yawningbabble
Resident Evil 4 2011
Log Status
Completed
Playing
Backlog
Wishlist
Rating
Time Played
--
Platforms Played
“All we know is that there are dead feelings, dead ideas, and cold beliefs, and there are hot and live ones; and when one grows hot and alive within us, everything has to re-crystallize about it.” – William James
Perhaps even more than any game in its sister series, Devil May Cry, Resi 4 is a game about rocking and getting rocked, not an experience to trepidatiously wade into, but a maelstrom to submit to. It baptismally dips players’ cognitions into the absurd logic of holy water, some substance with spiritual and esoteric profundity in excess of its unblessed counterpart, alleging that the player will leave this encounter forever changed. It is a game about dying and being reborn, as so many video games or pieces of zombie media tend to be, but this thematic play is constantly tensing and loosening across and between multiple planes of narrative, aesthetic, and game design. The resultant polyphony is breathy and wavy (and libidinal), and it effectively provokes players to cathect with a new mode of ludic orientation. A new-for-the-franchise over-the-shoulder camera is a heavy burden – I honestly can’t even believe what the development team was able to accomplish with it here – which the game makes light through an obsessively choreographed dance of virtual exploration and conflict as the sound flits between frigid ambience, propulsive bouts of percussive tumult, and chittering sound collages. Ashley’s shrill shriek ceases to irk, instead nestling itself into a surreal soundscape that demands a freakish sirenic call to counter the stoned reverie I inevitably drift into every time I pick this one up. The murky waves threaten and they beckon, blissfully cradling players who rock in the crook of this game’s ever-swelling dread.
The zombie horde as a sort of formal wave became a trope routinely reuttered without much consideration for the actual mechanics of such a design and its resultant production of affect. What does a wave do if not rock, throw one off balance, destabilize? When the horde crashes against Leon, it’s sloppy and frantic, inducing a state of panic that Resi players have been conditioned to crave. Alternatively, with mechanical mastery players may effectively redirect those very same waves, repelling them back away from Leon with explosive force. The birdectional design of these waves render the gameplay loop a sort of mood swing, masterfully toying with emotions to induce adoration in the vulnerable player. It is both a horror game and a comfort game. It’s not just that when one adapts well or poorly they are respectively rewarded or punished. Rather, potentially more intrinsically, the scramble to stabilize in the wake of a wave’s knocking against Leon, the getting rocked, produces a pleasure that motivates proficiency, the rocking. Then as one begins to feel too safe, too on top of their game, the game presents yet another twist to dizzy them and restart the process. The player’s brain becomes a sort of briefcase which feels deviously good to optimize for the sake of efficiency, but which will inevitably jostle into a state of disarray with regular addition and depletion – a Tetris grid forever in flux, repeatedly begging the question, doesn’t that feel good?
This oscillatory ludic project (evidently successful, at industrial scale) is one of reorientation, not just to present players with a new perspective but to convince them of its incontrovertible dominance. Resi 4 trades the spectral figure skater of a camera in games like the first two Max Payne titles in favor of something more visceral and lumbering. Leon can’t balletically twirl around and amid onscreen projectiles, Resi at this point is still invested in at least partially tanky design. The camera and by extension the player inhabit the gamic space in a heavily embodied way, as Leon’s physical frame fills so much of the compositional frame. This grounded approach sounds laborious but it is precisely the weight of that soil which affords the figurative sprout, ecstatic spurts of growth within and beyond heavy circumstance. All of a sudden, in spite or because of that grounding, the game feels unbelievably light, silly, and fun as Leon spin-kicks people in the face, shoots dynamite out of the air, or stops to stab some fish in the water. In this way, the design speaks for itself, justifying its very nature as a work discontent with simply establishing an entirely new gamic grammar, though it certainly accomplishes that much. It, effectively in the same movement, imaginatively fucks with it, continually redefining the scale of its ambition and, consequently, expanding our own understandings of what is possible when a game balances both clarity of mechanical vision and a willingness to experiment. Indulging an amusement park-esque abandon, Resi 4 drops any pretense of believability or realism in its level design, allowing it the space to stretch mechanical premises to their limits. Now we’re assailed by fire-spewing totems, now we’re riding a rickety minecart, now we’re running from a giant mechanical statue. The game is so creatively dense as to often seem an endless pool of ideas that don’t just help with variety and pacing, but properly expand upon a new ludic framework that would have sufficed just fine on its own without these constant manipulations to, and variations on, its base formula. It feels impossibly stuffed to the brim and it just fucking rocks.
