A Bit Further Into RE2: The Complex Escape Room

 Well, this is interesting:

After our initial prologue arriving in Raccoon City, at least in Leon's campaign, we find ourselves in the RCPD headquarters, an elaborate building that once was a museum (and I believe was built by the same architect as the mansion in the first game). This helps justify the sprawling and dramatic architecture.

It also gives the game an interesting structure: It's a big escape room.

Now, I'm still pretty early in the game, but I've noticed how much stuff I just have to pass my and note for later. For example, there's a locker room in which all you need is a code for each locker to open it up, but you need to replace some of the buttons in it to get access. Finding one button allowed me to open up the lockers with a 2 in their number, but I'll need another to open up any with a 3 in them.

My sense, then, is that the objective of the game is largely to just get out of the RCPD, though this might only be the game's first act - that being said, as a game from 1998, it's possible that it's a fair bit less epic in scope (we do, after all, have Claire's whole game to play here - which I'm given to understand is similar but different).

Interestingly, one of my frustrations with RE4 was all the points-of-no-return, where I figured I needed to progress further to solve some optional puzzle or finish some task for the Merchant, only to discover that I couldn't go back and do it (I never got the tile puzzle in the village, for instance, needing just one more tile).

Here, though, it seems that the entire thing is built around "you don't have the thing you need for that yet" and backtracking is a huge part of the game (the limited inventory is also a factor).

Interestingly, it reminds me of the old Sierra adventure games I played, like Space Quest. These, to be fair, were often fairly linear, but it was primarily about figuring out how to use various inventory items to solve puzzles. I got, for example, a roll of film to develop in the darkroom, but it seems I need some other chemicals to finish the job.

So far I don't think I've encountered anything other than your standard zombies, but boy are they tanky, and they often play dead only to rise up later, even if you hit them with nothing but headshots (and like, five bullets right in the dome). I did get a glimpse of what I believe is a Licker, which I know are infamous.

Anyway, I already have two of the medallions for the goddess statue in the main hall (a strangely pagan image for a Midwest city, though a couple tweaks and she could be simply Justice,) which to me implies that this is only our starting "big puzzle we need to solve."

Separate Ways Completed: And Now, A Journey to Raccoon City

 I beat the Ada chapter of Resident Evil 4, which serves as a kind of "sidequel" that shows the events of the main game from Ada's perspective. One of the interesting wrinkles to it is that the final boss is not really the last challenge - from Leon's perspective, we free Ada and then she turns up to toss us a rocket launcher to finish off Saddler once and for all. In this, we need to play through her rapid fight across the scaffolds of the big rig while Leon's fighting. With a sharp time limit (though I think I finished with a minute to spare) I was focused less on killing enemies than getting past them.

Anyway, Separate Ways is all well and good, but obviously a lot shorter of a campaign than Leon's main one.

Having beaten it, I decided to put RE4 to a rest and boot up the Resident Evil 2 remake. Right off the bat, there are some interesting differences: The Zombies are spongier than the early-game Ganados in 4. While I did get a combat knife after the first little excursion into the halls of the RCPD, I'm curious to see how much we can get away with using melee here - every time I get even close to a zombie that isn't incapacitated with a bullet, they grab me, and pre-knife, at least, that's guaranteed to take off a chunk of my health. We'll see if I get the chance to cut short such grabs with the knife like I do in RE4.

Still, the overall impression I'm getting is that avoiding foes is more often the right call than killing them.

As horrific as the Plaga parasites are, maybe I just got desensitized to them. The zombies are pretty standard horror movie zombies, but there's a somewhat more apocalyptic feeling here, you know, like a zombie movie, which is what they're going for.

I'm only like half an hour into the game - I was rescued by presumably doomed Lt. Branagh, who seems very pale and is clutching what I assume is a zombie bite wound. Now, Leon's gotten bitten plenty here, but presumably the lore of the game's zombie virus is that it's not, like, a guaranteed conversion if you don't then die. (I know part of the story of the upcoming RE9 is going to have an older Leon suffering from "Raccoon City Syndrome" as one of the few survivors. Man has had some nasty things attacking his body).

