I was thiking about upcoming survival horror games and was counting on Dead Space 2 Remake as an upcoming game... until I decided to look it up and learned that Dead Space 1 Remake flopped and so everything was scrapped.
And I wonder... why? RE2R is massively similar, I think. To list some of the similarities I can think of:
- They both like to set up an atmosphere. Dark corridors, eerie silence, eerie sounds, distant zombie/monster groans.
- They both, heavily, make use of backtracking. You dance all over the place in both the Police Station and the Ishimura. The same places undergo minor changes as the story progresses, and, considering the first point, they succeed in making you dread when you realize you have to backtrack to some place you fear.
- They both have stalker enemies that do not overstay their welcome. Mr. X begins chasing you around the Police Station after you learn most of the layout, and mostly leaves you alone after that section, appearing briefly for some fights. Also, sound (his footsteps) is a major selling point for him. In DS, The Hunter chases you intensely in 2 out of 12 chapters, and briefly appears in a third one. In the other 9 chapters, he leaves you completely alone. Also, sound (hearing him in the vents around you) is a major selling point.
- The main characters arrives at Place X to do Y, finds out Place X is massively fucked, and the game has them gtfo of Place X.
Anyway, the are more (emphasis on inventory management, resource scarcity, mid-difficulty puzzles), but the question is: wtf made one game sell 20 million copies and the other sell less than 2? Was it just the name, or is there something I'm not seeing?