Center Stage: Raccoon Police Station (Resident Evil 2)

Resident Evil can’t escape the Spencer Mansion. The sprawling, palatial manor—invented for 1996’s original Resident Evil, refined in its 2002 remake, and depicted repeatedly across the past thirty years—was a perfect setting for a horror game. A classic haunted house is already great, but this one was buttressed with a cavalcade of side rooms, tunnels, and secret labs. The labyrinthine structure of locked rooms you had to open, one by one, was great for horror and puzzle solving. It quickly become one of the most iconic locations in the entire medium; it arguably deserves an article in this very series. Tragically, I’m terrible at fixed camera horror games, so that’s probably not an option.

Since then, Resident Evil has dined out on mansions. Resident Evil 7: Biohazard has the Baker House, which was central to the game’s position as a soft reboot. There’s the castle in Resident Evil 4, which upped the size in accordance with the game’s gonzo action. Castle Dimitrescu in Resident Evil Village does something similar, though both games also have more modest manors. These areas are great and evolve the haunted house idea in their own ways. However, the most overt form of evolution, and perhaps the best, came in the very second entry. 1998’s Resident Evil 2 built something especially great, and its 2019 remake of the same name preserved and tweaked its values. These games are symbolic of the series’ ability to expand, explore, and turn on a dime, and their best settings capture those values. I should note, though, that I’m unable to play the original due to various factors, including that aforementioned difficulty with classic survival-horror. This review is primarily about the remake.

Image: Source Gaming. The giant gate to the Raccoon Police Department. It’s Claire’s only safety, and yet it feels ominous.

Both versions of Resident Evil 2 move from the Spencer Mansion to nearby Raccoon City, a Midwestern mountain town under an onset zombie apocalypse. It’s a natural evolution; you go from Night of the Living Dead to Dawn of the Dead. But for reasons technical (in the original) and stylistic (in the very faithful remake), alternate protagonists Claire Redfield and Leon Kennedy don’t spend much time in the streets. For the first half of both of their stories, they hole up in the besieged Raccoon City Police Department and desperately try to find a way out. Turns out there’s a secret exit underneath the station, and it’s got plenty of amenities for a survivalist biker or a cop on his first day. But a building meant to stand riots and bombs gets slowly overrun by a hero desperately trying to navigate its casual insanity.

“Casual insanity” was the main theme of the Spencer Mansion’s architecture. It was a building where every room was locked, every lock a puzzle, and every key something absurd like a giant bust. Capcom made a giant, vaguely house-shaped puzzle box filled with backtracking and the living dead, which aided in both the horror and, most crucially, a surreal energy that wound up powering Resident Evil’s best entries. The Department arguably takes this further. It’s not just that everything is locked; there have to be four specific locks, each patterned after a card suit, or barred with improbable one-way bolts. Rooms that should have more than one door simply don’t, or they require you to leave by jumping through a ceiling-hugging half-window. There are secret rooms and a giant industrial basement, and that’s on top of the fact that your main goal is to find three golden discs to open a door hidden underneath a giant statue in a lobby that becomes your makeshift hub. It’s like a Metroidvania walked into the campiest escape room on Earth.

Image: Source Gaming. One of the more notorious puzzles: a series of bookshelves you need to individually move to form a makeshift floor after finding a crank to move them at all.

There are so many awesomely silly puzzles. There are giant statues whose hands need to be reattached to their bodies, discs guarded by golden statues, circuit breakers with an electricity puzzle, gears to operate a clock tower (a clock tower!), and library shelves that need to be moved. There is an actual part of this game where you have to make a controlled explosion to blow up a wall to input a code to get a disk to open a door underneath a statue, and by this point we’re fully removed from the idea that this a gritty zombie game set in 1998. Or it would were there not zombified cops and wall-crawling monsters with exposed brains and prehensile tongues, all of whom seem to love getting in the way of your character and the thing they need most, like a crank to operate a shelf. Resident Evil is rightfully seen as a campy franchise, but this is actively comedic.

