The videogame industry is dependent on sequels. They’re a more or less guaranteed source of income, a way to re-use expensive engines and assets, and they’re welcomed by fans and (most) critics alike. But one thing always presents a problem. Atmosphere. The thrill of the first time is almost impossible to replicate, and most sequels simply dilute what was there, turning well-remembered but isolated moments into series trademarks and nudge-nudge references. But for every rule there are exceptions. And then there’s Resident Evil 2.

Resident Evil laid the template for ‘survival horror’ by punctuating its claustrophobic setting with moments of attritional combat: you were always in small rooms and tight corridors, fighting one or two (very occasionally three) enemies. Resident Evil 2 takes this idea and expands it into a city, concentrating on the ‘survival’ part
of the equation in terms of both pacing and scale. Where the original delayed its first zombie encounter
for a few rooms, and gradually introduced foes via a drip-feed, Resident Evil 2 begins with your car crashing in a street full of zombies, forcing you to run for sanctuary, bumping into fellow humans only for them to be overwhelmed by the ever-present and encroaching mass.

In these first ten minutes zombies surround you, burst windows, break through gates and relentlessly shamble forward in groups you just don’t have the ammunition to take down. The solitary groaners have become a more aggressive and numerous horde that doesn’t let the little scenery details get in the way. It’s all scripted, of course, and Resident Evil 2 is as culpable as any other entry in the series for letting you escape through doors and down stairs, but the escape that begins the game allows no time for reflecting on the linearity of your route – there’s simply a relief that there’s somewhere, anywhere, you’re being funnelled through and away from the immediate threat.



Throughout, this illusion of an infested city is maintained, whether through instant shocks or finding desperate notes from long-dead groups trying to survive. Outside, police vehicles blockade the streets, overturned cars burn, and temporary barriers are everywhere – relics of desperate, failed attempts to stop the undead’s progress. When inside and passing through a previously safe corridor, hands will suddenly burst through the boarded windows and try to drag you outside. Later, you’ll be able to close shutters over the same windows, but even they only slow down the tide and are eventually broken through: a cutaway shows zombies pouring in through the windows, sliding over shards of glass and on to the floor. It all adds up to a pervasive sense of the environment, rather than the player, being under siege. At another point, you find a cocky reporter who insists on staying locked in the cells for his own safety – shortly after you’ve moved on, another cutaway partially shows a monster with a grotesquely huge eye (and gloriously squishy sound effects) in his cell, forcing a tailed polyp down his throat. You run back to the cell, the reporter croaks out a few words and is then split in two by a monster bursting straight out of Alien. The game uses these cuts selectively and brilliantly, always reminding you that enemies are encroaching, that the rooms you’ve ‘cleared’ are no longer clear, that you are pitting your finite resources against an infinite foe.

They also pace your movements throughout the game’s world: while RE2 is as much about exploration as its predecessor, here it feels less like clicking pieces into a puzzle than desperately searching for an escape route. The structure of Resident Evil 2 is labyrinthine, and although Capcom’s tools are the same as ever (multiple-part locks and key sets being particular favourites), any backtracking is well disguised by rooms being refreshed with new foes, new set-pieces and – most of all – the temptation of new fragments from ongoing stories. The greatest example of this, and a replay concept that few games have matched, is the ‘B’ scenario: when you complete the game as either Claire or Leon, you then play through the game as the other character taking the other, complementary route. You crisscross at moments you’ve already seen from one side, and deal with situations that were in the background the first time around.



The changes aren’t cosmetic: a high-octane helicopter crash immediately frames your approach to the police station (you come across the smouldering wreckage much later in the ‘A’ scenario), and you’ll have to zig-zag across a zombie-filled court, fight clouds of crows, and take on a licker with a handgun in the first few rooms. But Capcom is always a benevolent tease, and quickly rewards you with a grenade launcher. You’ll need it, though, for Mr X. This silent figure, a hint of the original’s unfinished tyrant beneath his trenchcoat, pursues you throughout the ‘B’ scenario with relentless purpose. After completing one puzzle, he bursts through the wall inches from you, scattering bricks and mortar across the room. If you escape, he simply bursts back through the same wall, his huge frame blocking the narrow corridor between you and the door. Another time, you reach the end of a metal walkway and glance at a security camera, only to see him following the same one-way path. You can knock him out, but it’s only temporary. It’s notable how much of the series since RE2 has borrowed from its replay innovations and the ‘B’ scenarios: RE3’s Nemesis is clearly an extension of Mr X, the ‘Fourth Survivor’ mode has inspired similar bonus modes in every subsequent sequel, and RE4’s Ashley dynamic is prefigured in the short sections where you guard or control Sherry.

Quite apart from its importance to the series mechanically, however, is RE2’s decaying atmosphere, which even the superlative RE4 struggles to match. What a sense of place it has: every prerendered backdrop made to work, every object implying something. The first time you enter the corrupt police chief’s office, the camera intently focuses on the player, framed by the large wooden door behind and flanked by two sets of shelves – one topped by a stuffed lemur, the other jammed with GCSE formaldehyde jars of indeterminate origin. Stepping forward to the sound of your own footsteps, the rich mahogany fittings and red carpet lead to a desk bearing the police chief’s badge of office – a woman in a white dress, the mayor’s daughter, lays across it with a bullet wound through her stomach. The chief is there: she’s going to turn into a zombie, he explains, unless he shoots her through the head or decapitates her. “And to think,” he says, the camera turning to his mounted animals, “taxidermy used to be my hobby…”