Apparently, Hideki Kamiya has finally met a Resident Evil game he’s too scared to play. The legendary Capcom developer and director of Resident Evil 2 says Resident Evil Requiem is simply too frightening for him to handle, which is particularly unfortunate because he really wanted to see Leon S. Kennedy’s return to Raccoon City for himself.
Kamiya recently talked about his relationship with modern Resident Evil games, and he made it very clear that his request for Capcom to tone down the horror isn’t some running gag.
First declaring that “this is not a joke,” the Devil May Cry creator told VGC that he’s “being one hundred percent serious when I say that I wish they would make it so that their games can also be enjoyed by people like me, who can’t handle scary games at all.”
It’s pretty funny coming from one of the creators who helped turn Resident Evil into a survival horror powerhouse, but Kamiya certainly isn’t alone in thinking the series can sometimes push things a little too far.
Resident Evil 7 director Koshi Nakanishi previously admitted that his game was “possibly too scary” and that “some people couldn’t handle it.” That experience also influenced Requiem, which includes a third-person mode intended to make the horror a little easier for some players to deal with.
For Kamiya, however, Requiem still crosses the line. He said: “Just recently this year we had Resident Evil Requiem and the big return of Leon Kennedy, and he went back to Raccoon City… reliving all of those memories and all of those experiences.”
Considering Kamiya directed Leon’s original Raccoon City nightmare, you can understand why he wanted to see what Capcom had cooked up for the character. “As somebody who directed that original game, Resident Evil 2, I was curious to know how that panned out for him.”
Curiosity apparently wasn’t enough to get him through the horror. He continued: “I wanted to experience that myself as a player,” as he says, “but the game was way too scary, and I couldn’t.”
Kamiya has a solution, and it involves giving players who can’t stomach horror an alternative way to experience the games. “It’s not a joke,” Kamiya explains. “I legitimately wished it would include some kind of non-horror mode for people like me.”
He’s even taken the idea directly to people working on Resident Evil at Capcom. “I tell them that their games are way too scary, and they’re like, ‘What, come on, they’re not that scary.'”
According to Kamiya, the developers may have spent so much time creating monsters and terrifying environments that they’ve lost track of just how freaky their games can be.
He says they “seriously seem to have no awareness of how scary the things they make actually are, so I really hope they address that at some point” and suggests making it “so that the zombies’ faces aren’t so scary.”
His proposed solution gets even better, “Why not have a mode that just puts, like, brown paper bags on all of their heads, or instead of having these dark, dingy rooms everywhere, they could have really pleasant mood lighting”
A Resident Evil mode filled with paper-bag zombies and cozy lighting would certainly be something. Imagine exploring Raccoon City while every horrifying creature looks like it’s embarrassed to be there.
Kamiya has actually been pushing this idea for a while. Earlier this year, he argued that Capcom “should make a ‘non-scary’ mode” for Resident Evil Requiem because “look, I just want to enjoy the puzzles.”
Of course, terrifying players is a major part of what makes Resident Evil so much fun! Still, there’s something amusing about the director of Resident Evil 2 asking the current development team to please stop making Resident Evil so damn scary.
If Capcom ever does add the paper bag option, they better call it Kamiya Mode.
