The film Tár, one of the most outstanding of this year’s start, opens with an audience discussion between the orchestra conductor, who plays Kate Blanchett so powerfully, and a journalist from the New York Times. It implicitly sows the foundations of the way of being and the conflicts that the character will develop throughout the film. But it is explicitly about the interpretation of a score.
You are talking about Mahler. From his Fifth Symphony. They talk about the differences between Lydia Tár and her (literary) teacher, the legendary Leonard Bernstein. As he lengthened the work, he reveled in melancholy while expressing the enthusiastic dynamism found in the same notes. It emphasizes that the personality of an orchestra conductor can recreate, recontextualize, reinterpret and update a melody written long ago. Video games, with their infinite eclecticism, with their current creative effervescence, cover almost every corner of art. Also that kind of different interpretations of the same score.
Released in 2005, Resident Evil 4 became one of the best games of all time in its own right. Its mix of action and survival horror, the perfect balance of its difficulty, its level design and its setting left no one indifferent (and neither did its location in empty Spain with its pesetas and its zombie villagers who insulted us in Mexican) . The game was so successful that it has seen some polish over the years. Because video games – most of them – run; they decay as their visual or playable part becomes obsolete, removing the current audience from the core of the works. In this way, the game kept adapting to technical developments. In 2007, the Wii edition was released, which used their motion sensor controls. In 2016 a remaster (a purely graphical improvement) was released for PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, in 2021 the virtual reality version came to Oculus Quest 2.
A moment of the game with his Spanish village and his zombies.
Each of these reinterpretations was like a score played by different performers, like a work performed by different conductors. Last Thursday, the remake of the game for the PS5 and XBox series was launched, which supposedly completes the squaring of the circle with all imaginable graphic, technical and mechanical improvements.
For the signatories, this is a bit of a disappointment. This Resident Evil IV reconstruction tastes more like Resident Evil VIII than the first Resident Evil IV, a phrase that will obviously sound like a Martian to those unfamiliar with the saga, meaning that the infinitely lingering aftertaste before almost 20 years gone from the original is not replicated in this new game that (as if that were no small matter) is content to be, like VIII, a wonderful action and horror game. For the most part, the response was far more enthusiastic than that of this article.
No problem. It has an explanation. Many people, many players and many critics had not seen the work for more than a decade, while the person who wrote this had played most of the published versions. And above all, the VR version. There aren’t that many good, really good games in VR. But those who are good activate not only the sense of taste, but something more exciting and deeper: the feeling that one is facing a new and overwhelming force, a force that can change the tastes of society.
Resident Evil IV Remake is undoubtedly one of the best games of this year. And certainly, in what seems to be an exceptional year, it will rightly be a contender for best game of the year. But the virtual reality version was something else. It was a new way of spending free time, a new way of relating to the interactive, narrative and even aesthetic world. No words are wasted. What happened in 2021 was an evolutionary leap in an emerging art. And of course that is not common. Apart from that, this new version is just (only!) an excellent game. A game, yes, that everyone should enjoy.
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