Capcom brings fresh eyes to one of horror’s greatest locales.
“We can still create a feeling of unseen presence through level design,” creative director Kazunori Kadoi tells us – and, indeed, the remake’s binaural soundtrack bubbles with threat, from unearthly shrieks to an ominous dripping, but its handling of the space is very different. It’s a question of what your torchbeam misses as you probe newly dark and cluttered interiors, of deceptively still corpses masked by table legs and what might emerge from a crawlspace behind you. It’s also a question of how much you recall of the original’s maps: Capcom is keen for veterans to find the game much as they left it, but that degree of foreknowledge obviously creates opportunities for treachery. “We want to use your muscle memory to an extent – this is the lobby, these are the side corridors – while also making it fresh,” Kadoi says, with faintly sinister emphasis. Backtracking, in particular, is more perilous: as in more recent horror games, recovering a key puzzle item now often sees you running the gauntlet, as zombies jolt to life on the way back to the objective.
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