The demo just landed ahead of the game that’s releasing later this March 2023. The original RE4 of the best Resident Evil games ever made, and it was innovative too at the time with its 3rd person view mode at the shoulder level. I remember it very well when I played it for the first time on the Gamecube (it’s one of the reason why I bought the GC, because it was an exclusive…) and even though it’s aged since then the original remains a very solid game.

Now Capcom is giving the “remake” treatment to this episode as well, and it’s a complete rethinking of the game just like what happened with Resident Evil 2 Remake a few years back. The amount of work on the environments is staggering even from the demo, and I am really looking forward to playing the full game at some point.

I checked the demo on Linux and it works very well with Proton (Valve just released a Proton hotfix you have to apply first) - on my old machine with a GTX 1660 Ti, it runs at 60 fps with the default settings, which is very welcome. This should mean it will probably run well on the Steam Deck. Note that while the performance was fine, I did experience several random crashes - could be due do the game, or who knows, to something going awry with the Nvidia drivers. It happened several times, so you may want to try to demo first on your machine as well if you have a Nvidia config.

The gameplays feels very close to the original RE4, along with the controls closer to what you had in RE2, to make it more modern and natural to play these days. In the demo it worked well but there are still cases where you don’t see enemies coming from behind you, which is as akward as in the original game.

By the way they turned the teenage brat (the President’s daughter) that was in the original RE4 into a true hottie this time around.

That’s it! You can try the demo on Steam right now.