Well, coming back to it after my first several unsuccessful attempts seemed to do the trick. RE4 begins, famously, with an entire village coming after you, and you have to just basically run and evade as best you can, maybe taking out a villager here and there to make an opening, until the church bells ring and everyone suddenly becomes chill and leaves you alone.
Given my experiences with the Silent Hill 2 remake, I assumed I was on a somewhat linear path and would never return here, but after struggling to figure out how to get into a locked desk and up a wall into a high window in an otherwise-locked-off building, I realized that this was going to be a bit different: online, I saw the game described as something of a Metroidvania.
Tonally, it's funny: the game is certainly scary in a kind of physical threat sense, and I know that the body horror gets cranked up to 11 as the truth of what's going on here is revealed, but truly, coming off of SH2, this is far, far more like an action movie.
Following my first foray further into the chaos, I discovered a tied up man named Luis, the first friendly NPC since the doomed Spanish police officers who brought me here. Before we can even get him untied, Leon is thrown into a wall by a big guy in a priestly get-up and then injected with some horrific parasite.
Waking up, there's a quick section to help you hone your knife skills (I seemed to do it all right, getting a good parry off and taking the other two enemies in this area with stealth kills). Then, we finally meet the Merchant, and have something to spend all the money we've been collecting.
This felt like a reasonable stopping point, but I felt the drive to go and do a second of the Merchant's quests, taking out three rats in the previous small area. These evidently grant Spinels, which are traded to the Merchant for unique items.
It seems that scrounging valuables will be useful, as the guy can sell us ammo and even upgrade our weapons - I evoked Troy Barnes here and got a new rifle and upgraded the durability of my knives (which I was going through like crazy - I'm hoping/assuming this applies to all my knives and not just a single one, which would seem kind of pointless as an expense).
The key is that after that big village fight, the other combat encounters I've had have been far more reasonable, rarely more than like five foes to face. I'm sure that this ramps up over the course of the game.
The story is playing pretty coy: Leon has a woman in the chair back at "HQ" wherever that is, and even after he's captured they don't take his communication equipment. I know from pop culture osmosis that Leon's there to rescue the president's daughter, and that a good chunk of the game is a big escort mission, but so far his actual goals are left for us to wait for more exposition.
Anyway, getting past that first hump, I can start to feel the appeal of the game's core gameplay loop.
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