Resident Evil 2 makes Raccoon City terrifying again

The original Resident Evil 2 still lives in my head as a collection of PlayStation memories: Leon standing beside a burning car, Claire riding into town, the police station doors closing behind them, and those loading screens where a handle turned slowly before the next room appeared. It was frightening, but it also had the strange warmth of a game learned through repetition. I knew which hallway held the Licker, where the darkroom was, and how relieved I would feel whenever the typewriter music started.

The 2019 remake takes those memories and makes them unreliable. Raccoon City is familiar, but the route through it has changed. Rooms are darker, zombies are harder to put down, and the Raccoon Police Department feels less like an old puzzle box I remember solving and more like a building that has trapped me inside. Capcom modernised almost everything without losing the old tension between curiosity and dread. The second scenarios are weaker than they should be, but this remains one of the finest survival-horror remakes ever made.

Walking into the RPD still produces that brief sense of safety the original used so well. The main hall is wide, brightly lit and watched over by an enormous statue. There is an item box nearby, music plays softly, and for a moment the station feels like somewhere I can catch my breath. Then I open one of the side doors and the light disappears.

The remake turns the police station into a tightly connected maze of locked shutters, blocked corridors, strange keys and rooms I keep returning to with new tools. I learned it in layers. A hallway that once seemed like a dead end became a shortcut later. A door I passed several times eventually opened into another route through the building. That familiarity never became complete comfort, because the station kept changing around me.

The old absurdity is still there. This is a police station filled with chess-themed machinery, statue medallions and doors sorted by playing-card suits. The remake does not apologise for any of it. Instead, the detailed rooms and grounded presentation make the nonsense feel like part of the building's history. I stopped asking why a police officer would need a spade key and started worrying about whether I had enough room to carry it.

The first zombie I met took far more bullets than I expected. I watched rounds tear into its face, saw it hit the floor, waited, and then watched it start moving again. That single encounter taught me more about the remake than any tutorial could have. Ammunition is not permission to clear every room. It is a limited amount of control over a situation that may still go wrong.

Zombies move with an ugly unpredictability. Their heads sway while I aim, they stumble through doorways, and they grab with just enough reach to punish careless confidence. A clean headshot can stagger one long enough to slip past, but trying to finish every body quickly burns through ammunition. Even after something goes down, I never fully trust it. I have walked back into too many rooms and found the corpse missing from where I left it.

The over-the-shoulder camera makes Leon and Claire easier to control than their 1998 counterparts, but it does not turn the game into a power fantasy. Standing still tightens the aiming reticle, forcing me to choose between accuracy and movement while something closes the distance. The shotgun, grenade launcher and magnum offer moments of reassurance, yet the game is careful never to let that reassurance last too long.

Mr. X is the part of the remake that changed how I thought about the police station. In the original, the Tyrant's appearances were dramatic interruptions tied to specific moments. Here, his footsteps can become the background noise of an entire journey. Once he starts roaming the RPD, every route I thought I understood becomes a risk.

I would stand inside the darkroom listening to him cross the floor above me, waiting for the footsteps to fade before opening the door. Sometimes he would walk away. Sometimes the ceiling would creak, the sound would grow louder, and I would realise he had found the stairs. The game creates panic without needing him to sprint. His steady pace is worse. It suggests that he already knows I will make a mistake eventually.

That pressure changes ordinary decisions. Stopping to solve a puzzle becomes dangerous. A hallway containing two zombies becomes almost impassable when heavy footsteps are approaching behind me. Even the save rooms feel different when his shadow passes outside. Mr. X is not frightening because he is complicated. He is frightening because he enters a carefully planned survival-horror game and refuses to respect the plan.

Leon and Claire give the game two different emotional centres. Leon arrives for his first day as a police officer and finds a city already beyond saving. Claire comes looking for her brother and ends up protecting Sherry Birkin. Their paths overlap, but their weapons, supporting characters and parts of their stories give each campaign its own flavour.

Claire's story has the stronger personal pull. Her relationship with Sherry gives the disaster a human scale, and the scenes involving the Birkin family carry more weight than the broader Umbrella conspiracy. Leon's campaign leans further into the police thriller side of Resident Evil, with Ada Wong leading him through a mystery he is not experienced enough to question properly. Both leads are earnest in that recognisable Resident Evil way, surrounded by horror but never entirely losing the series' B-movie charm.

The disappointment is how little the two campaigns affect each other. The original's scenario system created the impression that decisions in one character's route carried into the other. The remake offers second runs with altered item placement, a different opening and the complete ending, but Leon and Claire still solve many of the same problems and fight overlapping versions of the same events. Replaying remains enjoyable because the game itself is so strong, though the campaigns never fit together as neatly as they promise.

The sewers and laboratory cannot match the police station's slow-building dread. Both areas have strong moments, but the game becomes more direct as the weapons improve and the enemies grow larger. Some boss fights are visually impressive without being especially enjoyable, and the final hours lose some of the nervous restraint that defines the opening. Even then, the inventory remains tight, ammunition remains valuable, and every route still asks me to decide what I am willing to spend.

Resident Evil 2 is the remake I would recommend to newcomers and the one I return to when I miss the old shape of the series. It remembers the comfort of typewriters, item boxes and impossible locks, then makes the spaces between them frightening again. The original will always have its grainy PlayStation mood and the strange intimacy of a game many of us learned room by room. The remake does something more difficult than replacing it. It brings me back to the RPD, lets memory guide me for a while, and then quietly moves the Licker to somewhere else.