I actually initially meant to play Claire's campaign first, but they were listed with Leon first, and I'd just played a fair amount as Ada, so I was willing to go back to our favorite boy scout with boy-band hair. The two meet up early on, but are separated when their obvious route back out of the city is cut off by an exploding tanker truck.

I am bracing for a much simpler set of gameplay systems - RE4 was released when games were definitely heading in that "more is more" attitude toward game mechanics, but it looks like crafting, melee attacks, and any real sense of in-game economy are going to be out. In place, it seems that the RCPD is built more like a big puzzle-box (somewhat akin, I assume, to the Spencer Mansion). Even a big location from 4 like Castle Salazar is still a somewhat linear experience taking you through it, while I get the sense that a good chunk of this game is going to be figuring out the central medallion puzzle in the RCPD lobby.

That's kind of fun, honestly.

Still, I had one of those moments where I had jumped into a new game so shortly after finishing an old one that I realized I needed to take a break and digest what had come before.

An Explosive Ending to RE4, and Now... Probably More Resident Evil

 Ironically, the final boss of Resident Evil 4 is the one that I never died to.

Saddler, the evil cult leader intent on using the US President to spread mind-controlling parasites to the globe's populace (so... RFK Jr.?) undergoes a monstrous transformation and we fight him on what seems to be a big oil rig.

The fight, which I imagine is not too dissimilar to how it worked in the original (though without any quicktime events) has you blasting away at eyeballs on his new vaguely arachnid form to stun him so that you can get a critical knife attack in his... er... mouth-eye. Other than the top half of his old human face, there's very little human about his appearance anymore.

The final phase of the fight felt pretty simple - he becomes a mass of tentacles with a central eye/egg in which perhaps some remnant of his human form sits, and I just shot it a bunch of times with my sniper rifle until Ada tossed me a rocket launcher to finish the job.

There's a last-minute (well, 2-minute) escape sequence in which we run out of the island facility. There's one scary moment with a Ganado that comes after us, but most are writhing in pain with the death of the hive mind monarch in Saddler. We get on a jetski for the second half of this, and while we have some falling rocks to dodge, I don't think the intent here is to be at all challenging - it's a cathartic moment of explosions and speed.

After the Krauser fight - the real fight - in which I died maybe seven or more times (I actually had 14 deaths total in that chapter, which is I think over three times as many as I died in any other chapter, but there are some other hazards there) I was actually expecting to really struggle with Saddler, but maybe it was dumb luck or just a fight that played to my strengths, but I seemed to do exactly what I was supposed to.

The ending of the game fully transitions us out of whatever horror existed, the transformation from the folk horror insanity of the game's opening into this full 1980s-style action sequence completed.

The game is good, though I do think that it does suffer quite a bit after leaving the castle. Other than the sequence that introduces the Regeneradors, which has that real Umbrella "evil science" feel, the military vibes of the island don't really lend to a sense of creeping dread. I've already written about this, so I won't belabor the point.

I've started "Separate Ways," which was evidently a bonus campaign unlocked after beating the game originally, but is now a DLC. I got the whole Deluxe Edition for 12 bucks on the PS Store, so it was well worth the price.

Here, we see the events of the game from Ada's perspective, playing across familiar locations but in a different order and with different tools. Ada has a grappling-gun which lets her play a lot more with the verticality of spaces, at least when the game lets you.

The game mechanics are largely similar - we meet the Merchant and will want to trade him treasures for big chunks of money to immediately spend on upgrading weapons. Given that I never really used it in the main game, I've decided to focus Ada on her TMP submachine gun. Of course, I don't think you can really focus on just one weapon, because you'll run out of ammo quickly enough.

Ada is, of course, also a tonally different protagonist from Leon - she's a mercenary, and only stirred toward heroism against her better judgment. The fact that she's working for Albert Wesker, RE's perennial big bad (though I think he was definitively killed off in 5 - though I would not remotely put it past them to revive him in 9 or some later game) does not reflect very well on her, even if the post-credits scene from the main game does see her realizing just how deadly the thing she's getting for him could be, and has her abandon the job and take her dominant Plaga sample somewhere Wesker can't get to it.

