Anime take on Resident Evil 4 is creepier than non-anime Resident Evil 4
Watch cheerful anime Leon cop a hatchet in the skull.
When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
Horror always dabbles in childhood imagery for scares: it’s whycreepy dolls,animatronic toysandhorrible sentient toys that hug you to deathare basically genre cliches. So it’s not particularly surprising that Resident Evil 4’s latest promotional trailer pillages the breezy sanctity of children’s anime towards its own grizzly ends. I’ve played the RE4Chainsaw demoand can confirm that this trailer is much, much creepier.
Dubbed ‘Leon and the Mysterious Village’, the one minute romp has a gun-toting, baby-faced Leon wandering around a quaint Spanish countryside in search of Ashley. Starry-eyed and naive, Leon approaches a group of folksy locals to ask after Ashley, but I think you know where this is going: a guy with tentacles growing out of his back whacks the poor boy in the head with a hatchet. Damn! Mum would never have let me watch this.
It doesn’t tell you anything about the game, really, though it does feature adorable anime versions of some of Resident Evil 4’s most memorable foes—burlap sack guy is there, tentacle head guy is there, and massive-spikes-for-hands guy is there. It’s probably the best promotional video I’ve seen since thatDark Souls 3 one, which turnedFromSoftware’s cerebral RPG into a schlocky ’80s horror film.
Resident Evil 4 remake releases on March 24, but reviews dropped late last week.Richard Stanton dug it, even if he wasn’t quite as hyperbolic as some other outlets. “Resident Evil 4 re-invented thirdperson action, and ever since it came out I’ve been waiting for another game to blow the bloody doors off in the way it did,” he wrote. “But this is not the heir to Resident Evil 4, so much as a tribute.”
But while you wait, why not sit back and imagine what a full-length anime based on RE4 might look like. I’d kinda prefer to see RE7 made into an anime, but maybe that’d betoocreepy.
The biggest gaming news, reviews and hardware deals
Keep up to date with the most important stories and the best deals, as picked by the PC Gamer team.
Shaun Prescott is the Australian editor of PC Gamer. With over ten years experience covering the games industry, his work has appeared on GamesRadar+, TechRadar, The Guardian, PLAY Magazine, the Sydney Morning Herald, and more. Specific interests include indie games, obscure Metroidvanias, speedrunning, experimental games and FPSs. He thinks Lulu by Metallica and Lou Reed is an all-time classic that will receive its due critical reappraisal one day.
Terrifyingly good Humble Bundle deal nets you 11 Resident Evil games for less than the price of Resi 4 remake
I spent the last week roaming the Spencer Mansion and I’m here to tell you not to sleep on the new GOG release of 1996’s Resident Evil
The best Black Ops 6 map for XP grinding finally got a 24/7 playlist, so you know what to do
