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"He's not a zombie," says Leon S. Kennedy as he stands over the twitching corpse of the man he's knifed to death in a forest shack during Resident Evil 4's opening scene. Kennedy is as surprised as anyone: after cleaning up the zombie infested Racoon City in the second game in Capcom's survival horror series, any encounter with a person whose rotten flesh isn't slurping from the bones must be something of a novelty. Indeed, Resident Evil 4's Los Ganados walk tall and never shuffle. They have bright, alert eyes instead of hollowed pupils, and in some cases wield chainsaws, not mere incisors. They speak in a quick European tongue rather than slurred moans and they maintain their humble houses rather than allowing them to fall to post-apocalyptic ruin. Los Ganados are, as the game's marketing slogan put it, a 'new kind of evil', peasant folk dressed in sackcloth and armed with rakes, hoes and sticks of dynamite. They're soiled with mud and the unmistakeable blemishes of land toil; even their chickens are grubby and irritable. They are a recognisable yet unfamiliar people, furious with intruders (they pin the police driver who escorts Kennedy to a post in the town square in the game's opening moments, where he hangs idly, burning) and calmed only by the rounded toll of a church bell. He's right. These are not zombies; they're something far worse.
Kennedy's surprise at this new kind of evil was, at the time of the game's release in 2005, mirrored in us. Players had grown weary with a series whose exquisitely pre-rendered backdrops now seemed antiquated, and whose fussy controls schemes seemed increasingly cheap. Indeed, Resident Evil 4 was, in its entirety, a new kind of Evil, a game designed from the peat up with such wisdom and creative insight that its example went on to define the subsequent decade of third person action video games.
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