As I suplexed my way through the Resident Evil 4: Chainsaw Demo last week, I couldn't shake the feeling of déjà vu. Taking in Los Ganados' village on modern hardware for the first time, I was overwhelmed by the feeling that I had done all of this before, and recently.
However, I haven’t played it recently – I experienced Capcom's masterpiece for the first and only time way back in 2016, playing the GameCube version on Wii. It was one of the first games I played as I got back into the hobby after college. Three jobs, two presidents, and a pandemic later, that playthrough isn't especially fresh in my mind.
The feeling of déjà vu was strong, I think, because of how much 2021's Resident Evil Village drew from Resident Evil 4 for inspiration. Now that Capcom is updating the original, it feels like RE4 is borrowing the influence back. For a small example, the original Resident Evil 4 didn't give Leon the ability to crouch. If you wanted to avoid enemies, you needed to run by without being seen. But the remake, borrowing from Village (and its sole first-person predecessor 7), includes the ability to stealth around and sneak up on The Ganados. The years, it seems, have loosened Leon's jeans.
Like RE4, Village included a moment for its hero to fight his way through a horde of monstrous creatures in a rural village near the beginning. Resident Evil 4 Remake's UI is nearly identical to Village, so as you pace through the cottages looking for weapons and herbs, the button prompts look extremely similar. More than that, though, the two games share a broader aesthetic.
Compare the villages from 4 Remake and Village and you'll see a lot of the same objects showing up. Ominous trees, dark brown doors, breakable barrels, pots of soup, rotting animals with wounds that indicate violent deaths, wooden cabinets, barred doors. They're in both of these games and, as Resident Evil 4 brings those things back in the shared graphical style that all the Resident Evil games since 7 have adopted, it's hard not to feel like we did this just two years ago.
The good news is that Resident Evil 4 doesn't stay in the village. Even then, some of the places that Resident Evil 4 goes were remixed by Village. Both games have a sprawling ornate castle and both feature a fight against a lake monster. They have their differences, to be sure. Village had a hide-and-seek game with a giant gooey baby, and Resident Evil 4 has Village beat in the mine cart ride department. Resident Evil 4 ends with Leon and Ashley riding a Skidoo, while Village has the one and only Lady Dimitrescu.
Capcom found smart ways to retool Resident Evil 4 in Village, and it has its share of memorable, iconic moments. But, it's hard not to feel like the publisher kind of ate its own lunch by releasing a game that drew so heavily from Resident Evil 4 less than two years before a remake of the same game.