This Week In Retro: Resident Evil Revelations 2

February 24, 2015: More fun than a moist barrel of fucks

by Diamond Feit

Everyone loves a good fright, right? Whether riding a rollercoaster, sharing ghost stories, or watching a horror movie, I think we all enjoy testing the limits of our comfort zones from time to time. The trick lies in bending but not breaking our tolerance for terror and we each have our own personal boundaries. I for one lack the confidence to jump out of an airplane while other people do that for a living.

Infusing a video game with fear has long proved a popular if precarious prospect for developers, since both they and the players can never completely agree on what's scary. The interactive nature of the medium complicates the matter even further for like comedy, horror relies on perfect timing. You could design and animate the most hideous monster known to mankind but if the player doesn't look in the right direction when it pops out of its den, the moment may fall flat.

Resident Evil, Capcom's flagship horror franchise, has made scaring players its bread and butter since 1996. The first game's combination of moaning zombies, tight corridors, and maddening tension petrified me as a teenager to such an extent that I couldn't bear to play it alone—only in the company of my friends. Yet that didn't stop me from obsessing over every nook and cranny of the Spencer Mansion for months, and today I consider the series one of my favorites across all mediums.

Of course, as Resident Evil grew from a single game into a multimedia franchise, it necessarily changed its tune with each new entry. Better hardware afforded the developers more enemies on screen as higher sales increased Capcom's expectations for each new release. The unprecedented success of Resident Evil 4 triggered a major sea change, convincing Capcom to wager heavily on explosive action setpieces and multiplayer modes for parts 5 and 6. It paid off, but the shift in tone meant that Resident Evil no longer qualified as "survival horror" anymore.

At the risk of sanding down the brand's edges and rendering it indistinguishable from a litany of other big-budget shooters, Capcom decided to re-establish Resident Evil as frightening. In 2012, the company released Resident Evil Revelations for the Nintendo 3DS, a portable spinoff of the series that trapped players inside a crippled cruise ship. While still including plenty of guns to collect and monsters to kill, Revelations offered an alternative to the main series' bombastic excesses. The positive reception and retail success of this spinoff—especially once a 2013 HD remaster brought the game to even more platforms—warranted a sequel.

10 years ago this week, Capcom sought to scare us into buying Resident Evil Revelations 2, a game so adamant about promoting fear as a concept that they made it a central pillar of the villain's motivations.

Just as Revelations 1 paired classic Resident Evil leads Jill Valentine and Chris Redfield with new partners, Revelations 2 calls upon some familiar faces from games past. Claire Redfield, star of both Resident Evil 2 and Code Veronica, gets kidnapped and taken to a remote island hidden in the Baltic Sea. Locked inside a prison cell, Claire escapes with the help of Moira Burton, the oldest daughter of Barry Burton from Resident Evil 1. Wearing strange bracelets and hearing ominous threats from an unseen mastermind called The Overseer, the two women fight to survive in the hopes that the authorities might eventually track them down.

Barry Burton ends up responding to their distress call himself, although he arrives long after Claire and Moira flee further inland. Barry instead discovers a young orphan named Natalia seemingly on her own; he asks her to wait in his boat but she rightfully argues that she's no safer sitting by herself than if she follows Barry on his mission. Unable to argue with a child, Barry agrees to take her along into a rusted-out prison, the kind of place that if you even look at it you should consider getting a tetanus shot.

The story of Revelations 2 unfolds as players take turns controlling each team of heroes across four Episodes, with Claire and Moira acting as the vanguard and Barry and Natalia bringing up the rear. Not only does this make economical sense as it allows the developers to reuse the same general layouts and art assets for both campaigns, but it helps make the island feel like a contiguous space rather than an abstract string of locations. Earlier games in the series made great use of this same technique, sending players back through familiar locations that they had already managed to clear only to encounter new threats.

With our protagonists always acting in tandem—just like Resident Evil 5 and 6—Revelations 2 supports single or cooperative play with a twist. In those aforementioned adventures, both characters run into each scenario loaded for war as they shoot, stab, or detonate hordes of infected fiends together. This time around, only experienced killers Claire and Barry have access to firearms; Moira wants nothing to do with guns and Natalia is far too young to comprehend basic trigger discipline. Instead, they fulfill a supporting role as Moira juggles a flashlight and crowbar while Natalia uses a mysterious sixth sense to detect enemies before they appear.

Given their disparate backgrounds, the two sets of characters each have their own dynamic. Claire and Moira have a sisterly back-and-forth with the zombie-savvy Claire keeping her cool and Moira freaking out in the face of non-stop danger. Barry assumes a parental role as he watches over Natalia and tries to get her to share any information about the island. Natalia in turn tries to lead Barry back through the places where she once met Claire and Moira, all while coming to terms with her abilities and her past.

