Lens of Challenges

Resident Evil 4 rarely keeps to one type of challenge for long, preferring constant variety seemingly out of a fear that a series of standard combat encounters would grow boring. Although the default challenge is walking into a room and trying to kill all enemies within that room there are many other types such as: survive against an infinite horde until the time runs out, boss battles, simple puzzles, fight on a moving vehicle as enemies jump on or shoot at you as you go past, defend ashley while she is on her own, as well as many other one time single use challenge ideas such as the end-game escape sequence or the QTE boss battle. Interestingly, Resident Evil 4 has an adaptive difficulty which causes less enemies to spawn the more that you die in a specific area. This leads to the difficulty adapting to fit the player’s skill level so that even inexperienced players can get that little boost in order to beat the tougher challenges.

Although the difficulty is adaptive, RE4 does get harder the further you get into it. At the start you are only facing the standard village enemies who can only slowly walk up to you to attack you with their knives and pitchforks, but the further you get into the game the more tougher and faster enemies are introduced such as giant flying bugs and mercenaries wielding miniguns. Of course if you want the game at its maximum difficulty than you can play the game again on professional mode where all enemies have more health and do more damage, ammo drops after killing enemies are far less common, QTEs are more difficult, the difficulty is no longer adaptive, and you can no longer purchase the tactical vest which was the singular piece of armor you could get in the game.

All in all looking at the challenges throughout the game there is only one type and one sub-type I don’t think adds to the fun of the game. Firstly, Resident Evil 4 was one of the main games to popularize the use of Quick Time Events in cutscenes. This was not a good thing. Suddenly ambushing the player in the middle of a cinematic by yelling at them to press a button in an extremely short window of time, with the punishment for losing being repeating the whole scene over again was frankly terribly game design and I’m baffled that some games still pull this nonsense. My other gripe is very personal, but it had me stuck for ages so I’m going to complain. One of the puzzles you have to complete is one of those sliding block puzzles where one piece is missing and you can slide any nearby tile into that blank space, where the goal is to get all the tiles to their correct positions. I hate this type of puzzle, they are impossible, and anyone who knows how to solve them is either a magician or a liar. Overall, the challenge design and placement is a masterclass of the genre and is one of the main reasons the game is still amazing to this day.