Editorials
How ‘Resident Evil 4’ Perfected the Inventory System [Resident Evil at 25]
As a general rule of thumb, inventory management is a necessary evil for video games, there only to prevent you from accumulating too much power at once. It’s not really intended to be fun in and of itself, unless you happen to derive great pleasure from sifting through long menus or calculating weight thresholds. Rather, the mechanic is just something that we all have to put up with.
Which is a bit annoying, when you consider how much of our time in virtual worlds is taken up by this administrative drudgery. Indeed, Mass Effect, Skyrim, and Fallout are all very immersive experiences, right up until you acquire one-too-many screws and then discover that your character is unaccountably rooted to the floor. When this happens, the action inevitably grinds to a halt whilst you determine what you can afford to offload and what to do with all your duplicated loot.
At its best, this is a quick detour. At its worst, it’s the equivalent of painstakingly checking your airline luggage, to make certain that it doesn’t exceed the maximum flight allowance. You know, something that you have to go along with to get to the part that you’re actually looking forward to.
Granted, imposing some kind of limitation on how much we can carry is a rational move (otherwise things wouldn’t be very challenging), but getting us to laboriously whittle down our haul like this, just to shed a few ounces of junk, utterly kills the momentum for me. And even in titles that don’t rely on these encumberment systems, inventory management is rarely something that I anticipate with bated breath. Whether I’m robotically deconstructing weapon mods in Control, restocking my troops’ gadgets in XCOM, or trying to navigate the Kafkaesque menus of Cyberpunk 2077, I’m seldom enjoying myself here.
That is with the exception of Resident Evil 4, which takes the obligatory chore of organizing your crap and turns it into a fulfilling minigame in its own right. To be fair, the legendary horror series tends to handle this aspect better than most franchises, because the developers understand how to make it feel like a tactical consideration. Rather than an obtrusive declutter session that totally interrupts the flow of gameplay.
For example, in the original PSOne installments, it behooved you to plan ahead when leaving a safe room, so that you could get the utmost utility out of a finite number of item slots. As such, you were forced to make excruciating compromises whenever you headed out into the fray, not knowing if you were right to pack that shotgun, or if it would have been wiser to take extra healing supplies instead.
The point is, inventory management always felt it was deliberately baked into Resident Evil from the very beginning, serving to heighten the tension, as opposed to breaking it. The fourth entry had a particularly strong iteration of this mechanic with its attaché case: a 6×10 grid (later upgraded to double its original size) that held as much equipment as you were feasibly able to cram into it. The catch is that, if you wanted to efficiently optimize this storage, you had to put your Tetris skills to good use and arrange your possessions as neatly as possible.
In a nutshell, the objective here was to methodically tidy your loadout so that there was minimal negative space. You could do this by laterally moving things along a vertical or horizontal axis, and by rotating them to fit into empty squares. If you did it with precision and regularly kept on top of things, then you were able to cart around whatever you conceivable needed.
What made the system work so well was that objects were proportionally scaled, meaning that a gun and its bullets no longer had identical dimensions. Whereas in previous games those two things would have filled the exact same area, this was a little more grounded in reality. It just made logical sense that the bigger items were, well, bigger.
Flash forward a few years to Resident Evil 5 (which reverted to a traditional pouch-based model) and it feels like we suddenly took a huge step backwards. You once again had this bizarre situation whereby an egg inexplicably took up as much room as a rocket launcher. Capcom obviously made that decision to better accommodate online play – as it wouldn’t have been practical to sort out your briefcase in real-time, not if you didn’t want to severely irritate your partner anyway – yet it nevertheless felt like a bit of a downgrade.
This brings me to another positive of the attaché: it was the perfect countermeasure for RE4’s more relentless pace. For those weaned on classic survival horror, the game’s frenetic encounters could have proved quite overwhelming, were it not for how opening up your case froze the action and gave you a much-appreciated timeout. It was a valuable opportunity to collect your thoughts and assess the situation at hand. You didn’t need the quickest reflexes in the world to switch guns, nor did you have to memorize various button inputs. You just had to stop and think for a second.
