Nightmare Fuel / Resident Evil 2 (Remake)

WARNING: Per wiki policy, Spoilers Off applies to Nightmare Fuel pages. All spoilers will be unmarked.

Open wide and say "AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHH!!"

With the highly-detailed RE Engine and various changes made, the remake amped up the Nightmare Fuel that Resident Evil 2 originally demonstrated.

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• The remake's announcement trailer has a rat's point of view (until it gets crushed, that is) where a cop apprehends a man, which is actually a zombie who overpowers the poor schmuck. Then we see the zombie feasting on the dead man, and this is easily some of the most detailed gore in the franchise. The released game did not disappoint. Especially because you get to see the scene where the zombie has torn the man's throat out from the A-Scenario character's perspective.
• The opening cutscene that sets the mood for the game features a trucker going about his business and driving down a dark road during a rain storm. He is distracted for just a moment when his radio goes out (in the middle of a caller describing a zombie, no less) when, suddenly, he hits a woman that wondered onto the street. The trucker is, understandably, freaked out over having possibly killed someone by accident. And then the woman he thought he killed stands back up behind him. Cue Smash to Black!
• The gore isn't exclusive to cutscenes either - if a character gets finished off by an enemy, you get a grisly scene of your character being killed depending on the enemy type, such as the zombies ripping open Ada's stomach and devouring her innards. Meanwhile, your foes can be dismembered, have the flesh torn from their faces, and even blasted in half. A shotgun blast to a zombie's stomach can cause their entrails to hang out, and a second blast can cause them to fall apart as they leave a gooey mess of their insides all over the floor between the halves of their body.
• Shortly after arriving at the station, the player responds to a call for help coming from the eastern wing and arrives in time to find the officer and start pulling him through the shutter... but not in time to get all of him through before the zombies managed to close in. Making things worse? Later in the A-Scenario, you'll find him reanimated and crawling about, seeking flesh for himself.
• Shortly afterwards, the player escapes back to the lobby, but are grabbed by a zombie while trying to crawl through the half-open shutter. Thankfully, Marvin is nearby to save you by pulling you to safety, then crushing the zombie's skull like a rotten watermelon with the shutter.
• The point where you initially encounter the Licker has been changed, much like the Cerberus in the first game's remake. Your first time through the hall, you merely encounter a zombie that breaks its way in through a window... Though you also find claw marks on a nearby wall and a smashed barricade. Thus, veterans of the series will get the familiar feeling of "Where the fuck is it?"
  • How do you first meet it in the A-Scenario? You stumble across it killing a zombie with its flaying tongue high in the west wing of the station.
  • But don't worry, the classic Licker introduction survives too! That's how you meet it in your B-Scenario, and it is just as horrible here.
  • As in all previous appearances, Lickers are especially sensitive to sound, so running will immediately alert them to your presence. Unlike the original, where with enough skill you could potentially juke a Licker's attacks and outrun them, you cannot outrun them in this entry. Running away from Lickers will ensure your back being sliced to ribbons. Staying quiet isn't always a guarantee of escape either as even moving a few feet away from it will make it turn and potentially investigate, and if it gets too close...
• Speaking of Lickers and gore, after entering the west wing's ground floor, Leon stumbles across the corpse of an officer who seemingly fell victim to one... and the man's throat and mouth have been completely torn open, with the jaw only hanging on by the highly-detailed muscle fibers. And before you ask, yes, that's what provides the page image above.
• Headshots are no longer a One-Hit Kill against zombies (with a handgun, at least, but a shotgun blast doesn't always work either).
  • And remember how going from one room to another in the original game kept enemies from following you? Now they can break doors down.
  • Don't look too closely at the zombies you plug in the face with bullets, either. You'll regret that, especially if they manage to grab you as the game forces a Gross-Up Close-Up. Some demo players reported that enemy eyes will hang out of their heads from enough damage, and if you don't manage to blow a head clean off with a shotgun blast or a lucky pistol hit, you'll literally tear the flesh away from a zombie's head altogether. And the worst part? Chances are they still won't die unless you're prepared to waste more bullets until the head is completely destroyed.
