Resident Evil 4 has never felt so influential

polygon.com:

In 1996, the original Resident Evil arrived on PlayStation — tank controls, fixed camera angles, campy one-liners, and all. It was a stark repudiation of game design modes, deemphasizing action and platforming in favor of puzzles, scarcity, and jump scares. Although it wasn’t the first to do so (it had several progenitors), it was certainly the most popular. But even then, it was clear that the developers at Capcom were toying with ideas too ambitious for the hardware of the time to express. They refined their survival-horror philosophy over the next nine years, updating a control scheme here, softening a jagged pixel there, until 2005, when they released Resident Evil 4 on Nintendo GameCube. And just last week, Capcom opened a window back to that moment, when the series, and video games as a whole, irrevocably changed.

I imagine that the prospect of remaking Resident Evil 4 gave Capcom pause. As opposed to the first three numbered games in the series, which featured clunky control schemes and many counterintuitive puzzles before their remakes (which range from phenomenal to aggressively fine), Resident Evil 4 did not need an update. It’s available on most modern platforms, it controls better than many new releases, and, aside from an uneven third act, its pacing is immaculate. That its remake manages to improve on many aspects that didn’t really need improving is its crowning achievement. (That third act is still weak, though.)

Playing through Capcom’s reinterpretation today, it’s easy to take its fluid gameplay loop for granted: Exploring, scavenging, crafting, item management, and third-person combat all feed gracefully into one another along the course of the game, which encourages some backtracking, but it is