2) A Consistent Sense Of Variety
Before the harsh words come full blast, I fully realize that there is an ongoing backlash against Resident Evil 4 for somehow marking the end of survival horror because it had the gall to give you a fighting chance against your enemies with a concise and responsive control system. While the focus on ridiculous action-packed sequences was brought to the forefront for RE4, it’s not the gameplay we’re here to pilfer for our perfect survival horror title. Rather, it’s the sheer amount of variety packed into the game that always kept players on their toes while still delivering a consistently creepy experience.
Many recent survival horror titles tend to stick to one or two environments, forcing players to find their way through dilapidated buildings and towns or, more commonly, decrepit spaceships that have gone mysteriously silent. While spaces like the USG Ishimura from Dead Space and the Sevastopol Station from Alien: Isolation will always hold a place in my heart for being genuinely terrifying, they’re missing the feeling that anything could happen at any moment. Sure, a Necromorph could hop out of a vent or the Xenomorph could do the same, but so what? It stops being scary after a short time.
Yet in Resident Evil 4, you went from taking on a murderous village to fighting a giant fish with harpoons, getting chased through sewers by man-sized invisible bugs, getting impaled by grotesque (and still creepy) monsters with invisible vulnerable points or being chased by a huge statue that knocks down an entire building as it lunges after you. While much of this action was indeed goofy and campy, it kept players wondering what could happen next, never letting them get completely comfortable in one place for too long.