  • The durability of the zombies also adds a new dimension to their danger, in that you can't exactly tell when a zombie is down for good. No more pools of blood, the only way to be sure is if you get a definitive Boom, Headshot! that blows their head apart. Even after shooting them in the head with half a magazine, you still can't be one hundred percent sure that they're not going to just get back up again.
• The iconic zombie dogs are back, and they are just as every bit as horrifying as they were in the classic games. Unlike infected humans, these undead dogs still have good motor function and can move very quickly toward their prey. Poor Leon almost falls victim to one of these things before Ada saves him.
  • The buildup to their reveal in Leon's scenario is a perfect example of Paranoia Fuel and Nothing Is Scarier. After fighting William, Leon climbs up into the dark and empty parking garage. He's completely alone... except for the sound of a dog howling and moving around. It doesn't physically appear until Leon examines the card reader next to the gate, but it's clear that he's being stalked. And then you see it coming up behind him in the next cutscene.
• The Adaptational Angst Upgrade adds to the Nightmare Fuel. Leon and Claire aren't the mostly stoic avatars this time around. They realistically cry out, scream, and curse (and in Claire's case during the William Birkin boss fight, plead) during zombie and monster attacks and shooting. If you die during a zombie encounter, they will struggle and yell and you see their faces contort and grimace in complete and utter agony before finally succumbing.
• Claire's first encounter with Sherry: (it's the same in both scenarios.) Sherry hiding in an office, blocked off by a fallen shelf that Claire can't move. Claire tries to coax Sherry out by asking if she needs help, but Sherry instead shakes her head and in a quiet, audibly panicking tone, tells Claire that she is the one who needs help. Claire whips around, and is confronted by the mutated form of Birkin AKA "G", twitching and spasming in an unnatural way, gurgling and groaning as he visibly fights for control of his body. His right arm is swollen hugely out of proportion, with an awful giant eye staring into Claire's set in his bicep.
  • And Sherry just had to choose the most pants-filling way to warn her, too:
    Sherry: "Y-you... need help..."
    Claire: "I'm sorry, I can't understand you."
    Sherry: *slightly louder* "You need help."
    Claire: "...Why?"
    Sherry: "He's right behind you."
    Claire: "...What?"
    (Claire turns around and sees G-Birkin, erratically convulsing and growling)
  • The resultant battle is no better. Birkin attacks Claire with a primal fury, shrugging off everything she throws his way, even acid and incendiary grenades. And the roaring. He won't. Stop. Roaring.
  • Unlike his past incarnation, which is calm and focused on the prey, the updated "G" is a completely frenzied beast. Gone is the "G" that will calmly saunter towards you, gone is the one that's implied to be capable of rationality, now he's totally out for your blood and will launch himself at you smashing everything in the way.
    • This is only slightly subverted, since G-1 William roars in a distorted human-like manner, however he partially mutates during battle; when the eye comes out, the roaring becomes deeper and less human, and while the eye is gone, you can actually hear him mumbling in agony for help, showing that when the eye comes out he is no longer in control, but when it isn't, he partially is! The key word being "partially".
  • What's more, he slurs out Sherry's name, just like in the footage of RE 1.5, and on some occasions, just stops to freak out and swing his pipe at nothing in particular. It's almost as if William's humanity is Fighting from the Inside and he has moments of understanding of what he's become.
    • He's not just screaming Sherry's name. He's saying "help me".
