One Avocadoan’s journey delving into the realm of survival horror.
It seems almost inevitable, especially these days, that any major media franchise will at some point dip its toes into the realm of prequels. Resident Evil actually went to that well early in its history. Initially starting development for the Nintendo 64 in 1998, only two years after the release of the original game, Resident Evil 0 eventually launched on the GameCube in November 2002. This was only eight months after the release of the highly acclaimed Resident Evil Remake, the game to which Resident Evil 0 was ultimately meant to serve as a prelude. (A remaster of Resident Evil 0 was later released in 2016, which is the version that I played.)
Now, there are a number of traps that prequels frequently fall into. They can sometimes lack stakes due to the audience’s existing knowledge of what will happen in the future. They can be overly obsessed with providing fan service callbacks to the original work, to the point where it can feel like they are just constantly winking at the audience. In a similar vein, they can be so consumed with trying to answer every little question from the original work that they remove any air of mystery that the original work had, cheapening its impact. (See the explanation of Han’s last name in Solo: A Star Wars Story.) And, finally, they can create continuity errors by contradicting or retconning – whether intentionally or accidentally – story details from the original work. Not all prequels have these issues. Some, like (in my opinion) Star Wars: Andor, manage to have enough depth and strong storytelling that they can stand both on their own and as part of the larger series. But, more often than not, it feels like prequels tend to falter and fail to meet the expectations placed upon them. Unfortunately that’s mostly where I end up landing on Resident Evil 0, despite some of its good qualities. But we will get more into all of that later.
Resident Evil 0 is focused on Rebecca Chambers, a member of the missing S.T.A.R.S. (Special Tactics and Rescue Service) Bravo Team that Chris Redfield encounters in the Spencer Mansion in both Resident Evil and Resident Evil Remake. Prior to the events of those games, the Raccoon City Police Department had received word of disappearances and other strange events occurring in and around the nearby Arklay Mountains. The six members of Bravo Team, including officer/medic Rebecca, were sent to investigate the situation but their helicopter (for no discernible reason) suddenly encountered an engine failure and was forced to make an emergency landing in the forest. Nearby, Rebecca discovers an upturned van occupied by the bodies of two dead soldiers and a briefcase containing an execution order for a man named Billy Coen who has been charged with the murder of twenty-three people. A little way further into the woods, Rebecca stumbles upon an unmoving train and climbs aboard to find it infested with zombies and strange leeches. Struggling to survive, Rebecca finds herself face to face with none other than Billy, the escaped convict, and begrudgingly teams up with him to figure out what is going on and how to make it to safety. Unfortunately for the two of them, a mysterious man reactivates the locomotive and sends it hurtling down the tracks, away from the rest of Bravo Team and toward deeper uncertainty…
To start out with the positives, Resident Evil 0 is a frankly gorgeous game, especially for its time. I’ve spoken at length before about how great Resident Evil Remake looks, and while Resident Evil 0 goes for the same visual style I think that it actually looks even better than Resident Evil Remake. Both games are able to attain their high quality visuals through the use of pre-rendered backgrounds and fixed camera angles, which allowed the developers to create significantly more detailed environments than other games at the time while still freeing up resources to pour into the 3D character models. As a result, both games are able to use their settings and environmental storytelling to create a top-notch moody and unsettling atmosphere. The difference between the remake and its prequel is in what sorts of files are used for the pre-rendered backgrounds. Resident Evil Remake, from what I understand, did use looping pre-rendered videos for some of its backgrounds but most of them were static images. Resident Evil 0, by contrast, seems to use a lot more video files and it really serves to make the whole experience feel more dynamic. Aboard the train you can see the limbs of corpses sway with the movement of the vehicle or dishes in the kitchen slide back and forth along the counter. In an outdoor area of a later facility, you can see flies buzzing around streetlamps. It helps to make these locations feel truly alive (in spite of their undead occupants) and to sell the illusion that the characters are moving through an actual three-dimensional space.
One of the game’s big new mechanics is its partner system, and I found it to be a mostly good addition. Previous games in the series gave you the option of two characters at the start (Jill and Chris in Resident Evil or Leon and Claire in Resident Evil 2), but once you choose you are stuck with that character for the rest of the game. Later games (Resident Evil 5 and Resident Evil 6, from my understanding) saddle you with a partner that is controlled either entirely by the game’s AI or by another player in co-op. Resident Evil 0 is different. The player is given two characters to keep track of, Rebecca and Billy, with one of them being controlled by the AI. Unlike in the later games, however, you are able to switch between control of the two characters at will. Each character has their own separate inventory (limited to six spots each) and abilities, with Billy having higher health and being able to move heavy objects while Rebecca can use her medical knowledge to combine herbs and other chemicals. Items can be swapped between Rebecca and Billy’s inventories, but only if the two of them are close together. Additionally, the character that is not currently being directly controlled by the player can be given rudimentary commands that alter their behavior – they can follow the other character vs. stay where they are, for example, or they can automatically fire when approached by an enemy vs. staying still and holding onto their ammo. Being able to switch instantaneously between both characters no matter their distance from each other (a pretty amazing feat given the time period) opens up a lot of interesting possibilities for both exploration and puzzle-solving, and the way these mechanics were implemented add some strong strategy elements that aren’t really present in other games in the franchise. On the whole, I was quite impressed with it.