So, yeah, I’ve been converted. This is a fantastic game that I’ve had my reservations about in the past but, ultimately, how do you play this and do anything but let your jaw slack in awe? By like the third time I’m greeted to a safe room by that pillowy, brain-tickling ambient piece I’m already a drooling bundle of pleasure receptors and basically nothing else. I’m buyin anything you’re sellin. I feel stupid and I feel small in the face of something that can play me like this. It makes me feel like a single-celled organism. I’m not trying to gas up an already well-established classic with hyperbolic hagiography – it’s not an entirely pleasant experience. The game’s tone is decidedly discordant in ways that tickle me and make me feel like it’s identified some grand metaphysical truth (the brisk and blunt textual narration can come across as so brusquely utilitarian that it reads as both funny and sinisterly primordial: “There’s a faint unpleasant odor coming from beyond this door; smells like garbage.”), but it also mushes my brain into goo. The atmosphere of this game is less one of horror or comedy but pervasive ambiguity, one in which dialectics of sacred/profane and delicate meticulousness/rash audacity continuously slosh together in a cultish stew but never really resolve or cohere. The color palette is muted but the game’s visuals are still, generally, highly readable. Meanwhile, the vast bulk of its script is irreverently loud and contagiously flippant, seemingly refusing to be read. In its most iconically funny moments, the butt of the joke is not usually any one character but rather, surprisingly often, the players themselves for having been subjected to it. There’s a deep ambivalence to the story’s being read as a text with anything to really say, and that leaves us with a whole bunch of significatory gestures that come across deliberately hostile to critical analysis. Just laugh it off and keep suplexing dudes. Even as I catch glimpses of something luminous, I’m still scared of drowning in the inky black, ever teetering on the edge of thoughtlessness.
So too, though, is there deep pleasure to be plumbed as I wobble on the precipice of that always looming void. Yeah, there’s a lot of arcade-y fun baked into this, but I think that mode of game design brings along with it an implicit portent. You will feel control and you will stop thinking and you will lose control and it will all feel good. That this sort of zombification recursively refracts across and through the game’s viral narrative, one about the potential obliteration of autonomy in the wake of physiological and religious pathogens, is what really, from my vantage, makes this game successful as a work of horror. Though the horror of this game seems discursively undersold in favor of an understanding that Resi 4 is primarily a work of silly action schlock, it consistently threatens a troubling sort of ideological apathy and intellectual obliteration. Many seem to think the game sags as it delves into a more digressive island portion, but I think this is an absolutely crucial twist of form in that it allows the tacit threat to communicate itself more clearly and experientially. We’ve been effectively puppeteered by masterful game design so why shouldn’t it see if it can contort us any further? A last-act detour into the more modern realm of experiment-strewn laboratories is obviously unsurprising in this particular franchise but its execution here feels counterintuitively primal. Mutated flesh becomes the simulated sinew that threatens to finally and fully bind the player to a virtual world in which their role is purely mechanistic. The Iron Maidens attack via spikes that protrude from their skin, impaling Leon and drawing him as close as physically possible before the two character models would theoretically collapse into one another, visually threatening the same kind of assimilatory violence communicated through the game’s narrative and mechanics. You’ve been a rat this whole time, but as you scramble around 5-1’s comparatively labyrinthine map, the game asks if this level of embedment is what you really wanted. Those little dopamine hits, that feeling that you wanted to trace these corridors endlessly - Resi 4 confronts you more harshly with the implied reality of such a fancy by imposing upon you a more uncompromising manifestation of that vision. You could get lost. You could lose yourself. Do you regenerate? Does this still feel good? Becoming a part of the great industrial stew, swirling about with diseased anatomy, broken brains, and uncaring machines? Subsequent levels devolve further into unthinking linearity and tedious bouts of combat. At one point in 5-3, in a throne room, the game prods us to press our interact button with the prompt “?” (the only time in the game this prompt appears). Leon poses on the throne, tosses the camera a cheeky grin. Our silent narratorial text fills the screen – “There’s no time for resting.” So to ? is to rest and to rest is to ?
As with any good horror though, the unease produced by this constant threat feels good, I revel in being repeatedly dragged to the edge of cerebral cataclysm – I am here to get rocked, after all. Here to start Leon’s journey getting whipped and dragged around a choppy lake by a leviathan. Here to end it battling against something at once primitive and unprecedented by windmills rotating above a churning sea. I’m also here to rock. Here to shoot Leon’s guns and throw his grenades and violently stroke his knife across the screen to keep him afloat, sending waves of enemies stumbling backwards. Here to get the fuck off the island before it explodes by taking a jet ski out some caves and into the open ocean. And yeah, it feels good. Stupid, but stupid feels good sometimes. I think. Or maybe I don’t. I stop resting, I stop ?. Waves break and dissipate and so too do I feel myself rocked out of the bounds of me and dispersing into something more communal. Gamers belong in the muck.
