Among both the 1998 game and the remake's more ambitious features is 'zapping', in Hideki Kamiya's bouncy phrase, a parallel story mechanic in which each protagonist tackles the same layouts with different enemy and item arrangements.Īpproaching the remake as a veteran of these titles, you can almost feel the station's many reinventions swirling around your ankles like ectoplasm, running their fingers through Leon's bangs. All this, and then you remember that there are multiples of the station even within Resident Evil 2 itself. Google 'Raccoon City Police Station' and you'll be treated to a phantasmagorical, algorithmic mishmash of interiors from these titles - the military vibe of the abandoned 'Resident Evil 1.5' sutured to Resi 3's gentle rearrangement from 24 hours before the events of Resi 2. The absurdly overwrought entrance lobby, in particular, has graced no less than five games, from Resident Evil 3 through online multiplayer curio Outbreak to the much-reviled Operation Raccoon City, all orbiting roughly the same point in the series chronology. It's that so many other evils have resided here since the original game rocked PlayStations in 1998. It's not just that the station used to be an art museum within Resident Evil's fiction - a kludge dreamed up by original scenario writer Noboru Sugimura to explain the eerie marble busts, emblem doors and oil paintings that sit alongside the gun cabinets and mounds of paperwork.

While wandering the new game's extravagantly remodelled police station I've been dogged by the thought that older incarnations of the structure are trying to force themselves into the light. Is it possible for a building to haunt itself? Resident Evil 2's remake suggests so.

Resident evil 2 remake map comparison