Still, there is some fun to be had in following Ada's journey - we see that she's the one who rings the bell at the beginning of the game to stop the village fight, and we see what happens when she shoots Mendez to distract him from Leon in the village chief's house.

The pace, of course, is accelerated, and I've been struggling to gather the pesetas to spend on all the upgrades I want for her (stupidly, I dumped some resources to try to make room for the crossbow weapon only to send it to storage anyway because I forgot that was an option).

So far, the DLC has been in familiar locations, though I'm given to understand it's not exclusively so.

Anyway, even when I'm done with that, I shan't be done with ResE so soon - I found that the RE2 remake was available for just twelve bucks on the Playstation Store and figured I'd give that one a shot as well. Umbrella and Raccoon City are elements of the series I've been aware of for decades, so it'll be nice to see what it's like (I'm given to understand that, at least between the remakes, 2 was better-received than 3).

RE4's Final Act Leaves Something to Be Desired

 I know that Resident Evil games have a tendency to trade out their gothic or otherwise more classical horror in favor of modern sci-fi terror in their final acts. I wonder if this always accompanies a downgrade in the sense of atmosphere.

I'd known that getting to the island in RE4, which is basically a combination laboratory and military base, was known as a step down for the game, and I must sadly report that this is not wrong: we leave the moldering village and gothic castle in favor of a kind of generic island military base, more the kind of setting for a James Bond mission.

It's not that things aren't scary: this is where we encounter the Regeneradors, and even worse, later on, the ones that transform into Iron Maidens. These are monsters that have multiple parasites inside that can only be seen with a vision-limiting thermal scope and can only be hit with weapons that can penetrate flesh. These guys feel of a piece with the horrors dreamt up by the Umbrella Corporation, and while one is involved in among the most frustratingly difficult parts of the game, where you need to protect Ashley from Ganados coming in to take her away from behind a barred barrier while also fighting off one of these Regenerador/Iron Maiden combos. Initially, I was struggling because I was so low on supplies, so I wound up backtracking all the way to the Merchant, sold my magnum (which I was basically never using) and got a bit more ammo and armor, and even then, I wasn't able to put enough damage into the Iron Maiden's head-parasite and wound up killing it just by having Ashley release her hold on wheel that was holding up a bridge that it was standing on. This was only possible because the Ganados coming after her are evidently finite in number, so I was able to dodge the Regenerador long enough to take out the four or so Genados and then just ran back to her. I imagine I missed out on a gem or something for killing it conventionally.

But while these creatures are truly terrifying, much of the action on the island is just that - action. And the difficulty actually ramps up - I actually died more to the final Krauser fight far more than I have at any point in the game, and the giant race across the island has you fighting an absurd number of Ganados that then requires the game to give you tons of ammo, and it doesn't really feel like survival horror.

Weirdly, I actually think survival horror works best when it's honestly not that difficult - it works best when there's tension, and bursts of action-movie violence aren't really about tension as much as spectacle.

Comparing it with the, you know, other two survival horror games that I've played, I'm thinking about how Alan Wake II and Silent Hill 2 handle their final acts:

Backing up: I think ending a horror story is always difficult. Stephen King, a true master of the genre, doesn't always have the most satisfying conclusions. The creeping dread is really fun to establish early on, and drama typically works best with rising tension, stakes, and action. But what does that escalation look like?

In Silent Hill 2, the final "dungeon" is not all that dissimilar to the rest of the game, but the growing sense of dread is what is growing as James gets closer to his damning realization. But I think one of the ways in which you sense that it's different than before is that, unlike the Apartments or the Hospital, the Hotel starts off looking normal, even nice, but progress through it reveals more and more the state of disrepair and ruin that it's in. But unlike the stark transition into the otherworld, there's this terrible implication that the nice lie of it is the Otherworld, and when the truth is shown to us, the hotel's state of utter ruin becomes bare to see - not as the hellish, rust-filled night world, but as a bleak bright morning light on ashes and pain.

