Nightmare logic and 'nightmarish' are often reserved for works that evoke forces of total disorder that are malicious and occult and cosmic in scope. But these kinds of nightmares are thrilling, immediate, and easy to recognise as phantasms on waking up. I love these nightmares: they turn you into the happy audience of your subconscious' greatest horror film. There is always great catharsis to a descent into hell! The worst nightmares are the ones that are so ordinary that they are basically indistinguishable from daily life, that because they feel like a bad day rob you of the feeling of having slept. These nightmares sometimes recall situations and settings from your ordinary life, and even when they don't they capture its mundane processes and anxieties. If the former nightmares amplify these things to an extravagant scale, these ones cut through and distil the essence of life's exhaustion. Resident Evil 2 is this nightmare of ordinary life. It follows nightmare logic because it is deeply paranoid, and it is nightmarish because it is both very boring and very stressful.

Anyone who has ever worked in hospitality or customer service might think fast paced first person games distinctly nightmarish in their evocation of the horror of daily life. There is a universal alienation to moving through a crowd and realising that nobody sees anyone else, but what's worse is thousands of faces rushing directly toward you and you specifically and wanting something from you. Resident Evil 2 though is working as a teacher or administrator, performing as best you can with all eyes on you, putting out fires when they come up, and knowing that however well you resolve an issue in the moment you will never be on top of things. You are employed to make disorder manageable for minutes at a time from within the eternal disorder of human affairs. If things could ever be permanently ordered not only would you be out of a job, but humanity would cease to be human. The horror of daily disorder is also the beauty of ordinary life. I have nightmares about students challenging me in front of the class, but that's only because this can and should happen. If my lesson plans could be uploaded into the heads of a passive class-body, this would eliminate the need for interaction as well as thought. Teaching and learning is not about the absorption of information, but about thinking as a creative and disruptive process. If nothing is changing, then no thought is occurring. I have also had nightmares about online systems crashing, and databases dying with them. But the absence of interruption in an online system means that either the system is not being used, or that its uses have been exhausted. And if these databases could not be corrupted, they could also not be read. It is not a metaphor but a fact that disorder is at the essence of any working system, and noise is the essence of all transmission.

Both administration and pedagogy conduct disorder to maintain or further productive ends. Games are the same: disorder and precarity are the essence of the videogame's interplay of human and machinic agencies that test and collide and alter one another toward new and unforeseen outcomes. When outcomes are totally predictable, when disorder is under control, this means a victory to either the human or the game system, and this is when the game ceases to be a game. The system stops producing novelty when it is under control, and this happens when its heterogeneous components do not participate but dominate one another. Resident Evil 2 can be mastered by those players deeply committed to imposing order on systems, but as a game it works hard to maintain nightmarish precarity. The only thing inevitable about it is things, however under control they might appear, inevitably going the other way. It never makes the player feel entirely helpless like other survival horror games, and it never gives them a sense of triumph like other games with an atmosphere so dire. It is not about defeat or triumph or anything where things can be dominated or overcome. It is instead about just temporarily managing disorder before the cards are redrawn and disorder must once again be negotiated. The machine reads the player and the player reads the machine, and they both continue to adapt to and challenge one another.