The last element of the game that I found to be a mostly unqualified success is the story’s starting area, the Ecliptic Express. ‘Resident Evil on a train’ is not an idea that the franchise had really explored before Resident Evil 0, nor has it really been done since to my knowledge, so that immediately gives the level a unique feel. That feeling is further enhanced by the impeccable environmental design, which I discussed a bit already earlier; the use of looping videos as backgrounds goes far in selling the train’s speed and movement, whether it be by showing us the swaying and sliding of the items aboard or by utilizing lighting and other effects during the segments on top of the cars to simulate the whipping of gale-force winds. The narrowness of the train cars and their cramped guest quarters instills an intense feeling of claustrophobia to the entire endeavor, increasing the player’s anxiety in a way that seems to set the stage for the rest of the game moving forward. Additionally, the linear set-up of the cars requires the player to move back and forth along the train’s length multiple times, which gives the developers a chance to play with their expectations by changing things on each trip. Typically this just involves the arrival of more zombies, but it still helps to keep players on their toes. The train also introduces something that I will get into more detail later, which is the game’s penchant for separating Billy and Rebecca for an extended period of time. While I’m more mixed on this in later sections of the game, I found that it largely worked well here and required some thinking to solve. The train is such a cool way to kick off the game that its hard not to feel like everything else afterwards is a disappointment.
(That’s not to say that the other sections of the game are inherently bad – the second and largest area, the Training Facility, certainly has some great moments – but on the whole most of the other areas suffer from an unfortunate ‘been there, done that’ feel.)
Anyway, with the positives out of the way, it is time to dig into the parts of Resident Evil 0 that I am much less fond of. First and foremost, and perhaps the most discussed element of the game, is its approach to item management. Unlike with virtually every other Resident Evil game, item boxes are entirely absent from Resident Evil 0. Instead, the game adds the ability to drop items onto the ground and pick them back up at will. This may seem like a small change, but it is actually a fairly seismic one, and one that completely upends the game’s flow. Now instead of dropping items off in a box in one save room and retrieving them from a different one in a later area, you are forced to lug your items around with you everywhere, constantly making multiple trips to make sure you have everything you need on hand. You might be inclined to think that Rebecca and Billy’s inventory size would work in their favor in this regard, having twelve slots between the two of them compared to the six or eight that characters had to work with in previous games, but that is deceptive. You never know when you are going to run into an enemy (or even multiple enemies), forcing you to almost always give each character a weapon, extra ammo, and healing items that take up slots that could otherwise be used to transfer your remaining items. This is further complicated by the fact that multiple items take up more than one inventory slot, including one extremely infamous item that is used early on and then not again until near the end of the game (tricking many players into leaving it behind and having to then backtrack all the way to the beginning of the game). To make things worse, there is a seemingly arbitrary cap on how many items can be left in a single room, leading to some bizarre decisions like having two save rooms right next to each other (as save rooms are the most likely spots for players to deposit their items). As a result of all of these factors, it feels as though a huge chunk of the player’s time is devoted solely to juggling their inventory rather than making actual progress, and it quickly turns the game into a slog.
On a related note, the game as mentioned earlier has a tendency to separate Rebecca and Billy for occasionally long periods of time. Sometimes it occurs without much warning. Sometimes it is clear that this sort of thing is about to happen, but it is less clear what weapons or items each character will need. Either way, this forced separation frequently results in at least one of the characters being underprepared for what they are about to face with no access to items that could help rectify the situation. For example, there is one extremely annoying boss that is made much more tolerable with the grenade launcher. Except that there is no way to know that until you are already sealed in and, given that the launcher takes up two inventory slots, you’re not likely to just be carrying it with you at the time. There is one particularly notorious separation point near the end of the game that happens with no prior indication and has soft-locked many a player. I’m not against this kind of gameplay twist in principle – again, I felt it worked pretty well on the train – but more time should have been spent in making it feel less arbitrary and frustrating.
