Safe Rooms

There's a saferoom in RE2 and geographically, it's located in the same space in RE2RE: second floor, first office on the east side. It even looks the same-with massive graphical upgrades of course:

The layout is similar and while there isn't an item box, nearly everything else is the same from the original Resident Evil 2.

Which was how RE2 handled pacing: You run run run through various rooms, collect what you can, try not to die and then, 'whew' the save room theme music kicks in and you know you can stop.

There are no zombies in here, no weird mutations of creatures to eat your face. You are, effectively, in the clear. You can dip back into the hallways of fear whenever you've organized your stuff and are ready to go.

Part of this, of course, was about technology: when you need to stop and create save files, creating an unfun scenario to do so is detrimental to your game. When your character has to press an action button to climb stairs or go through doors, that means that the zombies become, effectively, old school Daleks. When rooms were cleared of enemies, returning to those rooms meant returning to rooms that were empty, which can be a little unnerving too, because it suggested someone was coming behind you can cleaning up after you.

It also meant that the designers didn't have to worry about what they threw at players, especially right after a save point, because you'd just gotten a break. The time was usually ripe to amp up the scares. The beats would be measured out in accordance to the doses you wanted.

RE2RE has the advantage of improved technology, so you don't have to create save files anymore. You can, of course (they even created theme music), but it also autosaves for you. As a result, enemies no longer have the same limitations as they did before.

Which means that pacing becomes very different. The first time a zombie came up the stairs after me, I vividly remember saying "Oh fuck this." Because they weren't supposed to do that-I had spent 20 years with games where they didn't do that.

It also meant that safe rooms weren't safe anymore. Which I didn't know...until it was horribly, terrifyingly clear that I wasn't safe there.

Now, instead of bursts of anxiety, dread infests RE2RE. Every corner is one where I might have to run away. Rooms that I've cleared still keep the downed enemies in them, and those enemies may not be dead.

Safe rooms are no longer places of respite.

And that is doing a number on my brain, I'll tell you. I'm worried about everything-the only rooms I am relatively certain do not have enemies in them are ones where I have to actively solve a puzzle.

But as soon as that puzzle is solved? Oooooooh boy....