  • Thanks to the RE Engine's more realistic graphics, G's later forms look appropriately terrifying; the third form, while bearing some resemblance to the original game's G3, now looks more like a horrible cross between the Newborn from Alien: Resurrection and a flayed Goro, with tons of exposed muscles, a gaping hole on its chest full of large, twitching teeth, huge masses of bone sticking out of it arms and legs, and what's unmistakably part of a spine pushed way out of place. And unlike the original game and Darkside Chronicles, where you could vaguely see what was left of William's face in its chest, it now sticks out like a sore thumb to drive home the point that yes, this abomination of science Was Once a Man. It's also impossibly strong, ripping huge tanks out of the floor to throw and pulling part of a wall down to try and smash you with. The fourth form is significantly different than its original incarnation: rather than a bestial hexapedal creature with a gaping maw, this one is what's essentially a bipedal, vaguely humanoid mass of flesh that seems to be standing only by sheer force of will, with a huge maw filled with massive, misaligned bony spikes and dozens of eyes. It's so heavy that it sends the train platform you fight it on sliding down several feet every time it jumps, and is visibly devolving into its final form... which can only be politely described as a vision of hell. And whereas it slowly dragged itself towards you in the original, it rapidly pulls itself closer and closer and will eat you, alive and screaming, if you can't pump enough firepower into it. Don't look too closely at it either, or you might see screaming human faces lodged into its slithering bulk...
  • It’s not just his later forms that are especially horrifying. If you look closely at G-1, you can see those bones sticking out of his chest? Are actually his broken ribs pushed out of his skin.
• The footage of Alpha Team confronting Birkin is from the helmet-cam of one of the agents this time around. In part of the footage, we see the gunman laying on the ground, injured as he watches G-Birkin tear through one of his squadmates, pleading for the monster to not hurt him.
• Thought Chief Irons was creepy before? Now visibly aged, with gray-white hair and mustache, he's even worse now. This Irons doesn't feign any sort of civility with Claire; he holds her at gunpoint, beats her down whilst cursing her, and threatens to shoot her before abducting Sherry and dragging her away into the streets of Raccoon City.
  • What makes Irons scary is as always, just how normal he is as a horrific threat in a setting where every other major villain is some sort of biohazard or a superhuman with a god complex. He's not a superhuman, he's not a bio-organic threat, he's not even infected — he's just a completely mundane fuck-off cop with no superpowers whatsoever who is both a horrific torturer and a Serial Killer.
  • The Chief in the original game was a very melodramatic fellow who waxed poetic about his passions. This Chief, however, is far more grounded, delivering his threats in a blunt, matter of fact tone of voice, demonstrating only mild impatience even as he threatens Claire and Sherry with his gun. When he yells at Sherry, he sounds less like a bloodthirsty maniac and more like a cross between a more down-to-Earth Rabid Cop and an impatient babysitter. Somehow that's more frightening than the hammy psycho from the first game.
  • What's more, he knows that Sherry is the daughter of the Birkins and is attempting to get his hands on her locket as a key to attaining the G-Virus for blackmail. He also was in charge of the Raccoon City Orphanage, which turned out to be a front for potential Umbrella test subjects.
  • Compare the dead woman lying on Irons' "operating table" to Sherry. Notice any similarities? Sherry no doubt did. RE: Outbreak implies that Irons has a penchant for torturing and killing young blonde females, which does not bode well for Sherry.
  • And thanks to the vastly improved voice acting in this iteration, the fear in Sherry's voice as Irons hunts her down feels painfully real.
    "No more... No more, please...!"
  • Want to know how viscerally disturbing Chief Irons is? Real Time Fandubs couldn't make him funny. In the midst of a video that turns the entire game into a barrage of comedy (including reimagining the notoriously horrifying G as a man made of Lunchables meat), Irons remains as a coldly brutal Knight of Cerebus, to the point that- with the exception of a single non-sequitur joke about Applebees- most of the humor from his portions of the video comes from how disturbed the rest of the crew is by Alfred's dead serious performance.
• Speaking of the orphanage, one of the children had a mis-test and traumatized the hell out of other orphans due to their body melting. As he ended up accidentally escaping with a T-Virus contamination, Umbrella killed all of the children and covered it up as a transfer to another orphanage to scrub the place. It says a lot that the tools Sherry gets for escaping the room she was stuck inside of were probably thanks to the children before her trying over and over. And naturally, Irons' stuffings and autopsies happened to get shifted to his office here, as poor Katherine is a whitened and blood-drained body Sherry personally stumbles across.