Alan Wake II does give us a giant spectacle with the Dark Ocean Summoning sequence, but as cathartic as it is (though I also found it kind of difficult, and thus not quite the hell-yeah moment that it was maybe meant to be) it's also undercut when we find out that it didn't work, or at least didn't work the way we thought it would. The final challenges are instead the surreal Eternal Deerfest, Saga's Dark Place Mind Place, and another chase with the Dark Presence now in the form of Alex Casey.

In both cases, the tone and overall feel of the genre is of a piece with the rest of the game.

With some exceptions (like the lab where we first encounter the Regeneradors) RE4's Island just kind of doesn't feel like the same game anymore.

I'm still eager to get to the end. I, sadly, think I screwed up the final Merchant request (meaning I failed to complete this one, as well as one I failed to find in the village) by going through a one-way door out of the room with the last blue cult emblem. I can't think of any major characters to deal with other than Sadler (though I feel like Ramon Salazar had a weird insectoid brute that worked for him that I don't think I ever fought).

Still, I'll say that I think the Village and Castle parts of the game were impeccable.

D&D As Survival Horror

 I don't know that I'll necessarily be able to run a true survival horror RPG. My friends, I think, are drawn more to the power fantasy, the high-stakes set-pieces, and the character drama.

Matt Colville has said in the past that D&D was originally a survival horror game, and MCDM's "Crows" aims to take the DNA of their heroic fantasy game Draw Steel and rework it in all the ways that will make for a tough, brutal survival horror dungeon crawler (Draw Steel famously doesn't allow heroes or monsters to miss, while Crows, at its early stage of development, will always allow for bad luck to screw you - casting a spell can potentially open a rift to hell or some such dimension and instantly kill your character, though extremely rarely).

As I've been playing Resident Evil 4's remake (which is, admittedly, a more action-forward entry in the genre, with foes often dropping ammo - a purist could make the argument that it's less survival horror than just an action game with gruesome elements) I've been thinking about that idea: D&D as survival horror.

It's not the first time I've given it some thought, but here are some ideas:

Recovery:

The adventuring day in D&D is a really important resource, and I think if there's one real failing of the 2024 DMG it's guidance on how much adventuring a party ought to get up to in a day. To be fair, I and many other DMs ignored the advice in the 2014 DMG. Complaints that 5E heroes are too powerful might not have been so strong if we were sending our players into the utter slogs that the DMG suggests on a daily basis.

Long Rests almost totally reset everything, even more in 5.5, where even hit dice expended fully recharge rather than only getting half your maximum. That means that a D&D character can more or less go hard every single day, but it also raises the following challenge: if you have a dark and scary dungeon, the optimal strategy for players is to just go in, fight something or do some other challenge, clear a room, and then leave the dungeon and rest outside.

A party might decide to rest inside the dungeon, relying on a cleared room and maybe using spells like Leomund's Tiny Hut (if the room's big enough) or Mordenkainen's Magnificent Mansion (if they're high-level) to prevent any interruption of their rest.

And even if they don't have that kind of fortification, DMs are forced to do some extra work to create monster patrols to assault the party while they're resting.

And even then, here's a question for you: if the long rest is interrupted with a 3-round monster fight (basically 18 seconds in-game) and the party prevails, they can continue their rest. Unless it was a truly grueling fight, do you, as the DM, feel like you've really made the dungeon feel scarier? Is it really all that much tougher? And are you going to send the same patrols of monsters against them again to show how truly nasty and scary this place is?

Let's look to Survival Horror. One of the big things in the genre (or at least in the three games in the genre I've played) is that there's no single moment that just resets your HP to full (actually, there might be, but they're relatively invisible). Recovery, of ammo and of HP, or any other resource, is something you need to work for, and every error you make - a missed shot or taking damage when you can avoid it (and the deal the games make with you is that you can avoid taking damage) means some little bit of your overall cache of resources is diminished when it might not otherwise have been.

So, what we need to do is make recovery a resource that is not so easily regained.

In D&D, an eight hour rest is what you need for a long rest. Officially, you also need to eat a pound of food per day (and drink some amount of water - a gallon, maybe?)

Let's totally rewrite that rule:

Instead, let's say that a "long rest" is a "full ration." We take time out of the equation (this might complicate things later, but we'll address it) and actually allow an adventure like this to take place over one long and terrible night. The key, though, is that "long rests" are now a consumable item, rather than an activity you can take.

