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Undoubtedly the most desperate moment I’ve ever experienced playing a video game wasn’t explicitly scripted or designed by a developer — it was an emergent, spontaneous player-narrative event. You know how most horror movies have a part where one guy knows he’s cornered by the monster, so he turns around and blindly rushes it before getting ripped apart? I lived that moment once in Resident Evil 4.
After a dozen runs on normal difficulty, most of them with extra items taking much of the danger out of the game, one day I finally dredged up the balls to start Professional (hard) mode. Right from the beginning the game re-asserted its position as one of the most intense pieces of entertainment media in recent years. This was true most of all during the ordeal with the Verdugo — arguably the game’s most dangerous boss.
For those that don’t remember, the Verdugo was that nigh-invincible thing you fought in the castle sewers — the “right hand man.” And if you haven’t played RE4, this is a boss whose normal claw swipe could decapitate you instantly. Unless you froze him with liquid nitrogen, he was the only character in the game with high enough defense to withstand a hit from the rocket launcher.
I’d heard stories of how Professional-mode players had to die enough times for RE4’s dynamic difficulty to make him actually killable. The conventional wisdom is that if you don’t have a rocket launcher, don’t try to kill him — just try to survive for four minutes until the elevator arrives. Even though I didn’t have a rocket launcher, I thought I could kill him with the help of an upgraded Broken Butterfly Magnum.
Didn’t happen.
A few minutes, nitrogen tanks, and every last bullet I had later, he was still alive. Next option? Uh…run down the sewer towards the elevator room and knock down more nitrogen tanks on the way? Maybe I’d almost killed him and these last few submachine-gun rounds I found could finish him off, right?
Wrong.
I found myself in the last room with the elevator — which hadn’t arrived yet — and absolutely nothing left on me. A table was pretty much the last thing separating us. I knew I was going to die.
It wasn’t like the usual video-game death, where you make a mistake and instantly pay for it. I actually had a few seconds to contemplate how royally screwed I was. As Verdugo took a step towards me I took out my knife, all like “let’s do this man!” realizing that I’d seen this moment before in a dozen horror movies.
Then the elevator opened up behind me.
Resident Evil 4 is one of my favorite games, because it wasn’t just able to provide me with moments that were scary or intense but also truly desperate. So many games these days pamper you with lots of guns, regenerating health, and generous save systems. Horror games today just try to scare you with ugly enemies but still give you an excess of firepower with which to kill them. It's only the times when you honestly don't think you're going to make it, when you really believe you have no hope, that the potential for real horror emerges. Resident Evil 4 is the only game to achieve this for me.
That Verdugo duel wasn’t even the climax of intensity for my Professional mode campaign of RE4. After again draining nearly all my ammo on the Krauser fight, I had to use what I had left on the kneecaps of enemies so I could run away during the last parts of the game. I still had to beat the final boss with nothing other than the knife.
My reward: The ultimate horror…a corrupted memory card.