  • Sherry also narrowly escapes Irons at first thanks to grabbing some of his torturous acid and then tossing it in his face. The Moment of Awesome for the kid is radically overtaken by Irons absolutely losing his shit and chasing her with the intent to torture her while half of his face is burning.
  • The worst part is that it's implied the orphanage wasn't always terrible. The kids may have been test subjects all along, but the kids had relatively happy days there before the tests and Brian Irons came along. Then everything deteriorated rapidly, to the point that you can find a letter a child left behind, begging whoever reads it to get out of there and call the police because "the boogie man is eating everybody". Followed by writing for their deceased or missing mother to help them and then the note just stopping there.
  • One of the worst letters' you find in the Orphanage, the last few pages, the kid writing describes how one of the other kids was adopted and the kid lamenting his friend never writing, then the last few pages he happily announces he too will be adopted, one day before Umbrella purged out all the kids due to the accidental infection.
• Despite still remembering Sherry, William attacks an elevator with her on it and sends it falling down. Dad of the year material right here, people.
  • And the worst part? Unlike the original, where she was thankfully unaware that it was William, Sherry recognized him.
    Sherry: "Daddy? Daddy, no!"
  • Also in this scene is her daddy growing a new head. In the original, it was only seen from a distance, while here, it is up close and personal.
  • Oh it's even worse than that. The reason William was even there? He was trying to save Sherry. William was Fighting from the Inside against the G-virus monster he turned himself into, and the last thing he did before losing himself entirely? Saving Sherry from Mr. X. The new head growing in means William's now trapped in his own body, Forced to Watch himself attack his own daughter.
• Tyrant T-00 AKA Mr. X was scary enough in the original game, being the prototype for Nemesis. Here, he's managed to take several levels in scariness. Firstly, there's his looks: he now wears a fedora hat to try and obfuscate his inhuman features, having a face that looks like it's made of melted wax, somewhat resembling the Creeper and Freddy Krueger all in one. His unblinking eyes also have unnaturally bright pupils inside dark irises, for that extra touch of creepiness.
  • Our first introduction to him comes in the A-Scenario, after reaching the upper East Wing and dousing the flames on the helicopter. As you enter the corridor where the chopper crashed, Mr. X lifts the wreck one-handed and starts marching purposefully towards you.
  • This Mr. X isn't a scripted appearance anymore. Oh no! Now he patrols the station constantly, and you can hear his footsteps booming through the halls from several rooms away, leaving you wondering where he is and how close he could be to you at all times.
  • To add to that, Mr. X is now truly unstoppable. It doesn't matter how much firepower you hit him with, at most, he'll just fall to his knees, temporarily winded. Your characters will even note that he won't stay like that for long, and sure enough, within a minute or two, he'll get right back up! Maybe the worst demonstration is if you use the knife on him when he grabs you; he doesn't even twitch, he just drops you, stares at the blade and then pulls it out like it's a splinter.
  • It's not enough that you're being chased by Mr. X all through the station, but you still also have to deal with regular zombies and enemies and solving puzzles in addition to being pursued by this abomination. And on top of THAT, firing any weapons, slamming doors, getting into conflicts with enemies, hell even running, will immediately alert Mr. X to your exact location and he will make his way towards you. The game from this point goes from being tense, to downright stressful and horrifying.
  • If a zombie is between him and you, he'll shove it away - because he wants you dead, and the zombie is obstructing him. If a zombie is between him and you and is attacking you, he'll let it attack you - because he wants you dead, and it's smart enough to "collaborate" with other monsters for that purpose.
  • For a final bit of icing on a cake, he's got a new One-Hit Kill attack; if he grabs you and you don't have a defensive item to stop it, he'll crush your skull.
  • Mr. X is now the guy who kills Ben Bertolucci. How? By punching through the wall behind him, grabbing his head, and squeezing it to a pulp, complete with his eyeballs bursting from their sockets from the pressure.
