Big Baddies Breakdown: Del Lago (Resident Evil 4 (2005 and 2023))

In Big Baddies Breakdown, Wolfman Jew analyzes all sorts of boss fights across the games industry. The catch: one boss per game. Many of these are brilliant, some of them poor. Several show technical polish, while others tell stories through their fights. But all are worthy of discussion.

Who doesn’t love Del Lago? The first boss of Resident Evil 4 is a triumphant, delightful bit of fun. As a highlight in a game filled with almost nothing but, the horrifying lake monster stayed with the players who fought it back in 2005. And RE4’s 2023 remake of the same name made sure to treat the grotesquerie with just as much care. The monster in both games is a perfect stop in the story’s first main act, when action movie hero Leon Kennedy finds himself bedeviled with the creature during a boat trip across its home. From when I first played the original around seventeen years ago to when I first played the remake this month, it’s always brought a smile to my face. It’s the kind of sequence that highlights the brilliance of Resident Evil, a franchise that juggles terror, gore, and camp to make a horror aesthetic that can’t be topped.

Image: Source Gaming. The “clearest” first image of Del Lago—unsurprisingly, you never get a good look at it. Getting good pictures in both games was a bit of a challenge.

But here’s the thing with Del Lago: yes it is a standard bearer, and yes it does help set the tone for Resident Evil 4, and yes it’s entirely in keeping with the game’s many virtues. But it’s also a complete outlier. Like, a hundred percent. The mechanics used in the battle are entirely unique to it, the pace is abnormal, and narratively, it’s kind of untethered and weird. It’s situated minutes before another boss who’s no less iconic, and if you consider the famous “village fight” as a boss battle in all but name (which I do), then it doesn’t even get to really be the first one. So how could this work as well as it does? How does it set the standard for every one of the legion of backwoods monstrosities to come?

Image: Source Gaming. Del Lago is even less clear in the remake; it appears so quickly in the cutscene that I could not reliably capture it on Xbox. The best of its profile you can get is during the sequence where it rushes to you (something taken directly from the first game).

Of course, that’s what’s great about it. The abnormalcy is exciting; it feels overwhelming and threatening. And that’s the point.

In Chapter 3 of both Resident Evils 4 (“Resident Evil 4s?” “Residents Evil 4?”), Leon has to go to the lake to get a key to a church. That’s standard for the series and most horror games; there’s one obvious immediate door, but unlocking it forces you through the most roundabout way possible. “Roundabout” really is the word, as you’re forced to fight over stilt bridges and a nasty marsh to reach the lake, the edge of the remote Spanish time capsule you could call a village. And in both games, when you first get close there’s an option to zoom in on a grisly scene: two cultists dropping one of Leon’s doomed police escorts into the deep. Some sort of… shape soon eats it, your first real clue beyond a bit of vague flavor text. But the lake monster’s shape isn’t much more defined when you fight it. You see its disgusting mouth and hide, but everything else gets naught but fleeting glimpses.

Previous Resident Evil games also foreshadowed their biggest bosses with cutscenes, lore, and spooky effects. And plenty of those bosses were designed to not be fully or perfectly visible. But Del Lago feels truly alien. It hits an odd midway point between being a gross monster and being a force of nature. Its very name—literally ”of the lake,” as though it’s the water given form—evokes this. Surprisingly, none of the successive bosses, whether El Verdugo or Krauser or “It’ or Mendez, replicate this feeling. RE4 has an odd War on Terror-era mixture of early Lovecraft and classic European folklore, where this supervillain from seemingly out of nowhere plots world domination by using parasites to mutate humans, dogs, and suits of armor into abominations from another time. Del Lago is just the one that hits the Lovecraft side the most. It’s unknowable, to the point where having official character renders that show its whole body is kinda strange.