Fear plays a huge part in Revelations 2, both from a metatextual and textual standpoint. Claire and Moira run into fellow survivors roaming the island, all wearing the same high-tech bracelets. The Overseer maintains contact with these stragglers through cameras and loudspeakers, telling them she has infected them all with a potent virus that responds to fear. The women witness the effects firsthand when a panicked man mutates into a beast and runs rampant. This in turn makes Claire and Moira afraid as to what might happen to them as they wonder why The Overseer would even engage in such a horrible experiment.

Revelations 2 likewise aims to keep players as anxious as possible as they explore the island and hunt down The Overseer. The environments feel ripped from a Silent Hill game as every location looks long abandoned save for trails of blood and patches of fresh viscera. Revelations' monsters also invoke a stronger sense of body horror this time around, ditching the aquatic adversaries of the previous game for creatures with metal implements fused into their bodies. Based on their facial expressions—the ones who have faces—it looks uncomfortable.

As a single-player experience Revelations 2 has you swap between characters with the push of a button, although the computer will automatically steer your partner along behind you and even attack if threatened. Still, the AI won't handle itself as well as another human would, which means when surrounded you'll likely have to hop back and forth to keep both protagonists alive.

Certain sequences split the teams apart and make them work separately, forcing one to unlatch doors or close valves to allow the other person to catch up. Naturally, things get messy whenever Moira or Natalia runs into any creatures without Claire or Barry there to help them which makes the game all the more frightening; I always felt on edge whenever my supporting member had to deal with even a single foe.

Revelations 2 ties all this together with allusions to Franz Kafka of all people, as scattered journal entries, Episode titles, and even loading screens drop references to the author's work. Having not read him myself I don't know if that's thematically appropriate at all, though I do know his most famous story has a man turn into a bug and that's certainly on target for Resident Evil. Either way, I always got a chuckle whenever I spotted his name in between shooting misshapen monstrosities. Let Revelations 2 remind us all that you cannot control your legacy after you're gone.

As a member of the gaming press at the time, I got to preview Revelations 2 before launch and hear directly from Capcom representatives about how this new game would make the series scary again. The first Episode certainly made a strong impression on me with its rotting architecture and deformities walking the halls. The prison even has crude automatons serving as security drones; once I turned on the power to open a locked device, they sprung to life and started patrolling while whirling their razor-sharp blades.

Another thing that made an impression was the game's surprisingly playful script. From the very start, the Resident Evil series has had a reputation for awkward dialogue clunkily delivered to the point that it continues to draw unintentional laughter even today. Revelations 2 manages to wink at the games' legacy by having its characters acknowledge past exchanges. When Claire nearly gets crushed in an industrial press, she says "I was almost a Claire sandwich" which makes Moira groan; as Barry's daughter she surely heard about his jokey remarks to Jill many times growing up.

Moira's status as a newcomer to these nightmares also affords Revelations 2 an opportunity to take a step back and recognize the absurdities we as players take for granted. She's understandably repulsed by what she sees and doesn't hesitate to speak her mind, often lacing her comments with colorfully-crafted profanity. I credit actor Marcella Lentz-Pope for delivering lines like "That bitch stuck a needle in me?" and "Irony sure is a dick" with perfect candor; were I in Moira's position, I'd likely curse just as much.

I don't know that Revelations 2 succeeds in making Resident Evil "scary again" in so much that it serves up different kinds of frights than the likes seen in the big-budget Resident Evil games of that era. A smaller scope restricting the story to a single island helps ground the experience more than Resident Evil 5 or 6. Fewer enemies also means that each encounter has a larger impact; the more time you spend mowing down brainless zombies, the less each corpse matters.

Unlike the previous game, Capcom released Revelations 2 episodically at first before packaging the complete game for retail shelves; players pass through each Episode twice with different teams but once they move on, they never revisit past spaces. I find the best survival horror games keep players in one place to the point that it feels real but that can't happen when a new Episode means a new locale.

Revisiting Revelations 2 a decade later, I wish Capcom had kept this side-series going. In recent years the company has bet big on turning each Resident Evil release into an event, whether through remaking old games with modern graphics or by creating an all-new blockbuster. Yet a shorter, cheaper title—something I can pick on a whim and complete one Episode at a time—holds a lot of appeal for me.

If nothing else, I want Capcom to give Moira Burton another chance at the spotlight. In a franchise full of grizzled cops, international agents, and mercenaries for hire, I appreciate a crowbar-wielding Millennial with a pixie cut who takes no shit from anyone.

Writer/podcaster/performer Diamond Feit lives in Osaka, Japan but xer work and opinions exist across the internet.