Resident Evil Devs Admit They’ve Become So Used to Horror They Can No Longer Tell If Their Games Are Scary

We’ve made so many Resident Evil games that we honestly can’t tell anymore whether something’s scary until we show it to others. Before the first Resident Evil Requiem demos at Summer Game Fest and Gamescom, we were genuinely nervous — what if the game isn’t scary at all?

I think you can broadly classify Resident Evil titles on a scale of how much they're like Resident Evil 2 or Resident Evil 4. Resident Evil 7 was definitely on the 2 side of that, as it returned to survival horror roots and was very acclaimed for that. Resident Evil Village built on that and added in more action and gunplay and brought it toard the RE4 side of that particular scale. But if we kept going in that direction there's almost an inflation effect, where you have to keep adding more and more action to outdo the previous title, and by doing that you ultimately end up where Resident Evil 5 and 6 went, and although they're still great games, the general consensus is that they pushed Resident Evil so far in the action direction that it was no longer horror. I didn't want to have to do that with Resident Evil's ninth title where I just tried to outdo the action in Village and ended up making something I didn't want to make. Firmly swinging the scale toward the Resident Evil 2 style was our intention, and it's almost an upgrade of that Resident 2 style.