Resident Evil Month (Part 1)

October usually marks a month-long look at horror films on this blog, though the last couple years have also included horror games. Last year, in addition to our usual survey of horror, I did a deep dive into the world of Silent Hill (or at least the “canon” material and both films), which coincidentally ended up a rather timely decision with the announcement of a full series revival. This year, I planned to do the same thing with every mainline Resident Evil game (as defined by the wiki) and the most recent film, but I ran into a major snag.

Either from 20 years of continuous gaming or from two-and-a-half years of pandemic gaming, I got diagnosed with De Quervain's tenosynovitis, aka Gamer’s Thumb, a form of repetitive stress injury. In hindsight, I started feeling pain when I did the “Finkelstein Test” while playing the original Final Fantasy VII (back in summer 2020), but I didn’t listen to my body then and have had the condition since summer 2022. I’ve recovered to the point where it’s more manageable and I can play a game for up to two hours a day (with a break) depending on the genre, but the early stages were more painful, though I’ve had to play on the lowest difficulty and it partly influenced my decision to play Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days for last year’s anniversary (I had wanted to play it anyway, but its short length let me more easily play it in small chunks). All this to say that my plan to make this year “Resident Evil Month” didn’t quite pan out the way I had hoped due to a much slower gaming pace (and to please listen to your body).

In an effort to stay timely, however, we decided to make this more of a “Part 1” for the planned deep dive into Resident Evil. As such, this will cut off with at Resident Evil 4, with the plan to cover the rest of the series next year starting with Resident Evil 5. This doesn’t mean we don’t already have a good amount of content however, as you can expect to see reviews of the following:

Resident Evil HD, Resident Evil 2 (2019), Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City, Resident Evil 3 (2020), Resident Evil Code: Veronica X, Resident Evil 0 HD, Resident Evil 4 (2005) and Resident Evil 4 (2023) with the Separate Ways DLC. As an added bonus, I’ll be honoring the history of Resident Evil 4 with a rereview of the original Devil May Cry and a special all-new review of Haunting Ground (aka Demento).

I hope you enjoy this special look at Resident Evil and also that you’ll come back next time for the rest of the series. In the meantime, if there are any other games from the series that you’d like me to try to look at, feel free to leave a comment below.