Retrogaming is an important trend. Old masterpieces were remastered (Bioshock, Street Fighter, Assassin's Creed and many more), new but old-looking games were published (Terraria, Shovel Knight) and companies like Sony and Nintendo relaunched their consoles from the 80s and 90s in “mini” or “classic” versions,  with preloaded games and HMDI connection. Resident Evil 2, the survival horror masterpiece of 1998?, was in the missing list of Sony’s PlayStation Classic. Its comeback was delayed only to January when Capcom launched a “remake” edition, updated for current-gen consoles and Steam. 

Resident Evil 2 is a masterpiece from a naive era when 3D games were a novelty. It obviously lacks that multitude in details that today we expect from a digital environment. More than an array of rooms and corridors and stairs and various other spaces, Racoon Police Station, the building where RE 2 takes place, looks like a “minecrafted” space where lots of elements are left to player’s imagination. This was new and exciting in 1998, but there’s little scaring in it. It’s all in plain sight, a deadly space where clumsy zombie wander. 

Remake presents itself as a claustrophobic and thrilling compromise between the horror survival feeling of the original game and the first person approach of later instalments. Capcom recreated Racoon Police Station from scratch, rebuilding over the ingenious map of 20 years ago a labyrinth of anxiety and total darkness, that reveals only slices of details illuminated by the protagonist’s torch. Not scaring as the recent Resident Evil 7, maybe, but still scaring.

Capcom redesigned the interiors of Racoon Police Station and orchestrated a new direction of all the key scenes fully exploiting the computational power of current-gen consoles. There still are some well-illuminated halls and spaces where, but the action takes place in dark corridors and claustrophobic rooms, in a succession that emphasizes every shadow, every noise, every piece of the soundtrack. Resident Evil 2 Remake makes details scaring, and long gone are the original spaces, which were just plain 3D parallelepipeds filled with enigmas to solve and hordes of walking corpses to eliminate. More than a plain remake, this is a complete rethinking of the original game and, with it, of a genre itself, and Capcom was clever in understanding that not in zombies, but in dark and apparently empty spaces the true horror lurks.