  • Just like in the original game, Mr. X will never break his slow, menacing stride towards you, for any reason... except if you decide to start shooting him. Then he'll get PISSED and start striding towards you at top speed.
  • Think you're safe for a while in scenario B if you don't look at the cameras? Oh no, Mr. X will show up regardless whether or not you look — specifically, on the second floor in the hallway leading to the STARS Office. You just can't escape him.
  • Mr. X will not follow you into certain rooms, which is the developers' way of giving the player some breathing room. This doesn't make Mr. X any less scary since he will still follow you to one of the safe rooms and hang around until he eventually leaves. It's also possible to hold the door open and watch him trying to get to you. If you try to tempt fate and get closer, he will punch you.
• The G-Spawn is back, and like Mr. X, it's gotten way scarier.
  • Firstly, there's its foreshadowing; when Leon and Ada reach the sewers, they find Annette muttering over a corpse, and she sets it on fire before fleeing. If the player looks back at the body after regaining control, they'll see a twisted thing caught partially emerging from the corpse's body, burned to ashes along with its incubator.
  • Then there's the G-Spawn itself; a malformed, lumbering brute of a thing, with its vulnerable shoulder-mounted eye hidden under a protective crust. It extrudes a repugnant tentacle-like "inner mouth" to vomit up tiny malformed spawn as a defensive weapon. Except that rather than "it", we should say "they". That's right, there's more than one G-Spawn in this game!
  • As Leon seeks out the last two chess keys, he has to pass through what seems to be a G-Spawn nest; heaped mounds of grotesquely meaty looking organic matter, corpses with their stomachs burst open, and even one corpse that "births" a larval G-Spawn as you get close. As if they weren't homaging Alien clearly enough before...
  • Look closely at the organic matter; that isn't just waste material from Birkin's experiments - it's pulsating in a rhythm, almost like breathing and the entire place seems to be alive, much like the spore-contaminated bayou of RE7's 'End of Zoe'; given the utter carelessness of the material disposal and the handling of facilities like the Dead Factory, it's little wonder Raccoon City succumbed to the outbreak seemingly so easily.
  • Perhaps the worst bit? If you stay out of sight and listen, you'll hear the G-Spawn talking. They moan, mumble snatches of almost coherent words, and even sing snippets of what sounds like lullabies. Just how sapient are they...?
  • Even worse, thanks due to documents found in the NEST, the revelation that all of the G-Spawn in the sewers originate from the test subjects provided by the orphanage which were swiftly disposed off once confirmed as failures. Those creatures you stumble upon in that fleshy sewer-hive among the muck and grime? Born from children.
  • The classic soundtrack for this area goes with the eerie, ominous "The Marshaling Yard". It's quite well-chosen.
• Contentious as the redesign may be, the new Ivy is just as scary as the original, if not more.
  • For starters, there's Plant 43. In the original game, it was basically just a bit of scenery; weird and creepy, but not scary. Here, there's visual evidence that this plant is capable of attacking, just like its progenitor, Plant 42. As you pass through the over-run greenhouse, the corpse of one victim smashed up against the walls of the presentation room visible, your nerves tingle as you wonder if it's going to attack you at any moment. It doesn't, but the Paranoia Fuel is very real.
  • Plant 43 may not attack, but the Ivys certainly do, dropping from the vines above and then lurching after you. And unlike in the original game, they're easily as fast as the zombies are.
  • When an Ivy is ready to attack you, its recognizably human head splits open vertically, revealing nested row upon row of teeth. You better have a defense item equipped, or else it's a One-Hit Kill.
  • The worst part however is that the only way to put them down is by shooting orange bulbs on it. But that won't put it down for long before it gets back up like nothing happened. The only way to put it down for good is setting it on fire with the Flamethrower or the Flame Rounds from the Grenade Launcher.
• Just in case you'd forgotten what self-centered scumbags the Birkins really are, in Claire's B-Scenario, you learn that they founded an orphanage (with Chief Irons' help!) so they could have a steady supply of child test subjects for their viral and mutagenic weaponry experiments.