Again, if we compare this approach with the later co-op offerings, you really come to appreciate the benefits. After all, Resi 6 demonstrates just how much of a fucking hassle real-time inventory management can be when it’s over-complicated, or if you’re lugging around too much gear. Hence why FPS releases like Call of Duty often restrict you to cycling between just a primary and a secondary firearm. Yet by giving you that moment to breathe, RE4 mitigates against this problem and makes the combat feel uniquely strategic, instead of like a chaotic nightmare.
Of course, the main reason everyone loves the attaché is not that it’s more realistic, or that it gives you respite from peril, but that it’s so damn satisfying to maintain. Though it may sound impossibly prosaic, doing things like: color coordinating your grenades; setting aside distinct rows just for mine darts; keeping the rifle paired with its scope; and finding the ideal spot for a freshwater bass are all weirdly rewarding. Not to mention it’s way more aesthetically pleasing than the ugly lists most inventories take after. So much so that you can go down an entire YouTube rabbit hole filled with people customizing their layouts, and ASMR videos dedicated to renovating disorderly cases.
If you haven’t tried it yourself then it will be hard to understand the appeal. However, in the same way that people like to customise their appearance in Fortnite and furnish their homes in Animal Crossing, it can develop into a serious compulsion. Especially as your armory grows and grows over the course of a playthrough. In fact, it’s on those grounds that I usually avoid doing a New Game +, because unlocking the OP weapons and unlimited ammo perks ends up trivialising the briefcase, rendering it almost irrelevant.
On that note, I can’t think of another inventory management system that I would genuinely miss if it was removed wholesale, and it’s baffling to me that the series dropped it after a single outing. After all, whilst this might not be the sexiest or most exciting element of game design, it is a major part of nearly everything that we play. So, if you can make it simpler, more intuitive, easier on the eyes and, crucially, fun then why wouldn’t you? Resi 4 managed it over 15 years ago and it still holds up today.
Horror was thriving so well in the 1980s that movies like Pen Densham’s The Kiss (1988) would understandably get lost in the shuffle, only to then gain their fans later on in life. Even still, this one Canadian-American curio has had a more challenging time than others, as far as contemporary reevaluations go, which is very likely due to the movie’s limited availability—at least as of this write-up.
However, the scarceness of The Kiss, while a bit annoying, makes it like catnip for ‘80s horror completists everywhere. Hopefully, a lot of them will walk away satisfied after watching this hidden gem.
Even though The Kiss was intended as the first of several horror collaborations between Astral Pictures and TriStar, as well as the first feature produced by Densham, Richard B. Lewis and John Watson’s Trilogy Entertainment Group, it ended up being the only one produced from that former union. Once the movie was released, TriStar’s distribution jitters—they opted for a regional rollout—did the $6-million flick no favors. TriStar’s cold feet toward horror releases have been well noted, but The Kiss still did a tad better than Night of the Creeps (1986), another genre outing that flopped due to its regional opening.
Shot in Montreal, but set in Albany, New York, The Kiss—which was still called The Host just a few months before its October premiere—concerns an average middle-class family and their forthcoming situation. The uncanny problem in store for them was, in fact, set in motion some years earlier. As that hot and dusty flashback to the Belgian Congo shows, a familial curse was set upon the two Dunbar sisters well before Meredith Salenger’s teenage character was born.
Meredith Salenger, Nicholas Kilbertus and Mimi Kuzyk in The Kiss
The Kiss, which was based on a story by co-writer Stephen Volk (Ghostwatch) and penned by both Volk and Tom Ropelewski, has the outward appearance of The Stepfather (1987). This movie, though, is anything but a gender-flipped retread of that classic domestic disturber. For starters, The Kiss is far less grounded in reality—that much is clear from its unsettling opening scene. There, a trusting girl (Priscilla Mouzakiotis) is the victim of her own deceptive aunt (Céline Lomez); the movie’s titular act, and the story’s first shock, becomes the means of transferring an ancient evil from one host to another.
In the present day, Salenger’s role of Amy Halloran, a religious schoolgirl, is dealt a harsh blow in life once her mother, Hilary Halloran née Dunbar (Pamela Collyer), suddenly dies in a freak accident. But rather than a complete stranger sweeping the Halloran widower (Nicholas Kilbertus) off his feet some months later, Joanna Pacula’s character is that chosen temptress. Here, Pacula plays the grown-up version of the afflicted girl last seen in the movie’s opener. Since Amy’s mother is insistent about there being no reunion between estranged sisters, and she even contemplates buying a gun shortly before her tragic demise, it’s presumable that Aunt Felice poses a threat to her family.
