God bless short games. One of the often unspoken rules of game design is that they’re inescapably repetitive. A game can only sustain so many mechanics and contain so much content, and all too often you find a thin coating of gameplay butter spread over a grotesquely distended slice of playtime bread.
Resident Evil 3 dares to be an opulently produced, beautifully turned out and tightly focused short game – the perfect riposte to ‘yer average bloated open-world adventure crammed full of busywork.
Naturally, it faced intense criticism for its brevity at launch, with many grousing that the remake removed certain areas from the already pretty brief 2000 original. Perhaps if I’d paid full price at launch I’d feel a little less charitable towards it, but I have a teetering stack of titles to play and review and a title I can clear off the backlog over two afternoons is basically manna from heaven.
But don’t misunderstand me, I didn’t just like Resident Evil 3 being over very quickly just because it was convenient to my schedule (though it was), it’s because this is the length that fits this story.
One awkward facet of horror games is that they so often try to emulate horror movies, though without any sense of pacing or escalation of tension. For example, according to this analysis the average length of a horror movie is a brief n’ breezy 98 minutes. That’s more than enough time to establish characters, stakes and provide a spooky narrative arc, while slowly building tension that explodes in the final moments.
Even at four or five hours long Resident Evil 3 is longer than the vast majority of horror movies, but at least it’s closer to the norm than most.
Granted there are a couple of caveats to that. I picked this up for about a tenner in a Steam sale, so perhaps if I’d have paid full price I’d have been a teeny bit put out that the game was over so fast. Also, it’s difficult to truly defend slicing out sections of the already quite short original game. Yes, it keeps the pacing nice and quick, but I did miss some of the puzzling from the original. And I feel duty-bound to wonder where Mercenaries mode is, even if like all the other Resident Evil games with it I’d play it once and then ignore it.
With a hope and a prayer I’m getting sent a Resident Evil 4 Remake code later this week to write some guides and analysis features on it, though all indications are that once again Capcom has nailed the important stuff while buffing what’s already good to a mirror sheen.
The Resident Evil 3 Remake is probably doomed to be considered something of a rush job, especially when compared to the bountiful content of its Raccoon City predecessor. But hey, I can only appreciate a big-budget blockbuster game that’s over and done with in a few hours and doesn’t have a duff sequence in it.
Pixel Hunted 