In terms of enemies, Resident Evil 0 actually has quite a good variety. Unfortunately, several of those enemy types are among the most obnoxious I have encountered in the franchise so far. Hunters are back, and while they lack the insta-kill attack they had in REmake they are still fast and hit hard. The Plague Crawlers, large bug creatures, are bullet sponges that can pretty easily overwhelm a player. Worse than either of those, though, are the Eliminators, the leech men, and the Lurkers. The Eliminators seem to be the most infamous, rabid monkeys that are difficult to hit due to their small size, fast enough that avoiding them is a real challenge, and able to completely stun-lock a player. The leech men (actually called Mimicry Marcus, but I’m not really fan of that name) are stretchy enough to hit the player from quite a distance away and are incredibly tanky, with fire weapons (a limited resource) being your best bet. It’s almost impossible to get out of an encounter with one without taking damage, and the squelching noises they make combined with their intense battle music doesn’t help matters either. Then there are the Lurkers. These oversized frogs have a random chance of showing up in certain rooms of the game’s final area and if not attacked immediately they will grab ahold of the player character with their sticky tongue and gradually reel them in to insta-kill them. The character who has been grabbed cannot fight back at all despite the slowness at which they are pulled in, meaning that if you don’t have the other character with you (a likely event) then you are forced to just sit there and watch until the Game Over screen pops up. In addition to these frustrating enemy types, it feels like in general that enemies tend to show up in larger groups more frequently than in previous games. I think that this and the harder enemies were both attempts to compensate for the fact that players could now have two characters attacking at the same time. I can understand that, and I’m definitely not opposed to having to face tough enemies, but I feel like they went maybe a bit too far and it contributes to the game becoming a slog in its later areas.
Related to the topic of enemies, the game has multiple boss fights and, to be honest, I wasn’t a big fan of most of them. They tend to follow the old Resident Evil trend of ‘animal, but bigger’ in a way that feels old hat by this point. Here’s a big scorpion! Here’s a big centipede! Here’s a big bat! Here’s a big leech! Most of them are just kind of boring from a design perspective. (With the exception of the Proto-Tyrant, that was cool.) In terms of the boss fights themselves, they range from overly simple at best (the aforementioned scorpion) to completely maddening at worst. The biggest offender has to be the giant bat fight, which forces you to constantly aim upwards and then summons a swarm of little bats early on that render the game’s automatic lock-on function entirely useless. Even if you manage to manually aim at the boss itself, one of the smaller bats will inevitably get in your way while firing and eat up your ammo. It’s rage-inducing. I’ve noted in previous reviews that Resident Evil as a whole tends to struggle when it comes to bosses, but Resident Evil 0 might just be the worst one in that regard.
*Story spoilers ahead!*
Finally, we come to the story. I will say that I was happy that Rebecca got her own game and time to shine, and that I quite enjoyed her dynamic with Billy (even if I wish they had done a bit more with the officer/convicted criminal tension of the whole situation). As both a standalone story and a prelude to Resident Evil Remake, however, Resident Evil 0 doesn’t do much for me. The plot isn’t bad on its own, but it doesn’t really do anything that the previous games hadn’t already done and it suffers from the presence of one of the most ridiculous villains I have encountered in the franchise to date. Seriously, his design looks like he walked straight out of a Final Fantasy game and he spends the entire time controlling leeches by singing opera and constantly monologuing about how much he wants revenge. Anytime he shows up it just kills the moody tone the game was trying to develop.
Despite its existence as a prequel, Resident Evil 0 struggles to provide any additional depth to the events of the rest of the series. Outside of Rebecca, the members of Bravo Team barely show up and most of them die offscreen. The game seems to make a big deal about delving into the early days of Umbrella, but all it really tells us is that Spencer had a business partner (Dr. Marcus) who discovered the T Virus, which doesn’t really feel like that big of a revelation. Especially since Marcus has pretty much the same backstory as William Birkin in Resident Evil 2 – after working on his own project in secret and becoming increasingly paranoid, the Umbrella higher-ups order his assassination and in the chaos he is infected by his own research. They could have attempted to draw this as a parallel, especially given that Birkin himself (and good old Wesker) shows up a few times, but instead it just comes across as a recycled plot line. The game also sets up Marcus as being the mastermind behind the Spencer Mansion incident, deliberately leaking the T Virus to get his revenge on Umbrella, but this just unnecessarily complicates the story of Resident Evil Remake in a way that smacks of the prequel trap of trying to explain every little detail of the original work.