Of course, you can’t have proper Lovecraft without some water, and Del Lago’s namesake does a lot of the work here. The lake is dour, like everything else in the games’ world, but there’s a beauty in that. The new version is absolutely gorgeous in a more traditional way, with exquisite water and lighting effects that sell it as a real space. But the 2005 one is no slouch either. Its browns and murky water are part of what makes Resident Evil’s gritty yet exaggerated house style work. In both iterations, you feel as though you’re boating over the deepest, blackest, most threatening body of water on the planet. The realistic graphics just highlight how insane and demented everything is.

Image: Source Gaming. It’s a very simple boss fight in practice: avoid the junk in the water and don’t miss your shots. Kind of arcade-y, in a way that foreshadows the shooting gallery.

However different it is tonally, though, is fairly mild to the sudden gameplay changeup. Against every other boss, Leon’s on foot with his guns, diminishing ammo supply, and very useful combat knife. That’s the game. The Del Lago fight eschews this by sticking him on a tiny boat with nothing but a thankfully unlimited supply of harpoons. An errant rope on the boat gets tied to some part of the monster’s body, so all you do is chuck spears at it and occasionally push your craft out of the way of debris. After all, the last thing you want to be is stuck treading water…

Image: Source Gaming. In the remake, your boat has a health bar, but the original knocks Leon out of the boat with every hit—perfect for the boss to swallow him whole.

It’s very fun, especially after spending all this time acclimating to the gameplay. Both versions of Resident Evil 4 have crackerjack combat; you’re constantly figuring out which precious resources to spare and how best to fight off angry mobs (the remake is one of only a few games to really nail crafting by making each flashbang or pack of shells matter). But not here. Suddenly you’re pitted against a solitary foe, just one who’s literally so massive that it’s hard to figure out whether it’s supposed to be a giant mutated frog or a giant mutated salamander. Your firearms are worthless, and your only defense is a dramatic gameplay shift. The ending of the battle, where Leon passes out from his parasitic infection, is memorable as well for how low it cuts him after an otherwise empowering victory.

That’s what Resident Evil 4 sold from the start. Its crazed, tight shooting was a response to the franchise feeling more iterative and less essential after five mainline entries within just eight years. It was desperate to become something new, and its conclusion was to become a playable action movie—one of the most gloriously action-heavy games of its day—that reimagined the entire third-person shooter to still fit within the broader survival horror genre. Ammo became more plentiful, and more enemies existed to soak it up, but they were violent mobs that took more initiative in carving you up. Every attack cut away at your health, and playing conservatively only helped a bit. So within that space of serving horror and action, having a sudden gameplay shakeup makes sense. You can barely move your boat and have almost no way to avoid the indomitable Del Lago, plus you get to stab a giant lake monster to death, and what third-person shooters had that in 2005?

Image: Source Gaming. The basic mechanic of picking up, aiming, and throwing the harpoon. It’s appropriately a bit different than the aiming in the main game.

This experience is just one of dozens that Resident Evil 4 throws out and its remake dutifully follows. There’s all the other boss fights, the catapults, the rubbery and ghastly Regeneradores, the village and cabin shootouts, that one room with the rotating flamethrowers… Several of these were cut from the new version for time and production costs, though they were mostly readded as part of the Separate Ways expansion. And a few, like a zany mine cart ride, were actually expanded, or at least replaced with exciting new things. All of them created this pair of rollicking cinematic adventures in which Leon would stumble onto some new insanity every chapter.

Image: Source Gaming. One fun addition to the remake is that the lake feels a bit more tied to the setting. It’s your first glimpse of Salazar’s Castle, but even the flame in this image is from a lantern on the dock you leave.

The boating mechanic is used once and then never returns. In both games Leon can drive across the lake and keep throwing harpoons, but there’s nothing but fish to throw them at. Every other time a body of water comes into play, it’s either as an obstacle, decoration, or the setting of the finale’s hilarious jet ski escape sequence. This high profile feature exists solely to power a single boss fight before being put away. That’s a challenge in game design, especially these days. It’s an investment to make an entirely new kind of gameplay that’s fleeting. If the remake wasn’t so faithful to the original and the fight so iconic, I could imagine it being an easy feature to axe.