Next, we ban spells like Goodberry or Create Food and Water - spells that conjure food would, of course, eliminate the scarcity that we need. Indeed, if we didn't ban these, the optimal thing would be to cast Goodberry, eat one of those goodberries immediately, and then have 9 left over with all your spell slots.

Short Rests... might be able to work as they normally do, but what I might do is institute a cap on how many short rests you can take. In Baldur's Gate 3 (not a survival horror game) you can only take two short rests before you need to take a long rest (long rests do take up resources, but in my experience I was never unable to take another ten long rests or more after any that I did take, the resources being so plentiful). Naturally, classes like Warlocks, Monks, and most Fighters get nearly everything back on a short rest. I think instituting either a one or two short rest per "full ration" might balance this right.

Difficulty:

One of the other hallmarks of Survival Horror is a certain pressure to execute things perfectly: with no regenerating health and often limited ammo for your weapons, you can't just go whole-hog on enemies with overkill and just shrug it off. You're always trying to take enemies down in the most efficient way.

But, again, the games give you the tools to do this.

Now, D&D has an element of luck, always: it's not a "skill" based game in the way that video games test your manual dexterity. The most wonderfully optimized character might get screwed by the dice.

I think the key is this:

Combat should be low-difficulty. But it should be arduous.

Now, this plays into our recoveries: If we think of the game as being divided into chapters or sub-dungeons (I do think this style of game lends itself to something of a mega-dungeon crawl) we might only let the party find sufficient rations for everyone to get a long rest (though there's certainly some potential challenge to giving them, say, only one ration at a time and forcing the party to strategize on who gets it) after completing a major chapter - to use Silent Hill 2 (remake) as an example, maybe they don't find any rations from the moment they enter Woodside Apartments until they get to the apartment where they hide in the closet right before going to Blue Creek Apartments, and then from there only getting full rations for the whole party after the first fight against Pyramid Head.

But, here's the thing:

Every individual fight they get into should be easy. Like, maybe lower-difficulty than the 5.5 DMG's "Low difficulty encounter balance" math. Like, maybe for a party of four 1st level characters, like a single Zombie.

See, there's a good chance that that single zombie isn't going to even hit anyone in the party before they kill it. A Zombie only has 15 HP (huh, they nerfed it from 2014. Never realized,) and a very low AC. But with Undead Fortitude and just the fact that a 1st level character is probably doing at the absolute most 15 damage with a hit (that's max damage on a Greatsword with +3 to Strength) there's a good chance that that Zombie might survive long enough to take a swipe or two at the party. Maybe one of those hits connects, and at that point, 1d8+1 (oh, maybe not a total nerf, this used to be 1d6) is pretty nasty for just about any 1st level character.

Now sure, there's a good chance they kill the thing before it hurts anyone. That's ideal - that's their goal. And they might favor long-range attacks to make it even less likely for them to get hit. All good.

But you throw like fifteen such encounters at them, maybe mixing it up occasionally - there's two zombies now, or the zombie's in a narrow, twisty corridor, so the only real way to get an angle on them to hit them is by getting up close - and that starts to really add up.

See, I think Survival Horror as a genre lives not in the frantic, desperate moments with boss monsters that can kill you in two hits (though that has its place). I think the genre really lives more in the moment where you're like "damn, I screwed up that fight, and now I'm totally out of ammo, my health is super low, and I'm just desperately trying to find some healing item before I encounter more monsters."

There was a specific moment in Silent Hill 2, in the Otherworld Hospital segment, where I spent a good 10-15 minutes in a state where I had zero ammo whatsoever and was probably one or two hits away from death, frantically trying to open every drawer and cupboard for that delicious health drink.

This is the feeling you want to cultivate in D&D as survival horror - the Cleric is out of spell slots, the Barbarian used their last rage, the Sorcerer has one spell slot they're saving for a Thunderwave but only if they can get three monsters in the area, otherwise it'll feel like a waste, and the Monk is sitting there with 3 HP left hoping desperately that they won't encounter any of those ghouls who have two attacks and might bypass Deflect Attack if they hit twice.