This ongoing mind-game might sound strange because zombies are stupid, and the zombies in Resident Evil 2 are exceptionally zombie-ish, which means exceptionally stupid. But again Resident Evil 2's brand of nightmare is not always about the specifics of its settings or entities but instead life's quotidian processes and anxieties. Its horror is one of the failures of administration. The player can never be entirely on top of things, and the only way to progress is to memorise things and forget things and plan for things and when it inevitably happens, adapt to it all going wrong. It is to try and remember and account for all your mistakes and failures, and to manage as best you can the sinking ship of your best intentions. The introduction of Mr X and Lickers is not so much about introducing more mechanically powerful foes, but undoing your meagre efforts to put things into order. No one thing is scary or even difficult, but the game dynamically works obstacles, enemies, and affordances into a series of ad hoc recipes where the goal is always player frustration. Having Mr X walk into a room where you have things basically under control (one zombie with its legs blown off, another in the corner, another stunned, you're on low health but you know where you're going) is like having a supervisor watching you work. And sneaking past a Licker, then past a distracted zombie, and having Mr X walk in is like having a car backfire outside and wake up the baby you swear to god you almost, finally, had to sleep. Because you can never directly respond to Mr X, so continues an eternal chase through the same god damn corridors where hands are once again played with the hope of a new outcome. Because we memorise certain routes and blindspots and dangers, Resident Evil 2 makes the case that repetition in systems might lead to a sense of familiarity, but it also always leads to difference.

Resident Evil 2 is also the scariest game for how it so beautifully handles slow-moving frustration within a space that a single stray bullet can throw everything into disarray. Zombies are not intrinsically scary but they are always uncanny; Romero's zombies move slow to mimic the world of humans undone by capitalism and Fulci's present the ultimate desecration of human life and the divine order of our belief systems. Both inhabit films that feel zombie-like: sluggish, falling apart, and singularly focussed on devouring the future. Resident Evil 2 is smooth, albeit circular and obsessive. Here the zombies are obstacles for management, and the horror of managing the impossible makes them scary. It is a game made for fans of the series, and fans of the series are big fans. It's a cult franchise that's also enormously popular; it's a cult on the scale of a supermarket or mall chain. Like the zombie it returns from the dead and moves with obsessive purpose. As such it is made to be played twice 'officially', four times 'thoroughly', and a hundred times 'realistically'. It gets less scary the more it is repeated, because repetition gives the space to experiment with new ideas and outcomes. The second play is more laborious than anything else because it involves re-seeing what once scared you, this time as blank obstacles. The third however unlocks a new kind of obsession in the player's brain, where the pain and joy of managing disorder comes back stronger than ever before. It takes about fifteen hours to complete, but like the zombie it cannot die an ordinary death and is never really over.

Resident Evil 2's gore is not affecting, but the lighting and always obscured sight-lines return the player to this infantile state where they are afraid of the dark. We play as the detached adult, dealing with problems systematically, playing Tetris with keys and herbs, but we are also aways the irrational child hiding under the blankets from the boogeyman. Both are always at play: one does not contradict the other. Resident Evil Biohazard plays this up well by swapping out Mr X for Jack Baker, the lunatic father looking for you, his 'son' who won't stop slamming doors and ruining dinner and staying out past curfew. X is interesting because when you can only hear him he functions as a Michael Myers-esque 'shape', or abstraction as persistent as the shadows at your feet. But then when you see him he looks like a fucking idiot. He is frightening because of how he upsets your plans, because of how he reminds you that no amount of trying will ever allow you to control your surroundings, but he is also terrifying because he looks like such a fucking idiot. Commonsense would suggest he'd be more ominous the more abstract his appearance, but the idiot physicality of his bozo suit and hat and weirdly serene face is actually chilling because it's also funny.

The screwball comedy of this game is also one of its greatest strengths because it keeps things terrifying, and rubs your mistakes in your face as if to say how this whole thing's your fault. I had to laugh out loud when I returned to this room to pick something up that I had not been into in a week, and there were like five zombies I had not dealt with and had forgotten about and it scared the shit out of me, then Mr X entered from the other side with perfect comic timing like Honey I'm home what's with all this mess!. It was like getting ready to go on holiday and at the last minute remembering that final little job you had to get out of the way but it was sent to that other inbox you're not really checking any more because you've tapped out and you just want to see the water and sit in the grass for a bit but now there's like a hundred emails in there that get progressively less polite as they add up.

Life is shit because it's boring and hard and unpredictable all at the same time but it's also really beautiful for the same reasons and is worth doing forever. This is Resident Evil 2's philosophy, and also what makes it such a brilliant game.