making your way through spaces of angular, alien structures. levels alternate between cramped, even claustrophobic moments and wide open areas with an epic sense of scale. not exactly a "walking sim" because the "making your way through" involves a consistent rhythm of puzzle platforming that's not highly difficult, but nontrivial enough that i could see people getting stuck or frustrated at points. moreover i wouldn't say the platforming and movement "feel good" in a way that you'd typically hope a platformer to feel, so even if almost all the sections in the end only took a handful of tries at worst, it often felt a bit painstaking, which might well be the intention. the way this game's level design unfolds, and the way the levels play with your perception of light as you try to progress, and especially the way the levels play with your perception in more extreme ways as the finale gives way to intense psychedelia, is unlike anything else i've experienced in a game. the ambient electronic music is what really seals the immersion though. i don't think its an overstatement that even with the beauty of the game's architecture, it'd be in a lot greater danger of becoming a slog without the music. so many points here where as soon as it really kicked in i felt so much more keyed into the play process.

if you're looking for a folk horror adventure to play through this season, you probably couldn't do much better. just really well constructed in all the genre nuts & bolts as you'd expect from wadjet eye: fun puzzles (not too easy, not too obscure), solid voice acting, solid art style (with some very memorable animated perspective shots!), near perfect pacing. setting is just extensive and moody enough to capture that spooky, dreary deep-rural town atmosphere (always overcast, frequently rainy). don't think i'd rank it above unavowed or the blackwell epiphany but its not far behind.

I put this off for a long time because as much as I appreciate elements of REmake 2 it wasn't a game I ultimately enjoyed playing all that much. the difficulty balancing never really felt solid to me, casual is too easy and on standard and hardcore i just personally find the zombies annoyingly tanky and i found the greater density of concerns in navigating the game relative to the original PS1 games simplicity exhausting rather than fun. i did beat the game on hardcore, but i kind of just... never really want to do that again. certainly not over just booting up the original game. i'm thankful that i enjoyed this game more overall for a few different reasons even if its not really something i would play over the original either. for one the dodge is a good mechanical addition and actually helps enemy encounters feel better balanced to me relative to REmake 2 since you're not just screwed if enemies get too close. secondly, though i wouldn't put any individual segment of this game in the case of level design over the mostly quite good reimagining of the progression through the police station in REmake 2, i do find the overall snappier pacing of the playthrough more enjoyable. the drain demos section, carlos siege, and lab sections were still very exhausting and. especially with the drain demos, annoying to get through on hardcore to me, so i probably wouldn't play those again on the difficulty without a damage upgrade or something which might possibly push it into the right tuning for me. but the opening city portion, with the addition of the dodge, exploding barrels for zombie mobs, and the fact that this game actually gives you an unbreakable knife at the start for checking downed zombies, along with the fact that i felt as if the zombies weren't quite as tanky here as they were as remake 2 (tho still pretty tanky, might be wrong about this i don't actually know the health values, but i know none of them got up more than once after being downed, when there was multiple instances of zombies getting up three or more times in my hardcore playthrough of remake 2), i actually had a lot of fun, maybe more fun than i had with even my favorite stretches of remake 2. i really despise the sewer section in REmake 2 so the sewers were more enjoyable here too. boss fights here overall were MUCH better to me as well, particularly the nemmy clocktower arena fight i really wish the terrible bits of this game weren't in it or better balanced because i found myself almost loving it as much as i wanted to, but i'd probably rather play through village again than this, which is a game i wasn't blown away by but found more consistently engaging. i should really replay RE7 since its been so long, but i'll probably start REmake 4 first.