The many selves of Resident Evil 2's police station
Is it possible for a building to haunt itself? Resident Evil 2's remake suggests so. While wandering the new game's extravagantly remodelled police station I've been dogged by the thought that older incarnations of the structure are trying to force themselves into the light. It's not just that the station used to be an art museum within Resident Evil's fiction - a kludge dreamed up by original scenario writer Noboru Sugimura to explain the eerie marble busts, emblem doors and oil paintings that sit alongside the gun cabinets and mounds of paperwork. It's that so many other evils have resided here since the original game rocked PlayStations in 1998.
The absurdly overwrought entrance lobby, in particular, has graced no less than five games, from Resident Evil 3 through online multiplayer curio Outbreak to the much-reviled Operation Raccoon City, all orbiting roughly the same point in the series chronology. Google "Raccoon City Police Station" and you'll be treated to a phantasmagorical, algorithmic mishmash of interiors from these titles - the military vibe of the abandoned "Resident Evil 1.5" sutured to Resi 3's gentle rearrangement from 24 hours before the events of Resi 2. All this, and then you remember that there are multiples of the station even within Resident Evil 2 itself. Among both the 1998 game and the remake's more ambitious features is "zapping", in Hideki Kamiya's bouncy phrase, a parallel story mechanic in which each protagonist tackles the same layouts with different enemy and item arrangements.
Approaching the remake as a veteran of these titles, you can almost feel the station's many reinventions swirling around your ankles like ectoplasm, running their fingers through Leon's bangs. One of the new game's best qualities - providing you skip the spoilery trailers - is that it keeps you guessing about where it clings to that legacy and where it strays. This creates obvious practical problems for a returning player: it means that your knowledge of prior layouts can be used against you by the designers. The Licker's newfound ability to scuttle over walls and ceilings may be alarming, allowing it to exploit the abundance of dark corners created by an over-the-shoulder camera and a flashlight. But the bigger problem is that the Licker isn't quite where you left it. Nor, for that matter, is the shotgun that used to be your best friend in a close encounter. Beyond that, there's something to the process of revisiting this much-revisited space that evokes Sigmund Freud's concept of the uncanny or "unheimlich" - that which frightens because it is strangely familiar. It's satisfying to trace the design of previous RPD stations in the remake - puzzles have been broken apart and elaborated upon, rooms mutilated and transplanted - but there's also a feeling of disorientation and unease, of fumbling at the contours of something repressed.
Post a Comment