Was initially worried this was a little redundant after Village and questioned if 4 really needed an update. Ultimately I found this a great time. The combat (once I got a handle on the melee mechanics) is consistently tense and tangible, with the chaotic shifting from crowd control to one-on-one parrying. I loved the almost immersive-sim interactions between enemies causing emergent chaos.

I cared little about the narrative changes as I literally played the PS2 release, so all is a foggy memory, but from what I could recall, I was consistently surprised by moments rearranged, recontextualised. Yes, the island is serviceable compared to the village/castle, but I enjoyed the grungy interiors and the big-boi regenerador sequence. Of all the boss changes, Krauser was a big standout, a metal-gear tier fight.

A few changes I was less happy with (most are hangovers from the recent REmakes): the lack of laser targeting for all weapons, the change from the semi-detached aiming system & less variety of interactive objects u could shoot. RE4 felt so revolutionary as a horror/shooter at the time due to how the gun felt like a tactile tool, taking out doors, knees & plucking weapons from the air. Much of this is still here, but a little stripped down (tho with some new additions, including rampaging farm animals).

Where does Resi go now? Village and R4MAKE have converged, and hopefully they don’t just fall back down into the slump of 5 & 6 (though 5 remake is inevitable lol) Hopefully a complete rebirth like 7 is on the cards. Capcom pls.

This is a fourteen-year-old’s fever dream after glimpsing a poster for fast & furious: no characters, real cars, stakes, narrative, just a visceral piss-colour-graded world tour that could only have emerged from a series building upon itself in isolation without any real-world reference: an automotive dream-world, an underworld to Forza’s sunny utopia.

I yearn for a timeline where Burnout wasn’t abandoned, and for tracks full of character to remain at the core of the arcade racer experience. Despite tech advancements, even Paradise didn’t quite capture the off-kilter energy of Criterion’s peak of Takedown and Revenge.

Charming, crude art direction and ludicrous situations carry this further than expected. The deduction gameplay builds on Obra Dinn in a way that is a little more focused in its structure, progressing linearly through puzzles, so it doesn’t quite suffer from the slight meandering final third of Dinn (that was a little too freeform for its own good).

I do think the more heightened, fantastic scenarios lose their lustre quite quickly, and I did prefer the earlier, more ‘grounded’ puzzles. A mystery needs gaps, intrigue, momentum, and I found most of the later scenes convoluted in a profoundly absurd way, though really funny.

The reliance on discovering words to describe the scenarios also leads to a lot of studying crucial documents to solve logic puzzles, and Obra Dinn’s minimalist focus on studying the scenes (faces, poses, props), without any documents to provide exposition, was felt missing here.