And then there is the way that the game doesn’t even try to connect Rebecca’s experience here to her character in Resident Evil Remake. She starts Resident Evil 0 as a rookie who becomes increasingly adept over the course of the game until she is single-handedly taking on Tyrants…and then when Chris finds her one day later in the Spencer Mansion she’s back to being a wide-eyed rookie who’s terrified of Hunters and is for some reason missing her entire arsenal. Not to mention that she discovers so much information about Umbrella’s role in all this, as well as the existence of Tyrants and other Umbrella monsters, and she apparently just chooses not to tell Chris or anyone else about it? It’s kind of a baffling mess, and it serves to make Resident Evil 0 feel even more disconnected from the game to which it is meant to be a prologue.
*End of spoilers*
Resident Evil 0 isn’t a terrible game, but it certainly is a disappointing one. It starts out so well, with its gorgeous visual style, engaging partner mechanics, and fun and unique opening train level, but after that it quickly becomes bogged down by endless inventory shuffling and a slew of incredibly obnoxious enemies and bosses. Not to mention that its story fails to be particularly interesting as a standalone title and struggles to justify its existence as a prequel. I wanted to like this game so much – especially as a big fan of classic fixed camera angle survival horror – and there were glimmers of hope here and there, but ultimately I felt let down by the experience. At least I can now say that Resident Evil 4 is no longer my least favorite of the series. There have been rumblings and rumors that Resident Evil 0 may get the remake treatment eventually, and I hope so; if there’s one game I’ve played in the franchise that could use a reworking, it’s this one.
Survival horror and adjacent games I hope to cover (in no particular order) – Resident Evil (OG), Resident Evil 2 (OG), Resident Evil 4 Remake, Resident Evil 5, Resident Evil Revelations, Resident Evil Revelations 2, Resident Evil: Village, Amnesia: Rebirth, Amnesia: The Bunker, Tormented Souls, Tormented Souls 2, Alien Isolation, Yomawari: Midnight Shadows, The Evil Within, The Evil Within 2, Alisa, Dead Space 2, Alone in the Dark 2, Alone in the Dark 3, Alone in the Dark: The New Nightmare, Alone in the Dark (2024), Curse: Eye of Isis, Dino Crisis, Dino Crisis 2, Darkwood, ObsCure, Cold Fear, Lempo, Stasis, Stasis Bone Totem, System Shock 1 and 2, Metro 2033, Look Outside, Heartworm, Little Goody Two-Shoes, SOMA, Empty Shell, Bendy and the Ink Machine, Bendy: Lone Wolf, Bendy and the Dark Revival, Clock Tower: Rewind, White Day: A Labyrinth Called School, Condemned: Criminal Origins, Fragile Reflection, Bioshock 1, Bioshock 2, You Will Die Here Tonight, My Friendly Neighborhood, Conscript, The Callisto Protocol, Penumbra: Overture, Penumbra: Black Plague, Penumbra: Requiem, Lamentum, Outlast, Outlast 2, Carnival Massacre, Late Homework, Routine, Alan Wake 2, White Night, Onimusha, Onimusha 2, Heavy Metal Death Can, Remothered: Tormented Fathers, Remothered: Broken Porcelain, NightCry, Nightmare of Decay, Ground Zero, White Night, Still Wakes the Deep, The Chant, Maid of Sker, DreadOut, DreadOut: Keepers of the Dark, DreadOut 2, Ecstatica, Dead Format, Lorelei and the Laser Eyes, House of Necrosis, The Coma, The Coma 2, The Coma 2B, F.E.A.R., F.E.A.R. 2, F.E.A.R. 3
My Current Survival Horror Ranking:
- Resident Evil 7: Biohazard (9.5/10)
- Resident Evil Remake (9.5/10)
- Silent Hill 2 Remake (9.5/10)
- Signalis (9/10)
- Dead Space (2008) (9/10)
- Resident Evil 2 Remake (9/10)
- Sorry We’re Closed (9/10)
- Resident Evil Requiem (9/10)
- Cronos: The New Dawn (9/10)
- Resident Evil 3: Nemesis (8.5/10)
- Crow Country (8.5/10)
- Silent Hill: Townfall (8.5/10)
- Fear the Spotlight (8.5/10)
- Fatal Frame II: Crimson Butterfly Remake (8.5/10)
- Subversive Memories (8/10)
- Fatal Frame: Mask of the Lunar Eclipse (8/10)
- Silent Hill 4: The Room (8/10)
- Silent Hill f (8/10)
- Resident Evil 3 Remake (7.5/10)
- Resident Evil 4 (7/10)
- Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs (7/10)
- Amnesia: The Dark Descent (7/10)
- Alone in the Dark (1992) (7/10)
- Resident Evil 0 (6/10)
- Deadly Premonition (5/10)
Up Next: Alien: Isolation
Header image courtesy of GamesRadar.
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