Before diving into our Resident Evil 2 Safe Room episode, be sure to listen to this month’s edition of the indie horror showcase Horror Bytes!
Without an ounce of hyperbole, playing Resident Evil 2 was a life-changing experience for me.
Despite coming to Capcom’s revered sequel far too late, Resident Evil 2 gave me my first taste of what M-rated games had in store for me. By this point in my adolescents, I had been covertly watching horror films (secretly gifted by my grandparents) in my living room until the wee hours of the morning.
Night of the Living Dead, The Fly, and The Thing were trauma-inducing but formative films that I became fascinated by, much to my parent’s dismay. But as far as games went at this time, my horror gaming experiences were relatively tame. I ravenously consumed classics such as Zombies Ate My Neighbors and Doom, and despite their timelessness, these games never captured the level of dread I felt during those harrowing midnight viewings.
All of that changed with Resident Evil 2. A rare occurrence of my parents throwing caution to the wind and gifting me a Playstation with a Greatest Hits edition of Resi 2. From the opening moments, the game presents itself in a way that previously only films had.
A fiery introduction to a city besieged by a zombie apocalypse immediately reminded me of my countless viewings of Romero’s trilogy. But it wasn’t just Resident Evil 2′s bombastic opening but its blending of resource management, hellish monster design, and the corporate conspiracy encapsulating it all that made Resident Evil 2 feel distinctly unique.
Dare I say special?
Among these things, I wouldn’t be able to appreciate the game’s approach to a “bigger and better” sequel mentality until a few years later, when I’d go back and play the original.
Naturally, when Neil and I began the podcast, Resident Evil 2 was at the top of our collective wishlist of games to discuss at some point (Resident Evil 2, Safe Room? Had to be didn’t it?). And given the inaccessibility of the original game, Capcom’s 2019 Resident Evil 2 remake was the natural version for us to discuss.
So for this week’s episode, Neil and I recruited fellow Bloody FM member Rob Coakley of Hometown Ghost Stories to unpack what makes the Resident Evil 2 remake the blueprint for remakes and how it manages to retain the stoic legacy of one of survival horrors’ greats sequels. –Jay Krieger
Safe Room is a weekly horror video game discussion podcast with new episodes every Monday on
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