Attack Resources:

So, what about ammo?

The survival horror games I've played have all been in basically modern settings (give or take a decade or three) where the main kind of weapon people use is a gun. Diminishing ammo is a challenge for all involved, and when you look at the single shell in your shotgun and find yourself realizing that using that will only mean having to swap weapons when the monster doesn't go down in one blast, it adds tension.

In D&D, only archers (well, ranged weapon users) really ever worry about ammo. Spellcasters are pretty happy to use cantrips (though I've actually tended to use True Strike with a Light Crossbow on my Wizard since converting to 2024 rules - 1d8+1d6+5 is actually a bit better than 2d10 from a Fire Bolt) and so ranged combat is not really limited.

This is an area I'm a little hesitant to screw around with that much: I think getting rid of damage cantrips, or putting some kind of ammo-like limitation on them, would be getting a little too far into the guts of the game's balance. Cantrips are not as good as a martial character using a weapon, and that's by design (Eldritch Blast, when tricked out with things like Agonizing Blast, comes quite close - but technically it's not going to keep up when magic weapons get involved, not getting the damage bonuses of a +X weapon).

But that's actually kind of great: martial characters are supposed to be better at two things than casters: they're supposed to have better single-target damage (which they don't, really, if you start considering things like Conjure Minor Elementals) and they're supposed to be more sustainable, doing their full damage potential or near it without expending resources.

The thing is, I think that most campaigns (or at least most that I've been in) focus so much on big set-piece combat encounters that this sustainability never really has a chance to shine (and the fact that resting is relatively easy, as we discussed above, means that it's rare that players are really forced into situations that demand sustainability).

Again, in Silent Hill 2, one of the elements of the game I loved was the melee weapon (first a wooden plank and then a steel pipe). Giving the player a melee weapon that would never run out of ammo or require repairs - something that James always has available to him - gives the game's designers the license to take everything else from him: the game never has to worry too much about letting you run out of all of your bullets because you always have that back-up option (an option you're likely to actually prioritize because of the potential for conservation).

I think leaving those cantrips, leaving those martial characters with their powerful weapon attacks, gives you, as the DM, license to hold off on granting the players any recovery items. You can let the players run out of spell slots.

Timing:

Ok, here's our next thing:

In D&D, a lot of spells and other effects (like Rage) last either one minute, ten minutes, an hour, eight hours, or twenty-four hours.

I don't know that this works for us.

One minute is actually fine: the real meaning of a one-minute-duration spell is that it lasts until combat ends. Combat takes place in 6-second rounds, and so a one-minute spell will last 10 rounds in a game where combat rarely goes beyond four or five rounds (for really epic fights).

But the others are trickier: because I've never encountered a DM who actually tracks things minute-by-minute in a dungeon. Functionally, what's the difference between a 10 minute spell and a 1 hour spell? The game doesn't tell you how long it takes to search a room, or how long it takes for you to walk down a corridor.

When in combat, walking speed is typically 30 feet, which is roughly three miles an hour. Can you walk three miles worth of dungeon corridors in the time that a Charm Person spell lasts? Well, probably not, because the dungeon is full of obstacles, traps, and monsters.

I think, then, you need to start thinking about what these durations are meant to mean, much as 1 minute means "one combat encounter."

If we think about it this way, we can propose the following:

10 minutes maybe means "it'll last as long as we're in this room, doing stuff."

Now, this can be a problem, because what is a room? Are we talking about one solitary alcove with nothing but a faded fresco that is like a 10x10 foot square? That seems like it shouldn't take that whole duration. But at the same time, if it's some massive cavern with a giant insect hive in it with various monster-filled mine tunnels catacombing through the walls, that feels like it's maybe too much.

I'll be honest, I don't have a great solution here, but I think that a place to start with is:

1 minute translates to one combat encounter.

10 minutes translates to exploring one fairly large room.

1 hour means exploring a level of the dungeon.

8 hours means exploring an entire sub-dungeon (what in a normal campaign would probably be a whole dungeon).

24 hours means... probably not the whole campaign, but maybe an entire "act" of the campaign.

