In its place, Resident Evil 2 successfully substitutes moody aesthetics and increasingly dangerous enemies. In this game, the camera is an over-the-shoulder, freely movable third-person view, which erases that particular brand of unease. The original game emphasized this tension with fixed camera angles, which gave the game a distanced, stiff mood that toyed with player ignorance as a means of sustaining tension. Resident Evil 2 is a zombie-fighting game that refuses to give you enough bullets. Do I try to find another route? Do I fight? Or just run for it and hope I don't get mauled to death? I need to backtrack through this creepy hallway, but I left several zombies alive in it. The feeling of playing Resident Evil 2 is that of desperate, continuous calculation, considering whether to fight or flee, weighing your ammo and health reserves against what you know about the areas you need to visit. Even on the most generous difficulty settings, multiple shots are needed to take down zombies, and the undead have a troubling habit of getting up when they really, really shouldn't. To put it another way, Resident Evil 2 is a zombie-fighting game that refuses to give you enough bullets.

Instead, the fear comes from scarcity of resources and the constant need to move forward to gather more resources, solve puzzles, and hopefully find safe harbor from which to plan your next steps.

Not scary, exactly, with the exception of some intense gore and a few goofy jump scares. The original Resident Evil games are called survival horror, but they're more like exploration-based thrillers. Those interests, more specifically, are tension and scarcity. The rest of the game is consumed with one overriding concern: escape. Both flee to the police station after realizing the town is overrun with the undead, and both realize their mistake quickly. In it, as in the original, you play as either rookie cop Leon Kennedy or Claire Redfield, an adventurous woman looking for her policeman brother. The new remake of Resident Evil 2, out this week for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC, is dedicated to the feeling of that place and to capturing the tension that players felt upon entering it in the 1998 original. A secret passageway leads to the parking garage, if you can solve the puzzle hiding it. Half the doors are locked with arcane traps the others are just locked.

It's also, improbably, a labyrinth-one that belies its appearance as a sanctuary from a city full of zombies and turns out to be as full of zombies and danger as anywhere else in the infested town. The centerpiece of Resident Evil 2, the Police Station is an austere, neo-Victorian government building. Every Resident Evil game is only as good as its setting, and the Raccoon City Police Station is one of the best.

Resident evil 2