Perhaps even more than any game in its sister series, Devil May Cry, Resi 4 is a game about rocking and getting rocked, not an experience to trepidatiously wade into, but a maelstrom to submit to. It baptismally dips players’ cognitions into the absurd logic of holy water, some substance with spiritual and esoteric profundity in excess of its unblessed counterpart, alleging that the player will leave this encounter forever changed. It is a game about dying and being reborn, as so many video games or pieces of zombie media tend to be, but this thematic play is constantly tensing and loosening across and between multiple planes of narrative, aesthetic, and game design. The resultant polyphony is breathy and wavy (and libidinal), and it effectively provokes players to cathect with a new mode of ludic orientation. A new-for-the-franchise over-the-shoulder camera is a heavy burden – I honestly can’t even believe what the development team was able to accomplish with it here – which the game makes light through an obsessively choreographed dance of virtual exploration and conflict as the sound flits between frigid ambience, propulsive bouts of percussive tumult, and chittering sound collages. Ashley’s shrill shriek ceases to irk, instead nestling itself into a surreal soundscape that demands a freakish sirenic call to counter the stoned reverie I inevitably drift into every time I pick this one up. The murky waves threaten and they beckon, blissfully cradling players who rock in the crook of this game’s ever-swelling dread.
The zombie horde as a sort of formal wave became a trope routinely reuttered without much consideration for the actual mechanics of such a design and its resultant production of affect. What does a wave do if not rock, throw one off balance, destabilize? When the horde crashes against Leon, it’s sloppy and frantic, inducing a state of panic that Resi players have been conditioned to crave. Alternatively, with mechanical mastery players may effectively redirect those very same waves, repelling them back away from Leon with explosive force. The birdectional design of these waves render the gameplay loop a sort of mood swing, masterfully toying with emotions to induce adoration in the vulnerable player. It is both a horror game and a comfort game. It’s not just that when one adapts well or poorly they are respectively rewarded or punished. Rather, potentially more intrinsically, the scramble to stabilize in the wake of a wave’s knocking against Leon, the getting rocked, produces a pleasure that motivates proficiency, the rocking. Then as one begins to feel too safe, too on top of their game, the game presents yet another twist to dizzy them and restart the process. The player’s brain becomes a sort of briefcase which feels deviously good to optimize for the sake of efficiency, but which will inevitably jostle into a state of disarray with regular addition and depletion – a Tetris grid forever in flux, repeatedly begging the question, doesn’t that feel good?
This oscillatory ludic project (evidently successful, at industrial scale) is one of reorientation, not just to present players with a new perspective but to convince them of its incontrovertible dominance. Resi 4 trades the spectral figure skater of a camera in games like the first two Max Payne titles in favor of something more visceral and lumbering. Leon can’t balletically twirl around and amid onscreen projectiles, Resi at this point is still invested in at least partially tanky design. The camera and by extension the player inhabit the gamic space in a heavily embodied way, as Leon’s physical frame fills so much of the compositional frame. This grounded approach sounds laborious but it is precisely the weight of that soil which affords the figurative sprout, ecstatic spurts of growth within and beyond heavy circumstance. All of a sudden, in spite or because of that grounding, the game feels unbelievably light, silly, and fun as Leon spin-kicks people in the face, shoots dynamite out of the air, or stops to stab some fish in the water. In this way, the design speaks for itself, justifying its very nature as a work discontent with simply establishing an entirely new gamic grammar, though it certainly accomplishes that much. It, effectively in the same movement, imaginatively fucks with it, continually redefining the scale of its ambition and, consequently, expanding our own understandings of what is possible when a game balances both clarity of mechanical vision and a willingness to experiment. Indulging an amusement park-esque abandon, Resi 4 drops any pretense of believability or realism in its level design, allowing it the space to stretch mechanical premises to their limits. Now we’re assailed by fire-spewing totems, now we’re riding a rickety minecart, now we’re running from a giant mechanical statue. The game is so creatively dense as to often seem an endless pool of ideas that don’t just help with variety and pacing, but properly expand upon a new ludic framework that would have sufficed just fine on its own without these constant manipulations to, and variations on, its base formula. It feels impossibly stuffed to the brim and it just fucking rocks.
