Everyone’s Gone to Bingo: Resident Evil 4 remake announced

You guys! It finally happened! Gird your loins and hang onto your butts because Sony hit us with its best shot during today’s State of Play. After two pretty successful remakes and a very successful new game, Capcom has done it again. You don’t mean?? Oh, I mean…Resident Evil 4 Remake is coming! Swoop your hair because pretty boy Leon S. Kennedy is taking us to Europe and this time, it’s fancy.

For those of you too young to remember how amazing Resident Evil 4 was (or those not cool enough to love it), let’s recap what this legendary game is and why it’s such a big deal. For all you youngins and those new to the franchise, do you remember that Scandinavian model/rookie cop who had the worst first day of work ever in Resident Evil 2? Well he’s back, baby. After the events in Raccoon City, Leon is working as a government agent for the president. When Ashley Graham, the president’s daughter, gets kidnapped, Leon is hired to retrieve said daughter and bring her back. Unfortunately, it’s not your run-of-the-mill abduction. Ashley was abducted by a cult called Los Illuminados who have their hands messy experimenting with a pesky parasite called Plaga found in rural Spain. They want to infect Ashley so they have someone they can control in the White House.

Leon finds Ashley and rescues her, but not before getting infected himself. Ashley and Leon are purged of their parasites but Ada Wong and a soldier named Krauser are hired by none other than Albert Wesker to snatch a sample of the parasite for his own evil deeds. In the end, Ashley is saved and Los Illuminados is withered to a shadow of its former self, but Wesker hires Tricell to experiment with the Plaga, therefore creating Las Plagas type 2 and 3, the parasite responsible for all of the trouble in Africa during Resident Evil 5.

So, why is Resident Evil 4 so beloved to fans of the franchise and why is a Resident Evil 4 Remake such a big deal? This installment in the Resident Evil franchise changed the game…literally.

Survival horror was shaken up to forfeit some of the horror for more action. It was the perfect balance of inventory management and gunplay that became so synonymous with Resident Evil games. It also changed the player’s viewpoint to over Leon’s shoulder, making aiming a hell of a lot easier than in previous games. After this game, the next two installments went hard on the action and dropped a lot of the horror aspects while adding absurdities (coughChrispunchingabouldertodeathcough) and quick time events out the wazoo. Resident Evil 4 was the perfect middle ground sporting 2005 quality graphics.

Whether or not you liked the RE2 and RE3 remakes are irrelevant because everyone can agree that they were stunning graphically. We had never seen Raccoon City in such vivid neon colors and never quite so damp. I could watch the graphics of those games forever.

With the Resident Evil 4 Remake, not only do we get to play one of the most beloved survival horror games of all time, complete with Leon’s snarky commentary, but we get to do it in stunning 2023 graphics. To tell you we are excited would be a huge understatement. Capcom is shrugging off the concrete jungle for a background of rural Spain and we KNOW Capcom can make a village extremely pretty.

If you are as excited as we are for the Resident Evil 4 Remake, the wait isn’t TOO long. We will be chasing after the president’s daughter starting March 24th, 2023. Here’s hoping she isn’t as god awful as she was in the original.