The Kiss isn’t a movie ever too concerned about its own predictability. The audience is indeed often one step ahead of the story here, but also keep in mind how every one of those steps is loud. Take, for instance, the death of Amy’s mother; the Halloran matriarch goes out in garish, gruesome fashion, as a supernaturally commandeered truck sends Collyer’s character through a store window first, then leaves her one leg short. The directorial enthusiasm truly comes out in horrific moments such as these.
The Kiss is always sure to revel in its characters’ ills and misfortunes. So if the plot doesn’t impress, then its lurid parts should. Amy’s mother’s exit scene was proof of an eager, first-time horror director proving his worth. Then, bestie Heather (Sabrina Boudot) survives to tell the tale of a bizarre escalator mishap that, despite showing relatively less gore, spikes viewers’ empathy meter. The wilder bits of this movie, however, commence with that inevitable hookup between Felice and Amy’s bewitched father; their kitchen coitus is paralleled by Amy’s feverish classroom terror. The outcome there is a disquieting cross-cut of sex magic and a young woman’s menstrual onset plus hallucinations.
Sabrina Boudot in The Kiss
From foam appliances to bladders, that parade of special effects in The Kiss casts its own spell on the audience. Felice’s familiar, a visibly malevolent cat, was realized here with several models, some more articulate than others. Admittedly, the demon cat’s not as convincing as most of the effects here, but accepting that artifice, as opposed to fighting it, will make the whole experience way more enjoyable. As for the makeup used to manifest Felice’s inner villainy, it is more minimal and subtle than one might like; yet the work done to turn Pacula into an antithesis of herself is nonetheless compelling.
The otherworldly perils and dreadful goings-on wouldn’t work half as well as they do in The Kiss without the story’s contrast effect. Finding frights in picturesque, extremely ordinary settings was something that took off in the ‘80s, thanks to that sweeping shift to locales like the suburbs. And Amy’s home, a replica of a real Montreal suburban house, is the ideal battleground for any proper good-versus-evil story. It’s also prime real estate for this movie’s satanic panic-inspired horrors.
Because of their ostensibly similar plots, The Kiss has been compared to The Exorcist (1973). Except in Densham’s movie, the sinister, non-Christian entity targeting a teen girl lies within something less apparent and, perhaps, more devastating upon its exposure. To an outsider, Pacula’s Aunt Felice is too beautiful and unobjectionable to ever suspect of being a monster. More suspicious is how quickly she rips into the fabric of the Halloran home. Felice’s mere presence upsets the “texture of family life,” according to the director.
The demon cat in The Kiss
Taking out Amy’s mother and best friend, and distracting her father, would suggest The Kiss is playing by a different set of rules. It is initially leaving its adolescent target unsupported in a rather grim scenario. In contrast, though, this story offers up a surrogate parent who does her best to fill in the holes of Amy’s eroding home life. Mimi Kuzyk does good work as that family friend and doctor, Brenda, who guides the lost child without also steering her in any one direction; she is naturally skeptical of Amy’s accusations until it’s almost too late to do anything about them. So although The Kiss does an admirable job of undoing the main character’s support system, it never leaves her without a lifeline. This dark movie, in spite of everything that’s transpired, doesn’t deprive itself of light and hope.
The Kiss is a potent mélange of familiar ideas. If not for the director’s surprise flair for horror, though, the movie would have been less effective. What a shame that Pen Densham didn’t continue with the genre. As for Joanna Pacula, she is, too, owed credit as the wicked vixen opposite Meredith Salenger’s pitiable Amy; she never fails to be unsettling in her role. Pacula makes Aunt Felice a sexy yet intimidating character.
For horror that steadily doles out madness and menace, while also delivering a flashy and ghastly conclusion, The Kiss is certain to please. Yes, it’s cheesy all the way, but most favorably, everyone involved plays everything straight. That kind of commitment goes a long way with this movie.
The Kiss
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