Resident Evil 2 does feature an explanation for why a modern American police station would be built like an escape room, and it’s pretty spectacular: it used to be an art museum. That’s it. That’s a goofy justification for a game that doesn’t need one, but it strengthens the worldbuilding and tone. The world of Resident Evil is built on an intersection of horror, weirdness, and camp. Explanations like this, or the sci-fi origins for any patently supernatural thing, are crucial to this identity. It also furthers the series’ evolving sociopolitical perspective; this institution of law and order is an unhelpful deathtrap, the seat of power for a corrupt police force that is literally eating itself alive. Silly, sure, but reasonably smart.

Image: Source Gaming. Of the non-boss enemies in the game, none are more memorable than the Licker, which moves on the ceiling and leaps across rooms.

And this doesn’t stop the danger. Another concrete element to the horror genre is unreliability, and few things capture that like a giant building where every convenience is working against you. Hallways have been blocked off but not in a way that’s actually stopped the zombie assault. The library is your main gateway to the third floor, except the floor’s busted and forces you to slowly move a set of bookshelves in its place. The cars don’t work, neither does the parking lot gate, and every damn thing seems to need an item taking up space in your tiny inventory. The remake helps by indicating the key items that no longer have a use, and the permanent inventory upgrades are a godsend, but it’s all part of this system where you’re constantly debating where you need to go, what you need to do, and how equipped you should be on your way. You probably should have a few empty slots in case you find a new doodad, but maybe you should still keep this stupid ruby you got from the third floor on hand until you find the puzzle it solves? If you find it??

That’s the tension of Resident Evil 2. There are things you absolutely need to do, and there are things that will make your escape more plausible, but they’re blocked, hard to access, or take up space you might need for something else. The pouch upgrade and the grenade launcher are so close you can almost taste them, but they’re behind windows that’ll only open to something you find on the other end of the building. You need to explore, but every nook and cranny is optional, potentially not worth the trouble, and crawling with enemies. The many fun clues and optional environmental puzzles are part of this, because they create smaller loops within the main loop of “how to get out of this deathtrap?” Every room’s an event. It’s just that experiencing each one is a risk. It’s like the boards you use to seal up open windows. They can protect you from zombies that come in otherwise, but you can’t block every window, and until you decide which window is worth boarding, they’re a waste of space.

Image: Source Gaming. Mr. X. In Claire’s story, he doesn’t even have an introductory cutscene. He’s just there.

It’s a tempest in a rapidly boiling teapot, and that’s before you meet the Tyrant. Colloquially known as “Mr. X” to fans, this trenchcoated, behatted giant of a man spends his time chasing you. It’s a great system; he searches for you in a fashion that’s largely unpredictable and untethered to the plot, and you run away the moment he hits paydirt. He chases you across halls, around the lobby, and even into save rooms. All you can do is try to shake him off and hope you’ve already unlocked a one-way shortcut nearby. Every time you hear the sound of him stomping about or smashing down a wall, it’s electrifying. It’s not perfect—the Tyrant is better about increasing the tension than the scares, and he’s a bit too aggressive in the Claire story, where his time is far more concentrated—but he’s very fun. Like the puzzles or the architecture, he mixes silliness and dread. The series has iterated on him time and again (Nemesis, El Verdugo, Jack Baker, Lady Dimitrescu, and something like four or five characters from Resident Evil 6 alone), but the extent of his procedural movement is special. The times where the plot tethers him to you are the exception.

Mr. X is a good example of what makes the two games different. What fans have chosen to call “RE2Make” is aggressively faithful, but it does go out of its way to toy with iconic moments from the original. Instead of picking Leon or Claire for the first half and playing as the other one in the second, you simply pick one for the whole go around. Save rooms may not force you to spend an ink ribbon to record your progress, but zombies can walk into them after a certain point. Headshots are reliable but not one-hit kills by a long shot. And Mr. X can hang out in the lobby, theoretically the safest space in the game and the location of the big exit. In the original, he would follow you, but not far due to the limits of the PlayStation’s processing power. Now, he can. It makes the remake a triumph by how it both preserves the original’s greatness and does things it wanted to but simply couldn’t. But that shouldn’t dismiss the value of the first Resident Evil 2, a game that evolved the survival horror genre in a number of key ways.

Image: Source Gaming. The completely useless corridors might by my favorite detail, especially as I can recall a zombie crawling out of one. It’s a perfect example of horror spaces as actively unhelpful.

