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Something’s wrong with me. No matter how many horror games I play, I just can’t get scared like I used to. Perhaps I’m the problem—maybe a decade of playing horror games pretty much non-stop has irrevocably altered my brain chemistry.
Take Resident Evil Requiem, for example—that just doesn’t make the cut for a horror game in my book. Apart from the first five minutes in the underground cells, there just wasn’t anything that felt particularly scary. In fact, I don’t believe that any horror game that gives me a gun can be scary, except for Amnesia: The Bunker—I genuinely thought that game was going to kill me.
Again, I find myself thinking that there’s something up with my nervous system, because even Hideki Kamiya, director of Resident Evil 2, would disagree with me. He believes that Capcom has become blind to just how scary its recent games have become.
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“I’ve never been a fan of horror. I mean, even from the time I was young, I could never handle it,” Kamiya says in an interview with VGC. “I don’t like horror, and I don’t like scary things. I’m not able to make it through scary movies, and that was even the case back in the day.
“But nowadays, with how photorealistic and high-fidelity video games have gotten, the amount of crazy, horrifying things that people are able to put on the screen is absolutely insane, and I think anybody who’s on the Resident Evil teams at Capcom, at this point, they must all be completely numb to how scary the thing they’re making is.”
Kamiya has previously pitched a cutesy Resident Evil game, complete with Leon fishing in the countryside, foraging for wild veggies, baking bread, and walking his dog. It’s either that or Capcom adding a “not scary mode” for its games, “where the zombies get all cute, the blood splatters turn into cherry blossom petals, the music becomes this upbeat, feel-good kind of tune, and you can just purely enjoy the puzzles and battles in a fun mood.”
I do find it quite difficult pitching Resident Evil and others like it to my friends who won’t touch horror games with a barge pole. It does seem a shame that these fantastic stories and characters are locked behind the requirement of a broken amygdala.
I wanted to experience that myself as a player, but the game was way too scary, and I couldn’t.
Hideki Kamiya
“Just recently this year we had Resident Evil Requiem and the big return of Leon Kennedy, and he went back to Raccoon City, and he’s reliving all of those memories and all of those experiences,” Kamiya says. “As somebody who directed that original game, Resident Evil 2, I was curious to know how that panned out for him. I wanted to experience that myself as a player, but the game was way too scary, and I couldn’t.”
Now that’s a shame. Maybe Capcom has gone awry if even the director of one of, if not the, most iconic Resident Evil games is barred from accessing its recent games. “I legitimately wished it would include some kind of non-horror mode for people like me,” Kamiya adds. “I talk to folks who are on the Resident Evil teams at Capcom just privately, and I tell them that their games are way too scary, and they’re like, ‘what, come on, they’re not that scary’. They seriously seem to have no awareness of how scary the things they make actually are, so I really hope they address that at some point.”
While I do think adding a softer mode that could make the games accessible to more people may be fun, like The Dark Pictures Anthology’s cinematic mode, I don’t want Capcom to pull its horror punches. I actually want Capcom to go to the other extreme and experiment with more Resident Evil 7-likes which are suffocatingly terrifying. But maybe there’s something wrong with me.
