In space no one can hear you scream. Turns out the same is true if you're stranded in the cavernous depths beneath a sprawling Spanish mansion crawling with zombies.
While confronting Salazar in 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Resident Evil 4 Remake, Leon is sent hurtling into a spiderweb of cavern🍸s beneath the estate. After wandering the dark depths, he eventually makes his way to an abandoned underground laboratory. The lab has an ele𝐆vator, which Leon needs to use to ascend back to the surface. Problem is, the power is off, so Leon sets off into the labyrinthine lab to find a way to turn it back on.
What follows, in my memory, is the scariest part of the original 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Resident Evil 4. Very recent experience tells me that it i👍s also probably the scariest part of the remake.
Resident Evil 4 is kind of a cosmic gumbo. There isn't anything else in horror that it can even be compared to one-to-one, and part of its appeal is the ways it draws from a variety of disparate sources. It's campy, with German suplexes and lines like, "Where's everybody going? Bingo?" But it can also be terrifying, like in the village fight, or operatic, like in the battle against Salazar's monstrous final form. The opening trek through the village and the surrounding area in rural Spain is a little bit Texas Chain Saw Massacre and a little bit folk horror. The castle feels more like Dracula. The mine carts are Donkey Kong Country.
But the lab is pure Alien. Almost as soon as you reach it, you can hear something banging around in the walls. If you're paying close attention, you may notice that there are ample air vents in the walls from which a monster could emerge. And if that doesn't clue you into what's coming, there are switches at intervals throughout the corridors that cause a wall of nitroglycerine to materialize when flipped. They'll burn you if you leave Leon standing in their path, which provides a strong hint that something you'll need to blast with frozen fire is lurking nearby.
Once you reach the twisty hallway's deadend, you'll find a breaker that you can flip to restore power. Unfortunately, almost as soon as this happens, a horrific creature emerges. This black-shelled humanoid with scythe-like arms is called Verdugos, Spanish for "executioner," and will stalk Leon relentlessly until our favorite agent kills it or escapes. Not wanting to waste more ammo than I needed to — and unsure if it was even possible to take the monster down — I decided to escape onto the elevator.
But, to make it there, you need to survive several minutes locked in the narrow corridors with the Verdugos breathing down your neck. The design of the creature and the setting it inhabits both feel heavily reminiscent of Alien. Like the Nostromo, the labs are a little old and rundown. Both are working in the Star Wars tradition of lived-in sci-fi, where the environments and the tech they contain don't look shining white and new. The lab looks abandoned, disused. And the Verdugos' design clearly nods to the xenomorph, with an insectoid body and a long spindly tail.
Eventually, a short cinematic shows that the elevator has arrived, and I ran to it as quickly as I could, pausing, terrified, to flip one last switch. I made it to the elevator and closed it just in time. Everything about this level communicates that you are up against an unstoppable killing machine, while the cuts to the elevator communicate that you are killing time. The Verdugos' is perpetually moving forward, and even when you stop it, it doesn't stay frozen for long. Maybe that's why I didn't try to fight back. The game's rules would have let me, but everything about its presentation said to run and never look back.