• Partway through completing most of your first run of the Police Department (on a first run of the game), Marvin stops responding on the radio. A series veteran would immediately assume he's now zombified, but he only passed out into a sleep for the time being. Then you solve the Goddess Statue, and Leon/Claire move to wake him up - only for him to growl and jump in a way that sounds like the T-Virus infection's taking over before he comes to his senses. At this point the next time you do manage to see him he's finally turned, but goddamn do they mess with you on it.
• Oh yes, enemy and situation specific deaths are here.
  • Get taken down by a pair of zombies? One bites the character's throat out, whilst the other rips out their guts. Worse, the second zombie tears Leon or Claire open first, so they're still alive as it starts biting into their intestines.
  • One of Birkin G-1's kill sequences if he beats Claire? Grabbing her by the skull, slamming it messily into the ground multiple times until his brute strength and the impacts burst her skull open like a melon.
  • Birkin G-3 for Leon has one where he simply pounds Leon's torso with his enormous upper limbs, crushing and rending him into a bloody pulp.
  • Birkin's G-5 kill scene, where he brutally and messily devours the player character.
• The remake milks a lot of mileage out of a completely new feature that wasn't present in the original: the levels are plunged into darkness. The simple play around lighting creates a new layer of atmospheric tension, lessening the advantages of the Always Over the Shoulder camera by creating a real night ambiance, dim lights and whole sections that are pitch black. The characters now only have a flashlight and unreliable ambient light to see and any corner or door may be an occasion for an ambush; worse still is that the darkness exacerbates the impact of sounds and you are more likely to hear the monsters coming before you can see them, if they don't lunge at you by surprise. Conversely, the save rooms have functioning lights (although you need to turn some of them on first), creating a sensation of relief whenever you reach them after minutes of navigating dark rooms and corridors.
• Some of the files regarding the nature of the experiments that Birkin was performing. One is an account from a child who saw his friend's mangled face after being experimented on. Another clinically depicts the surgical insertion of a G-Embryo into a test subject while he's still conscious.
• Sherry's infection from the G's embryo. Unlike in the original game where there was no visible changes to Sherry other than her complaining that her stomach hurts, her infection in the remake is clearly visible and disturbing. By the time Claire gets to her, Sherry is struggling to breathe and her left eye is discolored while having visible veins radiating from the eye.
  • William Birkin (in monster form) forced a G embryo into his daughter's body so that the virus could reproduce. While it is tempting and accurate to refer to this as an infection, this actually is a form of rape.
• The Pale Heads from Ghost Survivors are zombies who can regenerate from everything short of severe damage, move in a jerky, uncoordinated fashion, and are disturbing to look at; naked with ragged holes in their skin, and a lumpy face missing everything except their mouth.
• If you were ever thinking about how nice it is to never be chased by a giant version of that incredibly Creepy Doll in the orphanage, things are about to get very unpleasant for you.
• This particular nightmare fuel exists only on concept art — thankfully — but this artwork shows zombies with claws, elongated tongues and heads that look as though there is something trying to burst out. Some of these zombies have heads that were completely split open, and the beginnings of licker heads were poking out underneath. For those who are familiar with the 'life cycle' of a zombie, up to its eventual transformation into a licker, this concept art suggests that there was a point in the game's development where we were going to see zombies in the middle stage of said life cycle. That's right, there was once a possibility that we were going to see crimson heads in the game.
• Recently, the free trial for the game got updated. Usually, when you go outside the police station, you're expected to hear the ambience of groaning zombies, emergency sirens, all that stuff. But now hanging around outside will give you an extra surprise. What in particular? Well...
  "STAAAAAAAAARS!"
• On the east end of the Clock Tower room, you find a hallway lined with windows. An attentive player might realize this is the other side of the blocked off corridor on the 3rd floor where you first saw a licker skittering across the window. Not to mention at this point you've been chased enough by Mr. X to know you can't squeeze past him in narrow spaces without getting grabbed or haymakered. Nothing actually shows up here to bother you, which only helps ramp up the paranoia.

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