In an interview with VGC, Hideki Kamiya, director of the original Resident Evil 2, made a brave statement: the current Resident Evils are too damn scary. Despite being a Resident Evil director of yesteryear, Kamiya said he’s never been able to handle horror.
“I don’t like horror, and I don’t like scary things. I’m not able to make it through scary movies, and that was even the case back in the day,” he said.
That makes sense! The earlier Resident Evil games, like the ones Kamiya worked on before moving onto Platinum Games and now Clovers, were primarily scary in tone and vibes. Sure, there were monsters to fight, but the horror came largely from the atmosphere, not the threats the gruesome enemies represented.
But now, thanks to all the technological improvements, Kamiya says game developers are able to make monsters with a truly frightening degree of realism. “The amount of crazy, horrifying things that people are able to put on the screen is absolutely insane,” he said. “And I think anybody who’s on the Resident Evil teams at Capcom, at this point, they must all be completely numb to how scary the thing they’re making is.”
He’s got a point. The monsters in Resident Evil 9 are truly sickening to look at. And all the visual improvements stuffed into murder-spree simulator Grand Theft Auto VI might put its violence on the uncomfortable side of graphic. But Kamiya has a solution to these problems, and it sounds a lot like the arachnaphobia mode Xbox put in Grounded. “I legitimately wished [Resident Evil Requiem] would include some kind of non-horror mode for people like me.” I hope he gets what he wants, because it’s a shame a video game unc like him can’t play the games he had a hand in creating.