#resident evil

Playing Resident Evil 3: Nemesis^[1] and once again mourning the total absence of tank controls from the modern design palette. They're not for everything but they work so well for horror where having imperfect control over movement brings that feeling of fumbling around and panicking, and where giving the designer tight control of the camera provides so much juice. When you're walking down a hall and you can't see what's ahead of you it's scary!

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1. Four years ago, having never played a single game from either of the classic survival horror series, I decided to inaugurate myself a little October tradition: every year I play a Resident Evil or a Silent Hill, alternating series, from the oldest forward. This is, of course, a Resident Evil year. ↩︎

my two hottest survival horror takes are:

• the "ink ribbon" style save economy is actually genius and totally changes the way the player approaches the game. it's a huge factor in what makes resource management so compelling in early Residents Evil

• fixed camera angles are worth every bit of the awkwardness of tank controls and more. I've only just started playing Silent Hill 2 and it's already going completely off the wall with the camera in a way that just wouldn't work if you had to adjust your heading every time it cut

neither of these should be in every game, or even every survival horror game—Silent Hill never used ink ribbons because it's not really about the resource mechanics in the first place and that's fine. but it's a tragedy that they've completely exited the modern design lexicon