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Resident Evil Zero review

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  • Resident Evil Zero review

    It's an ignoble death for the passengers of the Ecliptic Express as their train and, soon enough, their brains are breached by a plague of leeches. Still, there are less distinguished surroundings in which to die. Resident Evil has always presented a hotchpotch of locales in its jittery tour of Victorian mansions, small town American police stations, industrial factories and Renaissance churches. The Ecliptic Express, however, with its pre-war luxury - the feathery lampshades, the forest of mahogany, the tinkling bottles of Scotch - is new, a scene that could have been lifted from any number of Agatha Christie novels. Puking zombies aside, it's a delightful place to be.
    The nostalgia comes in two hits. There's the familiar ambiance of the murder mystery-cum-buddy movie, which follows rookie cop, Becky, and a haggard convict, Billy, as they work together through and, eventually, out of disaster. And then there's the style: the polygonal characters placed amidst detailed static backdrops, like dolls in front of a fine painting. Pixel art has been mined to the point it no longer has a wistful effect. Here, by contrast, is a rare jolt of graphical nostalgia, heightened by the fact that the style, favoured by so many games between 1995 and the turn of the century, has never looked quite this good. Character models bed into the backdrops, which fizz with incidental animations - the frantic bubbles of a panoramic fish tank, for example, or the lazy chopper blade of a ceiling fan. This remake, with its widescreen rendering and dynamic lighting is, exquisite.
    Elsewhere, Zero is typical of early-era Resident Evil. There are the grumbling zombies, the obnoxious crows and those intrepid, window-shattering Doberman, so desperately in need of a hanky. There are the bosses (usually overgrown creatures such as giant bats, spiders and centipedes), which soak up your valuable ammunition and, with every swipe, infect your character with a limp that can be fixed by eating a fistful of coriander, naturally. There are the knotted buildings with their insanity layouts: locks that require a lit candle, or the correct time to be set on a grandfather clock or, more weirdly still, a leech to be pressed into the relevant indentation. There are the ponderous door animations, those intermissions that once covered load times as you moved from one room to the next but now exist merely to provide a rhythmic ramping of tension. And there are the safe rooms, with their comforting lullabies and progress-saving typewriters. Finally, there is the enduring question of luggage.
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