The other great thing about the police station is that it does visibly change in the few hours you spend there. Zombies slowly burst through the windows you haven’t boarded up, your officer friend Marvin eventually succumbs to the infection, the rooms become both more open, and whatever safety you find erodes thanks to the Tyrant’s intrusions. The rafters are generally quiet until Lickers begin infesting it, only for them to spread to the first floor. Other zombies move from room to room. This recreates the excitement of a zombie movie, and it really hammers home how unsafe this place is. Boarding up the windows and figuring out which zombies need to be killed only helps so much.

While Leon and Claire mostly go through the same plots, each version of the story adds little changes. Leon spends more time collecting the hilarious golden discs; Claire gets them earlier, only to run afoul of horrific Police Chief Irons and get forced back to the main building. She gets to see his creepy office, while Leon gets to see a falsely imprisoned journalist get killed. Several puzzles are altered, and the remake altered several further to keep longtime fans on their toes. This goes even further in the “2nd Run,” stories showing what each hero was doing in the other person’s campaign.

Image: Source Gaming. N.E.S.T. features this gross plant room willed with plant-human zombie hybrids and a wild puzzle with chemical balancing and language decoding. It is very cool.

After each hero abandons the police station, they run afoul of a few other areas: a spooky orphanage, a sewer system, and the gargantuan science facility NEST. All of them feature similar puzzles and that loopy structure; a standout in the lab is a roundabout quest to spray acid on a room that’s been overrun with murderous plants. It’s still not quite a match. They’re good, and they do appear right when you’ve gotten everything you can out of the precinct, but they lack that lived-in quality. For how hilariously “video gamey” it is, the police station is more than just a tool for inconveniencing Claire and Leon. It feels oddly real and not just realistic. The silly party supplies for Leon’s first day, the histories of its construction, and all the little environmental puzzles give it a life that makes all the death a bit poignant. The evil laboratory doesn’t have that—perhaps it shouldn’t. Its job is to provide answers and a wildly over the top climax. After all the time you’ve spent defending a place that probably never deserved a defense, that’s well earned. But it is less impactful, and only the creepy botanical garden comes close to matching any given room in the station.

If Resident Evil can’t leave Spencer Mansion behind, it has practically stapled itself to Raccoon City. Resident Evil 3 was an interquel to RE2 that explored the escape of one of the first game’s heroes. Resident Evil 4 posited it as the series’ equivalent of 9/11, this shocking American mass murder that kicked off 21st Century geopolitics (though some Japanese supplemental materials make a reference to the actual 9/11, which is bizarre). The characters of Resident Evil 6 and Revelations regularly describe the acts of bioterrorism they witness as “just like Raccoon City.” Resident Evil Outbreak put players in the shoes of multiple survivors and demanded they work together to escape the town; Operation Raccoon City did the same thing with super soldiers. The last two live action movies, the fannish Welcome to Raccoon City and this year’s delightful horror comedy Resident Evil, found purchase in seeing it fall apart. And February’s 30th anniversary title Resident Evil Requiem brought us back to the police station, now a washed out ruin three decades later.

Image: Source Gaming. The station in the back half of Resident Evil Requiem. It doesn’t have any of the gameplay values, it is just a stop on an adventure, but it is a surprisingly poignant moment.

Despite that, I’m not sure there’s an area quite like the Raccoon Police Station in the other games. The Baker House from Resident Evil 7 does slowly get new enemies to replace the old one, but by that point you’ve mostly moved on to the other parts of the estate and only need to come back for an optional item (something Claire actually can do in her route). The hamlet in Resident Evil Village flirts at being this, but it’s just a crossroads for you to approach each main area. The version of the station from Requiem is little more than a few zombies and a lot of memories before an exceedingly goofy boss fight. Most of the buildings in the series don’t last long enough to be this or feature this specific tone, or they’re only destroyed at the end in an exciting action movie finale. You don’t really have that exact kind of stable location that stays important as it totally falls apart.

This makes the police station Resident Evil’s greatest long form take on the zombie trope of a rapidly worsening holdout. And, frankly, it accomplishes that tremendously. No area in the series so perfectly hits this combination of familiarity, confusion, and long form storytelling. The layout is a delight to master and understand, as are the many puzzles. And the one big lug in a fedora ties it all together.

Thanks to Phanah for edits.