Lacking a numerical designation and originating on Sega's Dreamcast system, Resident Evil Code: Veronica X is considered the black sheep of the biohazard family. The remit here is lightly experimental, a fevered break from the Raccoon City milieu. Pre-rendered backgrounds have been dropped in favour of real-time environments. The usually fixed fright frame can, on occasion, pinball around to track your creeping steps. It's a faint escalation, allowing the game to further obscure immediate dangers, and your proximity to them. The stately home horror of the main series bleeds in around the edges, but for the most part Code: Veronica is set in desperate, depressing spaces, stained with industrialised murder.
The player starts in what can only be described as a concentration camp - bare, concrete brutalism spotted with the odd wooden barracks, and patrolled by rabid Dobermann attack dogs. The graveyard heaves with emaciated, sexless corpses that stagger and moan pathetically. Make it to the plush living quarters of the jailors and you'll find lightly obscured monument to blitzkrieg machinery. Escape, and it's off to a frigid gulag, scored with straight lifts from Brad Fiedel's terrible future Terminator score. Even for a horror game, Code: Veronica is ruthlessly downbeat. Unavoidable superfoes drain your dwindling resources, allies just grist for infection, and destruction. Your ultimate enemies are two incestuous science siblings with infinite money to pursue their derangement. The unfolding narrative positions them as manufactured reincarnations of a brilliant aristocratic scientist, their dilemma built around the creeping dread they feel at their lack of permanence. Played today, Code Veronica is an antiquated, almost clumsy experience. Resident Evil's tank controls frustrate, and there's a level of crisscross backtracking early in the game that borders on satirical. Adjust to these eccentricities though, and you discover a tightly mapped objective sequence that dares you to speed-run.
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