We’re reunited with Ashley, after our brief time apart. Now, David Phillips and I need her help to keep exploring the castle.

This entire section of the game does much to slowly build up Ashley’s confidence and capabilities. All of the puzzles require her and Leon to work as a team to solve them. Even when Leon is fighting, like against the armored parasites, she’s working in the background to help him out.

It culminates in a strong section where we play as her without Leon’s help, and she has to outwit the monsters in her way if she wants to free him. I like this section a lot as a small capstone towards our deuteragonist’s character growth.

Oh no. Ashley’s run away after being mind controlled into attacking us. David Phillips and I can’t leave without her, so we had best get moving.

Props should go both to Ashley and Leon’s respective voice actors for their performances in this game. The two of them have a lot of chemistry and naturally play off each other. For a franchise that almost prides itself on a B-movie aesthetic, I can’t help but admire the character work.

And in the next episode, that same character work pays off nicely.

We’re one boss fight and a few combat encounters into this castle, and we’re still some distance away from the courtyard. Luckily, David Phillips and I are more than capable of taking on whatever Napolean sends our way.

What I appreciate most about this section of the game is the way they frame Ashley as a vital companion that Leon needs in order to keep going against all of these hordes. While she can’t and doesn’t fight, she’s helpful in her own way, able to get to places that Leon himself simply can’t on his own.

I can’t speak for her portrayal in the original game, but in this remake, I grew quite fond of the character over the course of the campaign, and this is largely why.

With no better options for us, David Phillips and I have a castle that we need to explore in order to get our cure for the parasite and secure our escape route.

What could possibly go wrong aside from all the other things that have gone wrong?

I can already see the early advantage my advanced armory gave me at the start of this run slipping away while enemies gradually escalated in power level. It doesn’t help that this is roughly the midpoint, and the game has fully loosened the valves as far as ammo and resources are concerned. Our ability to fight back is still tightly controlled.

And it’s even worse when one random mini-boss’s attack patterns insist on screwing us at every possible opportunity. I’m slightly embarrassed the fight took as long as it did, but a win is still a win.

It’s about time David Phillips and I got Ashley out of this village. We just have one obstacle in our way.

Weirdly large, muscular Rapustin, the evil advisor of the Romanov family.

Fortunately, like all fights in the series, once we recognize the pattern, they aren’t too complicated. Rasputin is no exception, with predictable tells that help us determine exactly how to avoid them while continuing to pressure him with damage.

I know that part of it is that we’re using highly upgraded weaponry, but even still that fight went extremely smoothly. Good tidings for the rest of the run.

Turns out that rescuing Ashley is going to be a little more complicated than we first suspected. David Phillips and I’ll need to take another route to make our escape.

But I have faith we won’t have any more struggles this time. It’ll go smoothly. Right?

Right!?

One of the coolest parts of replaying a game is using foreknowledge of the ambushes and traps coming our way to take off problems before they actually become problems. I’m glad David was here to not only remind me of the chainsaw lady ambush but give me a strategy I could use to eliminate them before they became a problem. Definitely went a long way towards saving me a lot of time and energy.

I look forward to seeing what other exploits and tricks we employ in the rest of the run.

Finally, after going through several large fights, and a few puzzles, David Phillips and I have what we need to get our missing girl out of this accursed village safe and sound.

Surely, once we find her, nothing bad is going to happen right?

Right?

As a reminder, I never played the original Resident Evil 4. I have no attachments, good or ill, to that version of Ashley. For me, the version we have in this 2023 remake is the one that I have experience with, so she will be the one I think about. (Aside from Moushley.)

Having said that, I quite like this version of Ashley Graham. They’ve given her a strongly defined personality to start with. For now, she is very much the damsel in distress, but that’s merely a starting point. And over the course of the game, it’s fun to watch her grow in capability and confidence.

I’ve been told that the original version of the character was annoying, but I would never have guessed that from how she behaves here. She acts in much the way I would expect a young woman of her age and station to behave, especially since she’s barely an adult and thrust into a situation well beyond her understanding.

She’s great.

Though we somehow managed to defeat Nessy, we’re not in the best shape. Coughing up blood is never a good sign. And yet, David Phillips and I still need to get the key to the church, so we can rescue the President’s daughter.

So we best get to work.

One of the things I can’t help but notice as I play through the game is exactly how tightly controlled the drip-feeding of resources is across the campaign. It’s not that ammo or healing is scarce. In truth, there’s plenty of it to go around, but the game does an excellent job of making us feel like we’re always low on ammo despite that.

Though I wasn’t involved with the design of the game, I would guess that the secret lies in the items that enemies drop as they’re killed. If the game sees that we have plenty of ammunition, enemies are more likely to spit out money when they die. However, if we’re running below a certain threshold, it starts to loosen its grip on our ammo count and starts putting ammo, gunpowder, and crafting resources in the loot table.

That fosters an illusion that we’re running low, just barely scraping by, when in truth Resident Evil 4 is holding an almost bottomless supply of resources to the side, waiting until we need them to throw them our way. We’re in much less danger than we actually are, and it’s important to the tone and the tension that it remains that way.

It’s the balance of a horror game. The player needs to feel overwhelmed without actually being overwhelmed. Like any work of art, it’s a well-crafted illusion that elicits a powerful emotional response. The game doesn’t want us to fail, but nor does it want us to think that the adventure is too easy, lest we get bored.

Looks like something nasty is in that lake, but if David Phillips and I want to get to the church to look for Baby Eagle, then that’s where we need to go.

No better way to end a recording for a remake of an old PS2/Gamecube-era game than a classic video game boss fight.

As silly as it may be, it’s also quintessentially Resident Evil. The game wouldn’t feel right without that layer of goofiness spread on top.

You know what’s like to play Resident Evil. David Phillips and I are shooting infected and solving puzzles, but not necessarily in that order.

Give us a real threa… Oh okay.

I can’t stress enough that a large reason why I’m having no trouble on this second playthrough is that I started with highly upgraded weapons and equipment, and a maxed-out life meter. In a normal run of Resident Evil 4, these enemies would be significantly more threatening than they are.

And with luck, we’ll be able to keep up this breezy pace we’ve been going at throughout the run so far.