As Resident Evil 5 bears down upon us, a lot of people can’t help but comment on the ways that Resident Evil has evolved as a franchise. Resident Evil 5 marks the refinement and streamlining of the formula pioneered in RE 4. That game dropped the earlier installments’ slow pace, thick atmosphere, and bad combat and controls for a more action-oriented, fluid experience. RE 5 takes these new aspects to their logical conclusions, and features, smooth gameplay and high production values, but comparatively few genuinely scary moments, it would seem.
Regardless of whether you think that Resident Evil 5 trades in racist, blatantly offensive imagery and tropes (and it absolutely does), there’s no denying RE 5’s clout, nor can one discount the franchise’s new direction when it comes to this popularity. When it comes to pacing and combat, Resident Evil 5 is being compared to Dead Space, as opposed to its previous peers, Silent Hill, Clocktower, and Siren.
This is understandable: Resident Evil 5 is joining Dead Space in a new quadrant of the survival horror genre. These games are akin to survival horror in their look and style, and sometimes in the trappings of their stories, but when it comes to gameplay, they are faster paced, and emphasize tighter controls and tactical decision-making, not the ability to use as few bullets as possible on hard-to-hit monstrosities. The reasons for these gameplay changes have been carefully examined by designers and gamers alike.
Most people believe that when the old survival horror controls (characterized by tank-like movement, awful aiming, and terrible hit-detection and avatar integration into the world) were upgraded, the old, shambling enemies in RE and the like were untenable. Supposedly, to make up for the players’ newfound maneuverability and combat prowess, enemies had to be made faster and more vicious, provided with long-range attacks, and imbued with a different kind of menace.
Gone are the days of skulking uncomfortably through dark mansions. Now, players run through decrepit villages, mines, spaceships, and castles, fending off hordes of vicious, infected humans. Understandably, people are accusing Resident Evil of straying from its venerable roots. It’s no longer truly frightening they say, just bloodthirstily fast and brutal. The same kinds of comments were made about Dead Space; people kept on talking about how Dead Space “was” Aliens, not the slower, more tension-conscious Alien. Regardless of whether or not the team behind Dead Space misrepresented their game (and the gameplay demos they gave showed just how vicious and fast the combat could and would be), the ways that these and other modern survival horror games (and their predecessors) produce horror are changing.
There can’t be any doubt in anybody’s mind that Dead Space sets out to scare its players. After all, this is a game that plunges you into whirring, slithering darkness with regularity, and delights in treating you to sickening, horrifying displays of violence (and the auditory recordings of such events). As a whole it may not have scared players as much as Silent Hill: Homecoming, Penumbra or Alone in the Dark did, but that’s because it wasn’t just trying to scare players. It was also trying to throw them into violent, gruesome firefights; these were fights that might genuinely scare from time to time, but mostly just tested nerves and reflexes.
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