After 5 years, you can finally play Resident Evil 2 Remake the scariest way possible: with old-school fixed camera controls

Five years in the making, the Resident Evil 2 Remake mod that adds old-school fixed-camera controls is finally available to scare you silly 1998 style.

Don't get me wrong, the 2019 Resident Evil 2 remake, with its third-person over-the-shoulder perspective, is one of my favorite modern horror games, but what's unique about classic Resident Evil is that the camera and controls alone illicit so much terror. 

There's an argument to be made that Capcom might have designed the original Resident Evil games with a fixed camera perspective and tank controls at least partially due to hardware limitations - although director Shinji Mikami told Game Pro Magazine in 1996 that it was an artistic choice - but regardless, the fear of the unknown, the deprivation of total freedom of control, and the perspective's ability to highlight certain areas of the screen make this style of gameplay uniquely scary. I'll never, ever forget my first encounter with a Licker, and I think a lot of that is due to the fixed camera perspective.

Now, you can enjoy the modern refinements of Resident Evil 2 Remake with the original game's scarier controls with this mod from alphaZomega. "This is a REFramework mod that allows you to play Resident Evil 2 Remake from fixed camera perspective, bringing back a flavor of the original gameplay from the 1998 PlayStation game," reads the description.

According to the modder, just like the old Resident Evil games, the game will start with a mounted/fixed camera pointed at the scene, and then when you're given the freedom to move around, the camera will shift perspectives when you leave a certain area in "a seamless sequence." The mod includes more than 1,700 fixed cameras "all carefully placed," allowing you to play through the entire game like this.

The default control scheme moves your character relative to the camera, which means you'll move in whatever direction you press no matter which direction the character is facing. And finally, faithful to the classics, the mod's tank controls mean you quite literally move like a tank, only making wide turns by stopping entirely and using the left and right inputs to turn your character around, and then up and down to actually move. However, "if you hate this, the controls are heavily customizable in the mod's options."

If you like this, you'll probably like this throwback to classic Resident Evil survival horror that I fell in love with during Steam Next Fest.