fiction. Kinda funny that I was thinking about all of it, again, in a computer game where someone shouts "suck on this, bitch!" while unloading a railgun into a giant tentacle monster. But that's exactly what I wanted to do to the killer virus too.