Are they nearby? Are they locked in side rooms? Or are they behind you? The only choice is to keep going forward. The moans, groans and squelches audible yet not visible. There’s a partially flooded corridor with no lighting ahead, and you’ve only a small torch that barely penetrates the gloom.

Swallowing your fear and pushing through the smallest gap between barrier and floor you set out to reach him, only to have the path seal shut behind you. A lone CCTV feed tells you there’s an officer with information on how to get out of the station fighting something just out of shot and you’re going to have to brave the gore and head out to help him. The main doors are barricaded, the shutters are down and the only route out looks to be through a blood-soaked gap to another wing. Reaching the foyer of the police station and seeing the aftermath of what looks like a precinct that’s put itself into lockdown is unsettling. It’s this dynamic that drives the story forward and has you choose which of the two you want to play as, with a view of experiencing things from a second perspective in a subsequent game. Ambushed by the living dead they’re forced to flee with the intention of helping each other out, only to get separated by circumstance and have to survive on their own. team member) who happen upon each other at a gas station at the edge of the city. officer) and Claire Redfield (sister of a missing S.T.A.R.S. Although it was thought the situation had been contained, that clearly wasn’t the case and now the entire town has been overrun and descended into chaos. Resident Evil 2 tells the story of what’s happening to the town of Raccoon City since the zombie virus outbreak in the mansion that hid a secret bioweapons lab from the first game (spoilers!). Can it live up to something that has achieved iconic status in my mind? This anthropomorphic personification is what I really want to see in the new game alongside the fight for survival in the two main protagonists.

It was both tormentor and saviour in equal measures.

It wasn’t just Claire and Leon though that were the characters to watch, the Raccoon PD station proved to be an entity in its own right with the constant creeping dread, locked doors and secret passageways. The first game is rightly a watershed moment in gaming history, but the second stepped things up a gear with its two character focus and intertwining stories that demanded more than a single playthrough. Like many of the people who’ll be playing the Resident Evil 2 remake, it was my first experience of Capcom’s survival horror series back on the 32-bit generation.

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