Zach Cregger Is Finally Fixing Resident Evil's Biggest Flaw

The franchise began with survival-horror gameplay built around unsettling camera work, punishing resource management, and difficult controls. Resident Evil 2 expanded the scale while preserving desperate circumstances and high anxiety. Resident Evil 3 and especially Resident Evil 4 shifted toward a more conventional third-person shooter style, with horror elements reduced and later criticized for reaching limits. The series later returned to survival-horror roots with Resident Evil 7 and Village. A forthcoming film reboot aims to emphasize true survival horror after long periods where cinematic adaptations largely ignored it. The director stresses horror’s importance and slow-building dread, and focuses on how overwhelming the outbreak would feel to an ordinary person without gun skills or high-stress training.

"The original game was iconic for its jarring and uncanny camerawork, punishing resource management, and intentionally unwieldy controls: almost everything about it was designed to be as oppositional to the player as the Spencer House itself."

"But in Resident Evil 3: Nemesis, and especially in Resident Evil 4, the series started to shift away from its intense, horror-centric approach. Jumpscares, monstrosities, and resource management all stuck around to a degree, but the gameplay became a lot closer to a traditional third-person shooter, a design choice that critics thought reached its limits with Resident Evil 6."

"He once again emphasizes the importance of horror to the franchise as a whole, specifically the slow-building dread that's so potent in the first few games. He also discusses the central idea driving his take on the material, namely wanting to explore how much more overwhelming the outbreak in Raccoon City would be from the perspective of a regular guy unfamiliar with guns and not trained for high-stress situations."

"Everything Cregger says in the video feels in line with the direction of the more horror-oriented games, particularly the original game and RE7: being forced to creep down a"

Read at Inverse