The key, I think, to communicate to the players, is that we're not saying that "this is the amount of time it takes to do these things." What we're doing is replacing the idea of a time-based duration with more of a "progress-based" duration. A Barbarian's Rage (in 5.5) should be able to help with some kind of jumping puzzle or some challenge that requires lifting heavy things or even making use of Primal Knowledge to do other tricky checks - but it's meant to be there to last that entire challenge, and once it's completed, the rage ends, the resource is expended.

Mage Armor is supposed to basically set a Wizard or Sorcerer up as if they're wearing +1 Studded Leather armor for the day - they invest that spell slot into having halfway decent AC. You give them a good chunk of the dungeon to enjoy it, then.

This, I think, also solves the issue with "long rests" being replaced with recovery items: if it were purely time-based, casting Detect Magic right before noshing on a recovery item would be a pretty strong move, but if a 10-minute effect is only for the room you're in, it might not be so overpowered.

Notably, some spells and effects might need to be revisited: Detect Thoughts can be used in a social encounter (and if we think of 1-minute spells as being "per encounter," that can extend to social ones) but it can also be used to detect hidden enemies, which is more of a "room searching" function, so this might require us to classify it a little differently.

Level:

I think running a game like this is definitely going to work better at low levels. For the most part, I find D&D starts to really hum in its sweet spot in tier 2, but this might be a mode of play that could make tier 1 really interesting: but only if you have full buy-in from your players and are really up-front about wanting to run a survival horror variant of the game.

The genre need not dictate difficulty: Survival Horror games are not inherently harder than other genres, and I think it's a key attitude you need to have when running something like this that the players doing well and even getting lucky is actually fine. The tension in horror is there when the characters are under threat of death: paradoxically, dying in a horror game is a release of that tension. The horror, the real juice of this thing, is if you can get them right up to the edge, like where I was with James Sunderland in that hospital, any minor thing like a mannequin hiding a little too well or a lying figure belching out bile faster than I could dodge could spell the end. And then, maybe even better, drinking that health drink and realizing that, well, I'm still out of bullets.

Out of the Castle, and Into, I Think, More Sci-Fi Territory in RE4

 The Castle, which seems to comprise kind of the second act of Resident Evil 4 (I believe of three,) is my favorite area of the game so far, but has my least favorite boss. Ramon Salazar is a little shit, but when Leon tries to get over with the fight quickly by shooting him multiple times (including in the forehead,) he returns as a giant monster with a massive set of mandibles.

Here are the things that make him an annoying fight:

There's only one very narrow weak point to hit (it only now occurs to me that he might still take damage when hit elsewhere, and I wonder if that would have made the fight easier) that is only open to target extremely briefly before he does a massive and hard-to-dodge attack. Second, he has an instant-kill attack he can do if he gets in melee. This is why I died to him like six or seven times, I think all of my deaths (except maybe one or two) came from this move.

It's a shame, because the Castle is such a very cool part of the game - gothic excess, lots of puzzles, and I've got to be honest, I didn't hate the part where we play as Ashley armed only with a blue lantern to freeze the parasites-in-armor (I know there's a name for them, like Armaradors or something).

Anyway, there's a fair amount of plot-induced losing Ashley, including right after our segment playing as her, and at this point, the escort-mission part of the game seems at least for now on hold. I'm given to understand that the remake worked hard to make her AI (remember when that wasn't such a loaded term? We're not talking LLMs here) less annoying - while she will get grabbed by enemies sometimes, it tends to only happen if you let yourself get swarmed, and she's pretty good at ducking out of the way of your line of fire.

The castle is pretty good, though there's a somewhat less exciting part at the end in which you are thrown underground into the mines below the castle, where Ramon's ancestors kept the source of the Plagas sealed - Ramon's the worst, and unleashed it for Sadler (Saddler?)

Anyway, while Ashley is missing and in the clutches of the cult, we team up with Luis, the former Umbrella scientist trying to make good. It's a brief arc, where Leon gets to have a kind of snarky banter, only for dear Luis to get knifed in the back by Leon's former CO, Krauser.

