When Resident Evil arrived on the scene in 1996, no one could have predicted the impact it would have on the industry and artform of video games. While the game did not manifest whole cloth with zero precedent, the specific expressions of its foundations were themselves codified for the first time in punched-up, concrete terms: the age of "survival horror" had come. As an early pioneer in the genre it popularized, the history of Resident Evil thus exists at a slant in relation to everything it subsequently inspired--when bright-eyed and bushy-tailed aspirants were gearing up to have their turn at the wheel, the innovator itself had settled, in the eyes of many, into a reliable routine at best, and a desperate search for an out at worst. The six games of the series's original incarnation can then be roughly observed in terms of their common reputations: on one hand, there are the unassailable classics comprising one half (Resident Evil, Resident Evil 2, Resident Evil for GameCube) and what remains consists of games with troubled and divisive natures--inconclusively so depending on who you talk to but consistent enough as a refrain to put together that in its latter day, the shine was off of Resident Evil, and with the passage of time, evolving design trends and audience expectations were leaving it behind. It's in this contrasting crucible of waning series relevancy and ostensible genre heyday where a game that straddled the line between the series's past and its future came to be: Resident Evil - Code: Veronica.
Code: Veronica was conceptualized as the natural next step from Resident Evil 2 in basic narrative terms in that it follows the continuing adventures of Claire Redfield, one of that game's dual protagonists. This is the connecting tissue that Resident Evil had cultivated ever since it turned from a game into a series, where characters would return, reference encounters with each other even across games, react to and navigate the wider machinations of their shared world and generally contribute to a shared sense of mythology that enrichened the sense of emotional investment that players had put into the stories over the years. Code: Veronica is notable in how it's foundationally intertwined with the history of the series, even directly reactionary to it, but it was the first instance of said story widening its umbrella from the confines of the Midwestern backdrop of the dearly departed Raccoon City. This expanded context acts a prelude to the future direction of the series, which would turn the narrative into a veritable globetrotter, but in here the move away from American metropolitan suburbia to isolated oceanic island compounds, gothic-romantic retreats and sterile research stations gives way to relatively culturally contextless visions of economic remove and ostentatious sophistication, handily avoiding the pervasive cultural stereotyping and racism later entries in the series would be characterized by. The demonizations of Code: Veronica are by definition old money privilege and pedigree, which is as hard a contrast to where the series eventually went as could possibly be conceived.
The game's world is realized by another facet that defines Code: Veronica as an idiosyncratic inbetweener in the series's larger context: it's the first and only time the series in its original form moved away from the largely static pre-rendered backgrounds that had so firmly become synonymous with itself. The benefits of such a divergence are immediately called attention to and emphasized by the game, as every environment bolsters its atmospheric framing--an inherent allure and advantage of carefully curated presentation in games like this--with pursuing pans and tilts of the camera's view. A sense of voyeurism is often present in horror works, and here the dynamic watchfulness of the game's inner eye heightens the psychological unease in ways that hard screen transitions could not achieve. Real-time 3D has other boons to bestow on the atmospherics that are so instrumental in anchoring the series to its identity: lighting is now a factor with a sense of dynamism that previously could not be realized, as the very handling of a mobile light source casts the environments in its dancing flames and even keeps creatures like bats at bay, bridging the presentational and the practical. At the same time, the rendering of all the game's environments and objects in real-time instead of pre-created backdrops in one sense reduces the amount of minute detail possible free from processing power considerations, but the new sense of tactile physicality to Code: Veronica's world and the way the people in it interact with it creates an altogether fresh wrinkle on the experience of combing and rummaging through these puzzle-box settings.
In structural terms, the game again falls somewhere inbetween the series's holistic past, not quite reflective of any singular aspect of it but making its own extrapolations to create an impression of its own. Resident Evil built its identity on the looping exploration of interconnected megastructures that simultaneously prodded players to find out what was behind the next corner even as they dreaded the potential answer. If this level of engagement ever wore thin through familiarity and iteration, then the games could be transformed into a sort of razor-sharp, execution-emphasizing and route-planning-involving time attack challenge by those seeking a new way to engage with the compelling macroenvironmentalism. This was as interesting as it was because it was largely supported by the dominant layout design of the first two games--large multifloored labyrinths encouraging optimization of traversal and enemy engagement both, and allowing enough freedom to shake up and modify a personal approach. In Code: Veronica, the environments on their own are likely more labyrinthine and convoluted than ever, leading to a pleasing sense of discombobulation, but with the added specificity of their layouts each trek through them remains largely static and does not allow for much experimentation on part of the player. In this way, and with the relative spatial sprawl between each node of the journey, the game integrates aspects of all three preceding games into its makeup, and even as the particularities can chafe they're also the reason for the unique setpiece-heavy yet thoroughly granular balance of environmental progression and interaction the game professes.
