Survival Horror

Survival Horror is a design stance more than a fixed rule set: scarce resources, restricted mobility, and a player character built to be vulnerable rather than capable. Ammunition, healing items, and inventory space are kept shorter than a fight would comfortably require, so every encounter is first a resource-management decision — fight, flee, or waste something scarce finding out which was right — before it is a combat one. Bad mobility is deliberate, not a limitation: slow turns, no dodge, and fixed camera angles that hide threats are Game Feel choices in service of vulnerability, and later entries that streamlined movement had to rebuild scarcity elsewhere to keep the tension.

The genre has two ancestors, and they gave different things. Sweet Home (1989, Capcom), a Famicom horror RPG, supplied the mansion, permanent character death, the finite party inventory, puzzle locks, found documents, and a backtracking map structurally close to a Metroidvania, since key items reopen earlier rooms rather than extend a line. The fixed cameras are not its bequest: they come from Alone in the Dark (1992), and Mikami has said Resident Evil would have been made in first person without it. Resident Evil (1996) combined the two on new hardware and has been the genre's throughline since: the finite item-box inventory as a Diegetic Interface the player physically manages, notes and corpses doing Environmental Storytelling instead of exposition, and enemy Game AI tuned to feel slow but relentless rather than clever.

The series also carries the genre's central drift. Resident Evil 5 (2009) and 6 (2012) traded scarcity for firepower and mobility, chasing action-game audiences and drawing Ludonarrative Dissonance complaints — a horror story told through a power fantasy — before 7 and the remakes pulled scarcity back to the centre. Resident Evil 4 (2005) is routinely swept into that account and does not belong: it still roots the player in place to aim, as 5 does, keeps ammunition tight, and turns storage into the attaché-case packing puzzle. Free movement while shooting arrives only with 6. Fixed save points, another deliberate friction, became fuel for Speedrun routing once players optimised the restrictions meant to slow them down.