That it never happens again is good for both of the games’ genres. Action fans don’t have to deal with “impromptu lake spear battle” becoming a trope that wears itself out, and horror fans can enjoy fretting over whether something this disquieting will reappear—and if it doesn’t, what’ll take its place. For all that they’re often diametrically opposed genres, action and horror follow a lot of the same rules. You need constant tension, surprise, and hard-won relief. RE4 strings that dichotomy like the flamenco guitar that starts off the adventures, to the point where the original inadvertently killed survival-horror for a decade. But we’re now in the blissful gaming utopia of 2023, where both games can stand alongside dozens of more traditional horror experiences.

But there’s one last question: as two battles, as two games, as two experiences made almost two decades apart, what are the differences between the two Del Lago fights? I suppose the original one still feels a bit more “vital,” like the game itself, but that’s perhaps inevitable. RE4 (2005) influenced so many games that fights like this in the years since always felt somewhat iterative, and RE4 (2023) is one of those games and actively faithful to the experience of the original. Graphically, of course, the new one’s sumptuous and a lot more vibrant, though I don’t think that’s inherently better. Resident Evil is one of the few series to really nail the appeal of gritty, realistic horror, and the drabness fits the setting. This is a depressing bit of rural Spain that was doing poorly long before Los Illuminados started forcing the people into its parasite cult. The browns and grays are as good in the first game as they weren’t in its countless imitators. So both look great in their own ways.

Image: Source Gaming. The ending in both games has Leon pass out due to this infection from las plagas, the parasite at the center of the game’s cult. It deliberately limits the satisfaction of killing what was at the time Resident Evil‘s most oversized boss.

Another thing the original is known for? Quick time events. There are two button prompts during the fight: one to make Leon paddle to the boat every time he gets thrown out lest he get swallowed whole, and one to make him cut a rope that inconveniently binds his ankle to Del Lago’s swiftly sinking corpse. The remake instead opts to give the boat a health bar that gets cut each time something rams into it. There is actually one prompt whose failure ends in an instant death, but it’s very easy to miss—it took until my fourth or fifth time doing the fight, right before publication just to get the above screenshot, to discover it. It’s also much easier to do than its eighteen-year-old forbears, complete with a bar showing how much longer you need to keep pressing. Generally, that’s how the quick time events work in the new game, and it’s probably for the best. Required QTEs that kill you if you fail are an understandable thing of the past, though classic RE4 employed them better than any other game at the time. It is a bit sad that the remake doesn’t have that final scare right after the boss’s death, but it’s a fair concession in the name of more accessible design. The quick time events it does have are more generous, less painful, and simpler across the board (though I never got a handle on the parrying). No extensive button mashing here.

Image: Source Gaming. Leon’s frantic quick time event in the original is him escaping a situation not unlike e slasher villain’s final jump scare.

That’s one of several quality of life additions the remake adds, a standard among modern Capcom games. Not that instant kills are bad for survival-horror or RE4, which has them aplenty in both iterations, but it’s alright to limit them here when the mechanics are so different. Moving the boat is a bit easier, as is aiming. The sudden new controls are always on screen, though you can remove them for the fancy Photo Mode. These things make the game a bit easier to engage with in general, though some of its scares are ratcheted up and its resources pared down to compensate. That’s the general direction. Every tweak is complemented with another tweak, all held together with reverence. Thanks to that both experiences feel vital and distinct, even if the new one is slightly more immediately accessible.

But forget comparisons. One may be a bit more interesting, and one may be a bit more fun, but I’m certainly not going to thumb my nose at either. They are both wonderful boss fights from wonderful games. In all things, Resident Evil 4 is a masterpiece—both of them. And that extends to its possibly strangest boss of all. Del Lago rules. It and its fights are collectively a masterstroke of horror that helped Resident Evil reimagine its scares, its threats, and even its deeply needed camp. The ways it deviates are part of that, as is its sudden one-off mechanics and oddball tone. And thankfully, it’s also an example of how two takes on the same story can each produce something special.