The common parlance is "survival horror", but the realities of Resident Evil have always been truer with the latter than with the former. Outside of specific bonus modes and higher difficulty settings of a given few games, the series's emphasis on survival through resource scarcity has mostly been effectively conveyed artifice and illusion by the oppressive tension the games project and suffuse themselves with. Code: Veronica does not deviate from the precedent and regularly provides ammunition and restoratives in such droves that the entire game could comfortably be approached as a shooting gallery, instead of just the telegraphed end of RE games as is the player habit-derived custom. One of the factors that contributes to the absurd surplus of supplies is the presence of the combat knife, that often ignored and maligned starting accessory of the series. In Code: Veronica, the knife forms the backbone of any frugal explorer's tactics, as its complete overhaul from a pro player's bragging rights tool to an utter zombie disabler ensures that even in relatively unskilled hands its use dissuades one from any notions of game balance as far as the ratio of supplies to enemies goes, as the mere concept simply evaporates on the spot. This is not a bad thing, as further conservation still demands a degree of finesse and added risk in contrast to idle unloading, and changes the dynamic between player and enemy as traditionally the series has been about engaging enemies from afar. With the real-time 3D locales there's even a freshly added wrinkle that is surprising in its meticulous consideration for positioning in a game of this era: the knife will rebound and be interrupted in its slashing arc if it connects with part of the scenery, foiling the best-laid plans of aspirant zombie-slicers. These aspects among others continue the series's always-present trajectory into more action-oriented contexts even as they preserve the foundational methods of conveying them.
Code: Veronica is heavily invested in the larger-than-life personalities of its cast, and as such in addition to the returning faces, its new introductions merit examination. Chiefly, Claire is menaced throughout the game by Alfred Ashford, scion and acting patriarch of the Umbrella, Inc.-founding Ashford family, the history of whom forms most of the game's backdrop and context in the larger Resident Evil tapestry. Alfred is the one part of the game's storytelling where it falters and falls prey to lazy and offensive queer coding in villainy, with the added dimension of mixing in some good old conflations of mental illness and sadistic personality traits with queerness as either their cause or effect, into one big queerphobic caricature. This is a shame for obvious reasons, but also in light of Alfred being a ton of fun whenever he appears, acted to snooty pitch-perfection and delicious rolling of his rs, so even as one is entertained by his antics there has to come an acknowledgement of where parts of those theatrics come from and what associations they play into. The counterpart to Alfred in this regard is Steve Burnside, not so much for how he's depicted by the game, but for the audience reactions to him. Steve is, by a wide margin, one of the most universally reviled Resident Evil characters ever created, and the reasons for that are as depressing as they are transparent. With his boyish good looks; "effeminate" personal accoutrements like prominent choker, low neckline and ornate wristbands; emotional issues stemming from parental relationships and friction; and a high-pitched tone of voice complemented by an impetuous bearing, Steve carries with him a ton of queer, non-heteronormative signifiers and interacts with masculinity in ways that mainstream culture and especially video game audiences have no interest in meeting on their own terms or even allowing to exist. Thus Steve stands as the game's other queerphobic and gender-essentialist monument, but this one erected and maintained wholly by the players themselves.
Tone and thematic content was always a defining aspect of Resident Evil, right from the very beginning as it fashioned itself after B-movie suspense and espionage, aptly melding those aspects with gestures towards body horror and haunted house thrills until the concoction was so palbably its own that future derivations could pattern themselves after itself wholesale instead of referencing root influences. The affection that exists in the minds of players for the series's narratives is shaped by a sometimes pitying or embarrassed undercurrent in how they're regarded--a sensation of laughing at them rather than with them. Code: Veronica's evolution of these principles results in what I can only call an operatic farce, home to grandstanding and plotting aplenty, with an unforeseen commitment to over-the-top panache. No person in the game approaches a conversation as a casual chance of interacting with one another; every scene is full of declaiming intent, sneering at fated foes and confessions of doomed love. Resident Evil 4 is commonly credited as adjusting the series's tone from awkward and stilted earnestness to self-aware malarkey and witticisms, but in Code: Veronica the series experienced its defining statement towards a kooky camp sensibility tempered by the intertextual trappings and character interactions that were so compelling about the games in the first place. Even aspects that the series came to drag around as an eventual burden like the Wesker/Chris courtship dance charm here in their nascent vivacity, and technical leaps like the introduction of motion capture play enormously well with the giant mirths and melancholies of the characters. It's all tied together by a soundtrack operating in perfect unison with both the series's past works by Masami Ueda and others, and in relation to the tonal aspirations relevant here. Takeshi Miura plays the heartwrenching soapy drama to its utmost even as the area themes contribute to the playful morbidity of the environments while absurd paeans to military heroism underscore Chris's character in ways that his upstanding demeanor never could on its own. There's a consistency and a confidence in a tonal message and execution here, and in my mind it's the most compelling Resident Evil ever got on the merits of its narrative approach.
I think that is what Code: Veronica leaves me with: in its historical context and the series's messy development background, it's not by many definitions the "last" Resident Evil of its kind, but in many ways it stands as a kind of ultimate expression of all the ideas and themes that were pumped into the series at the time of its creation and even in the years beyond. Even as it extends its hand towards the past, it's firmly transitional in how it treats those concepts and teeters over the precipice, looking ahead. Other games would pick up its torch and carry it onward, but it's that exact betwixt existence that makes it so memorable and valuable as both an evolutionary culmination and harbinger.
