Even if you haven't played the 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Resident Evil 4 DLC Separate Ways yet, you might have seen various clips of it being shared online. The expansion pack features some brutal sections - not necessarily punishing by difficulty, but the vengeance they exact on failure. Separate Ways has 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:some of the goriest kills in the en𓄧tire series, and is vintage 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Resident Evil at its best. I told you all earlier in the year that you needed to play 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Resident Evil 4 because it was 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:the best horror game in existence. Now I am telling you you need to play Separate Ways to watch yourself die again and 🌠again.
I don't usually enjoy games where death is 'part of the experience'. There's nothing squeamish about it, but in gaming, death = failure, and games designed to be failed at for hours on end for that sweet taste of victory just don't land with me so much. It's why I didn't connect with Elden Ring along with the rest of the world. In Separate Ways, death is not part of the player's experience, but part of the art. There are several highly graphic death scenes for Ada, but they're executed with such cinematic flair that they become elevated above shock-jockery. We're used to video games featuring obscene violence - Leon is killed in visceral ways in the base game, while the likes of 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:The Last of Us, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Mortal Kombat, and 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:God of War also feature gruesome ends.
But these games, and Resident Evil 4 itself, are loud and nasty in their violence. They scream their bloodlust. We see skulls smashed in, arms torn off, spines ripped out - it doesn't feel real. It’s gory and 💎impressive to watch the various fatalities of Mort🌟al Kombat 1, but ultimately it's fiction. These kills are impossible, ridiculous. They are a blood-soaked amusement and nothing more. The deaths in Separate Ways are fictional in the literal sense - Ada Wong is not real and thus cannot ever truly die from our incompetence - they're real in the dedication to detail, and their focus on small moments over bombastic buckets of blood.
The death that has been getting the most traction is the laser corridor scene, which recalls the 2002 Resident Evil movie and was 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:in the original game back in 2005. Ada is trapped in a corridor of lasers that move towards her in complex patterns to be avoided. However, despite the obvious similarities to the movie, it most reminded me of 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Tomb Raider's Legend era. That's because Ada survives these sections through the proper execution of a QTE, and every button failure has a specific and deliciously cruel death scene.
But technology has moved on a lot since Tomb Raider, which means the fate awaiting Ada upon failure is far more shocking. If you are hit by these lasers, there are a variety of outcomes. In one instance, Ada steps back slightly, as if shocked, then her head crashes to the ground as the screen turns dark. In another, the top of her skull, in line with her eyes, begins to slide away slowly. There's another, non-laser scene, where Ada is trapped against the wall by a rotating blade, and the camera pans down to just her legs twitching away to death.
Some of these scenes have been 'toned down' for the remake, while others have been 'dialled up', or at least that's how it seems. But I like to think it's a little deeper than that. There are still some gorefests in regular play - Ada can be grabbed by tentacle monsters who pierce through her skull, or gunned down under fire - but there seems to have been a deliberate attempt, in these moments where the game has more control, to do things differently. In a lot of games, if a character got their head sliced off by a laser, there would be runnels of blood flooding down their neck, eyes straining, cheeks gasping and turning purple, blood sprayed from desperate teeth that gnawed at the air, and a heavy clunk and splatter as the head finally slipped off. In Separate Ways, seeing less makes it feel more real. The first time you see her head hit the floor, you're not expecting it. And while you're still mid-jump, the screen fades to black and doesn't linger. It knows its power over you.
Resident Evil has become increasingly lacking in subtlety as a series, a trend that probably started with the original Resident Evil 4. It's a strange thing to say about death via laser corridor, but it feels like Separate Ways brings that touch of subtlety back.