In the prologue, we're told that Leon was seemingly blackmailed/forced into joining US special forces, and one assumes that Krauser was the one that put him through his hellish training. We have a knife fight with him, which was honestly easy enough that I didn't feel that bad about reloading my save after not finishing one of the Merchant side-quests in the mines and doing the fight again.

Krauser leaves the battle unfinished, and we get a last little moment with Luis. The guy gives us a drug to suppress the progress of the parasite in Leon's body - setting the game's ticking clock back a little (though not yet for Ashley).

Anyway, we go to rescue Ashley from Salazar, but Krauser takes her on ahead while we fight the little (not so little anymore, I guess) monster.

Then, we hop in a speedboat with Ada Wong and head to some kind of island fortress. While I've barely scratched the surface of the island, it feels like a dramatic genre shift. The foes here are armed with more technologically advanced weapons, including one of those boar-mask-wearing brutes who has a freaking machine gun. Up until the point, ranged enemies have tended to have nothing but crossbows. There have been signs of technology throughout, but occasionally you can be lulled into thinking you're a 21st century soldier in a 17th century village. Now, though, a giant oil refinery looms in the distance.

And hey, this is, as I understand it, Resident Evil's classic formula: a facade of supernatural horror behind which lurks sci-fi terrors that are all too modern (even if they're pretty ludicrous, conceptually).

I'm given to understand the game is something of a three-act structure, and this marks the beginning of that third act. In retrospect, I probably would have been more thorough in the Village part if I had known I wasn't going to be able to come back. Currently I'm sitting on a super-valuable crown but don't have all the gems to fit into it. I'm also thinking of selling off some weapons I don't use very much to see if I can max out my upgrades on the ones I do - I hope the rate of money acquisition on the island ramps up (I did get what I assume to be the final Attache Case upgrade).

A Look at Silent Hill: Townfall

 Having recently been introduced to the Silent Hill series, the more psychological/Lynchian horror series compared Resident Evil's action-horror theatrics, via the SH2 remake, I've been curious about the series and other entries within it.

While Silent Hill f released only a... few months ago, I think, they already have the next game in the series announced an apparently coming out this year. Townfall, like f, takes place in a different town, this time a place called St. Amelia, which is a remote fishing town on the east coast of Scotland (there was a little documentary about the studio, Screen Burn, which is based in Glasgow, going out on road trips to real towns to base St. Amelia on, including a shot in-game that perfectly replicates one harbor-side street in a real town).

In the trailer, we're given some obscure hints at the plot: Simon Ordell is told by a woman that he can't stay in "that room" forever, and he resolves to return to St. Amelia to "set things right." He seems to wake up in the water, climbing onto a pier in the town. One thing that's particularly notable about Simon (while the game is from a first-person perspective, we'll evidently see him in cutscenes) is that he has an IV tube in his left hand, a needle sticking into the veins, and a hospital bracelet.

If I may do so, I know this series is all about its big plot twists, and my immediate thought was that Simon might be in a coma - that the exhortation for him to not "stay in this room forever" might have referred to a hospital room. Is he kind of astrally projecting to St. Amelia, then? Just putting this here in case I'm proven right.

The game makes a few changes to the formula: the action is in first person, as mentioned before. There's also a curious change to the classic Silent Hill radio. In this case, you actually have a portable television (for those kids who don't remember life before smart phones, there was a time when you could have a really crappy little TV that you could walk around with that had a tiny screen). One of the game mechanics is that you can tune the CRTV, as they're calling it, and at certain frequencies, you'll be able to detect monsters.

Among the monsters you encounter, we've seen a weird axe-headed creature wandering around. I couldn't tell if it was simply because of the perspective, but this might have been an enemy we see Simon fighting off with a thick bit of wood, though the creature looked mostly like a Lying Figure from SH2 to me (I think it might just be that if the axe-head were straight on it would be hard to see in the brief shots of it). Another monster of some sorts seems to pull its chest open, to reveal a snaking medical tube and needle, the kind used to draw blood (or, you know, to put an IV in).

From the dialogue, Simon sounded American to me, but that might have just been from a small sample size. The other character we hear is definitely British (though English, I think, rather than Scottish).

Anyway, it seems pretty cool.