What to play before the Resident Evil 4 remake

destructoid.com:

The remake of Resident Evil 4 is nearly here, and if you’re like me, the release of a new entry in a storied franchise always gives you the urge to seek out context. Sure, you could just play Resident Evil 4—it’ll probably stand on its own just fine—but why not dig into some earlier series entries to gain a fuller appreciation of what Resident Evil 4 represents?

Of course, nobody expects you to burn through every Resident Evil game over the next couple of days. Frankly, most of them won’t do very much in relation to RE4 (it is, oddly, one of the more self-contained adventures in the Resident Evil franchise). But if you want to fully understand where RE4 stands, both in the Resident Evil universe and in our own, there are a few titles you should at least take a look at.

Keep in mind here that I haven’t played the remake of Resident Evil 4 yet. This is not an expert opinion as much as it is an outline of games that you should play to see where Resident Evil and Leon Kennedy have been lately.

There are two games that are decidedly necessary in order to fully “get” any remake of Resident Evil 4. Those games are, of course, the 2019 remake of Resident Evil 2 and the original Resident Evil 4, released in 2005 and rereleased seemingly every day for the last eighteen years.

I don’t think I need to explain why you ought to play these games. Resident Evil 2 tells the story of Leon Kennedy’s first zombie-bashing adventure, and it also establishes a baseline design language for the REmake series. You can probably skip the Claire Redfield route for now, since Claire is off toiling in Code Veronica land around the time of RE4, but if you’ve never played it, you should get around to that route eventually. For now, you can just take a