// PC GAMER — GAMING
Resident Evil 2's director believes Capcom has become 'completely numb to how scary' recent games have been and wants a 'non-horror mode'
Ok, so, the zombies don't want to eat you, they just want a hug—wait, that's still scary.
When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works.
Something's wrong with me. No matter how many horror games I play, I just can't get scared like I used to. Perhaps I'm the problem—maybe a decade of playing horror games pretty much non-stop has irrevocably altered my brain chemistry.
Take Resident Evil Requiem, for example—that just doesn't make the cut for a horror game in my book. Apart from the first five minutes in the underground cells, there just wasn't anything that felt particularly scary. In fact, I don't believe that any horror game that gives me a gun can be scary, except for Amnesia: The Bunker—I genuinely thought that game was going to kill me.
Again, I find myself thinking that there's something up with my nervous system, because even Hideki Kamiya, director of Resident Evil 2, would disagree with me. He believes that Capcom has become blind to just how scary its recent games have become.
"I've never been a fan of horror. I mean, even from the time I was young, I could never handle it," Kamiya says in an interview with VGC. "I don’t like horror, and I don’t like scary things. I'm not able to make it through scary movies, and that was even the case back in the day.
"But nowadays, with how photorealistic and high-fidelity video games have gotten, the amount of crazy, horrifying things that people are able to put on the screen is absolutely insane, and I think anybody who's on the Resident Evil teams at Capcom, at this point, they must all be completely numb to how scary the thing they’re making is."
Kamiya has previously pitched a cutesy Resident Evil game, complete with Leon fishing in the countryside, foraging for wild veggies, baking bread, and walking his dog. It's either that or Capcom adding a "not scary mode" for its games, "where the zombies get all cute, the blood splatters turn into cherry blossom petals, the music becomes this upbeat, feel-good kind of tune, and you can just purely enjoy the puzzles and battles in a fun mood."
I do find it quite difficult pitching Resident Evil and others like it to my friends who won't touch horror games with a barge pole. It does seem a shame that these fantastic stories and characters are locked behind the requirement of a broken amygdala.
Keep up to date with the most important stories and the best deals, as picked by the PC Gamer team.