Another update in Leon's terrible night in Raccoon City:
After solving the Goddess Statue puzzle ("puzzle") the next real challenge is to fix the electrical wiring in the jail in the basement (fitting that a police headquarters would have a holding facility. I have, luckily, never been inside of a real police station. Is it normal to have them in basements?) The cells are all filled with zombies, and I think there's a reasonable strategy to try to take them down while they're in their cells, because when the power goes back on, they all come out.
But I'm getting ahead of myself.
Our foray into the basement is actually a bit short. However, it also has the first of what I imagine are a pretty small number of boss fights - a horribly mutated person with a giant eyeball growing out of his distended shoulder comes after us. Given how many eyes I shot or stabbed in RE4, I knew to focus my fire on this. Like zombies, the key was to get some distance, fire, and move before he could catch up with me.
After this, we emerge into the parking garage, off of which there are places like the shooting range, jail, a morgue, and a kennel, which gives us our first freaking zombie dogs.
We also meet Ada Wong, who in this game is introduced as an FBI agent, even though I know we find out later she's nothing of the sort.
Once we get the power running again, we can head up the stairs and back into the east wing of the RCPD, and with some key items we find there, we can open up a bit more of the building, finally putting out the fire set by the crashed helicopter.
However, doing so introduces us to Mr. X.
I'd already seen his introduction in online videos, but it's a fantastically understated intro: you go through a door to find the tail of the helicopter blocking your way. Then, helpfully, a massive ogre of a super-zombie in a trenchcoat and hat (though literally the first time I saw him I blasted him in the head with a shotgun, which removed the hat and netted me an achievement - and he has been hatless since).
Until this point, the game has been about slow, careful traversal of the RCPD. There are moments where it's best to run from the zombies, but they don't follow for very long.
Mr. X will, I think, continue hunting you down until you open up significant distance from him, and even then, he continues to roam the building. Even the main hall, our safe home base (oh, except when Martin Branagh turns into a zombie, which we all knew was coming) is fair game for Mr. X to chase you. He hits hard, but is overall pretty simple - he just walks quickly toward you, and you can stagger him with a couple shots (a headshot seems to do nicely) and run past him.
Still, it's good that we spend the first couple hours of the game creating a mental map of the RCPD, because that slow and careful exploration goes out the window when Mr. X is on our tail.
Getting the final part we need to restore power to the jail, we get into the cell of the journalist who was trying to expose Umbrella (before his skull was crushed by Mr. X - actually before we have that first proper meeting) and get the keycard off of his body, along with a recording of his attempt to get information out of an Umbrella scientist. Of course, when the cells all open, we not only have like a dozen zombies, but look who's here! Mr. X comes to follow as well!
Getting past them is a bit tough (I've had a lot of stockpiled healing items, so I kind of just brute-forced it after taking a lot of attacks from zombies) but once you do, Ada shows up and rams Mr. X with a SWAT van, which she then detonates with some explosives.
I'm assuming Mr. X is still around, but it gives you the opportunity to leave.
There were a handful of rooms I wasn't able to explore in the RCPD, and I wonder if these are just for Claire's story. I never got the Heart key, though I was able to open all the Spade, Club, and Diamond doors.
While the game is very scary, I think I've only actually died once (maybe twice?) And I actually think that this is appropriate: again, horror lives in tension, and even if it's a negative outcome, dying releases some of that tension. Thus, the difficulty of the game feels less about fending off zombies (and other, nastier things) but more about figuring out where to go next and what to do.
The combat in RE4 is for sure more satisfying, but I think you could make a very solid argument that this is fine, because RE2 is trying to do something very different. Fittingly for a game from 1998, RE2 feels old-school.
I really like that the layout of the RCPD is not totally implausible but also a little absurd. And I like the way that the game uses the space. Our familiarity with its layout is one of the tools we develop in our arsenal.
Now, of course, I'm heading to the underground labs in the sewers. I wonder if this will have a similar feeling of let-down to RE4's move to the island after the excellence of the Village and Castle.
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