I Wish 'Resident Evil 2' Let Me Be a More Compassionate Hero
'Resident Evil 2' is a scary, effective fantasy of permission and scarcity. But I want to be a different kind of survivor.
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At first, I oddly felt a little weird taking things. The station was designated as a shelter during the zombie outbreak. There are cots and bloody sheets, IV stands, boxes of food and medical supplies everywhere. Early on, protagonists Claire and Leon hear a radio message instructing all citizens to head for the station.
That notion is wild, the police station as fortress/safe haven is laughably naive (particularly for people of color). It certainly was in the 90s as well, and really, when has policing in America ever actually been about keeping neighborhoods safe as opposed to keeping a racist status quo up and running? Though the game does later connect the upper echelons of the police management with the evil, shady doings of the Umbrella corporation (whose decidedly unethical bioweapons research started the whole zombie apocalypse in the first place).
I still feel a little bad looting the place, at least at first, since this is a staging area for what we in EMS call a Mass Casualty Incident. So of course I went in thinking like an EMT. Looking for survivors to help. Like the nice dude who saves me from a faulty door, Marvin, who is clearly suffering from some kind of awful wound. I want to help him. Claire wants to help him too, exclaiming that we need to get him to the hospital, but he refuses. And the game doesn’t give me any tools for mending wounds or even putting gauze or bandages on something. The only first aid items are hilarious magical herbs and sprays, though the guns and blood look, well, more or less like the actual thing. This is a game about dealing and surviving damage, not healing it.