Resident Evil Won’t Be Robust Until It Fully Embraces The Evil Within

Highlights

• Resident Evil could benefit from incorporating more intense stealth gameplay inspired by The Evil Within.
• The Evil Within showcases the effective use of limited resources and lethal enemies to encourage stealth, which is something Resident Evil can learn from.
• It will be interesting to see if Resident Evil embraces creative liberties for stealth mechanics in future installments.

Resident Evil has a bright future ahead of it. Whether the rumors of Capcom remaking Resident Evil 0 and Code: Veronica are true or not, the franchise is tremendously healthy and its mainline installments haven’t been so revitalized in a long time. There are some who prefer the retro classics to the modern era as there always inevitably will be, but that’s what makes the series so enduring and popular within every generational era that it’s had to adapt to since its humble beginnings with tank controls and fixed camera angles.

Resident Evil hasn’t been coy about the external inspirations it wears on its sleeve lately and if it truly wanted to embellish an ordinarily ubiquitous feature the franchise has largely only dabbled with it wouldn’t have to look far. Indeed, even though The Evil Within came afterward and had inevitable inspirations drawn from Resident Evil due to its director, Shinji Mikami, being the latter’s series creator, Resident Evil should now pull from The Evil Within’s well with regard to intense stealth gameplay.

Resident Evil Has Yet to Dig into Stealth as Much as Action

To be clear, stealth has always technically been a part of Resident Evil. How big a part it plays and in which entry varies, and by no means is Resident Evil considered a stealth-oriented series rather than an action-oriented one, but it’s certainly apparent.

Stealth played its biggest role in the mainline series via
Resident Evil: Revelations 2
, as well as in
Resident Evil 6
, but even without the ability to crouch players have been able to sneak by enemies as far back as the original
Resident Evil
.

Before the Resident Evil 4 remake, the Resident Evil 2 remake came close to a more modern take on stealth with Sherry Birkin’s playable sequence in the orphanage, which allows players to crouch out of sight behind environmental obstacles they can also crouch under and around. Resident Evil 4’s remake then made stealth a prominent feature, though it still isn’t quite as viable as simply circumventing enemies or gunning them down.

The Evil Within Should Be Resident Evil’s Stealth Gameplay Blueprint

Therefore, in terms of Resident Evil having full-blown stealth mechanics that are preferable to every other available option in Resident Evil’s survival horror, it has never come close to what The Evil Within has been able to achieve. The Evil Within and its sequel unmistakably possess the same hectic action that a Resident Evil title does and yet when players must also contend with managing Sebastian Castellanos’ stamina along with resources and ammunition there are many more threats to assess and stealth becomes a highly encouraged route.

One easy lesson Resident Evil could learn from The Evil Within to make its stealth gameplay more effective is to grossly restrict how much ammunition players have. Likewise, level design is an important consideration; if Leon and Claire could crouch in the Resident Evil 2 remake, for instance, it would’ve been neat to see them be able to lose Mr. X in the RPD lobby as they duck below the reception counter and silently loop him.

Enemies being more lethal would also do the trick since players would knowingly spare what little ammunition they’ve been harboring and sneak around them instead, which The Evil Within successfully ingrains in players as early as the sadist butcher encounter at the beginning of the game. The Evil Within also sets players up for more stealth kill opportunities than recent Resident Evil games have.

It’ll be interesting to see if elaborate stealth mechanics are more prevalent from now on in Resident Evil since the most recent remake seemed to punctuate such gameplay, and the giveaway for if that’s a direction Capcom is willing to explore will be if stealth is reprised in a big way in the next mainline entry. If so, Resident Evil can actually afford to embrace such creative liberties and perhaps engage with stealth as much as The Evil Within does, whereas the original Resident Evil 4 never demanded the stealth mechanics the remake gave to it.