So, yeah, I’ve been converted. This is a fantastic game that I’ve had my reservations about in the past but, ultimately, how do you play this and do anything but let your jaw slack in awe? By like the third time I’m greeted to a safe room by that pillowy, brain-tickling ambient piece I’m already a drooling bundle of pleasure receptors and basically nothing else. I’m buyin anything you’re sellin. I feel stupid and I feel small in the face of something that can play me like this. It makes me feel like a single-celled organism. I’m not trying to gas up an already well-established classic with hyperbolic hagiography – it’s not an entirely pleasant experience. The game’s tone is decidedly discordant in ways that tickle me and make me feel like it’s identified some grand metaphysical truth (the brisk and blunt textual narration can come across as so brusquely utilitarian that it reads as both funny and sinisterly primordial: “There’s a faint unpleasant odor coming from beyond this door; smells like garbage.”), but it also mushes my brain into goo. The atmosphere of this game is less one of horror or comedy but pervasive ambiguity, one in which dialectics of sacred/profane and delicate meticulousness/rash audacity continuously slosh together in a cultish stew but never really resolve or cohere. The color palette is muted but the game’s visuals are still, generally, highly readable. Meanwhile, the vast bulk of its script is irreverently loud and contagiously flippant, seemingly refusing to be read. In its most iconically funny moments, the butt of the joke is not usually any one character but rather, surprisingly often, the players themselves for having been subjected to it. There’s a deep ambivalence to the story’s being read as a text with anything to really say, and that leaves us with a whole bunch of significatory gestures that come across deliberately hostile to critical analysis. Just laugh it off and keep suplexing dudes. Even as I catch glimpses of something luminous, I’m still scared of drowning in the inky black, ever teetering on the edge of thoughtlessness.
So too, though, is there deep pleasure to be plumbed as I wobble on the precipice of that always looming void. Yeah, there’s a lot of arcade-y fun baked into this, but I think that mode of game design brings along with it an implicit portent. You will feel control and you will stop thinking and you will lose control and it will all feel good. That this sort of zombification recursively refracts across and through the game’s viral narrative, one about the potential obliteration of autonomy in the wake of physiological and religious pathogens, is what really, from my vantage, makes this game successful as a work of horror. Though the horror of this game seems discursively undersold in favor of an understanding that Resi 4 is primarily a work of silly action schlock, it consistently threatens a troubling sort of ideological apathy and intellectual obliteration. Many seem to think the game sags as it delves into a more digressive island portion, but I think this is an absolutely crucial twist of form in that it allows the tacit threat to communicate itself more clearly and experientially. We’ve been effectively puppeteered by masterful game design so why shouldn’t it see if it can contort us any further? A last-act detour into the more modern realm of experiment-strewn laboratories is obviously unsurprising in this particular franchise but its execution here feels counterintuitively primal. Mutated flesh becomes the simulated sinew that threatens to finally and fully bind the player to a virtual world in which their role is purely mechanistic. The Iron Maidens attack via spikes that protrude from their skin, impaling Leon and drawing him as close as physically possible before the two character models would theoretically collapse into one another, visually threatening the same kind of assimilatory violence communicated through the game’s narrative and mechanics. You’ve been a rat this whole time, but as you scramble around 5-1’s comparatively labyrinthine map, the game asks if this level of embedment is what you really wanted. Those little dopamine hits, that feeling that you wanted to trace these corridors endlessly - Resi 4 confronts you more harshly with the implied reality of such a fancy by imposing upon you a more uncompromising manifestation of that vision. You could get lost. You could lose yourself. Do you regenerate? Does this still feel good? Becoming a part of the great industrial stew, swirling about with diseased anatomy, broken brains, and uncaring machines? Subsequent levels devolve further into unthinking linearity and tedious bouts of combat. At one point in 5-3, in a throne room, the game prods us to press our interact button with the prompt “?” (the only time in the game this prompt appears). Leon poses on the throne, tosses the camera a cheeky grin. Our silent narratorial text fills the screen – “There’s no time for resting.” So to ? is to rest and to rest is to ?
As with any good horror though, the unease produced by this constant threat feels good, I revel in being repeatedly dragged to the edge of cerebral cataclysm – I am here to get rocked, after all. Here to start Leon’s journey getting whipped and dragged around a choppy lake by a leviathan. Here to end it battling against something at once primitive and unprecedented by windmills rotating above a churning sea. I’m also here to rock. Here to shoot Leon’s guns and throw his grenades and violently stroke his knife across the screen to keep him afloat, sending waves of enemies stumbling backwards. Here to get the fuck off the island before it explodes by taking a jet ski out some caves and into the open ocean. And yeah, it feels good. Stupid, but stupid feels good sometimes. I think. Or maybe I don’t. I stop resting, I stop ?. Waves break and dissipate and so too do I feel myself rocked out of the bounds of me and dispersing into something more communal. Gamers belong in the muck.