'Resident Evil 4's Yellow Boxes Are Not A Betrayal, They're A Symptom

Following the recent release of a demo for the upcoming Resident Evil 4 remake, some fans of the series became frustrated with a detail that might seem innocuous to most: the bright yellow paint covering the game’s breakable boxes. 

This paint is used to clearly distinguish important, interactable pieces of the environment from set-dressing. This bright yellow paint is as common in games as it is goofy—allowing game worlds to become legible at the cost of artistic coherence and immersion. It is for this reason that some fans of the series argue that Resident Evil 4 Remake is a simpler, dumbed down version of the original game, ruined for the sake of mass audience appeal.

In the original Resident Evil 4, released in 2005, breakable boxes and barrels were demarcated by how they were lit, and the particular tone of their textures. They stood out like a sore thumb in the environment as identical and clearly interactable. If a player quickly rushed through an area, they could miss these containers, but moving at any other pace would lead to them being easily discovered, and then broken. 

In the Resident Evil 4 remake, this technique doesn’t work. The higher fidelity offered by this new version of the game doesn’t just allow for, but actively produces, more visual clutter. The universal level of detail provided by modern AAA games means that interactable objects are significantly less obvious without some kind of visual indicator.

To play the original Resident Evil 4 at release was to play a game carrying the weight of the Resident Evil series and all of the game design baggage that came with it. Developers could be more certain that, if people were playing RE4, they had a base level of familiarity with the mechanical language of 3D video game environments, and an understanding that playing a survival horror game meant combing those environments for resources. In previous games, which were set in pre-rendered environments and used clunky tank controls, that meant clumsily rubbing your character's face against bookshelves, desks, and counters to search for a hidden item or, if you were lucky, to pick something up that was obviously sitting on a table. Either way, searching the environment was standard practice.

Resident Evil 4 in 2005 took this assumed player behavior, and translated it into a more malleable environment. The game’s tight, third-person camera, newfound fidelity, and precise aiming meant that older styles of exploration felt awkward. Instead, Resident Evil 4 called back to an old stand-by of RPGs, platformers, and PC FPS games: breakable boxes. The new containers fit the game’s setting, and because players could be assumed to know that they should scavenge the environment for resources and that containers frequently held items in other games, they could be assumed to know that they should try to break things. This was a product of the game’s assumed audience: people who already played video games. Resident Evil 4 was, without a doubt, trying to court a broader audience than previous games, which is one of the reasons it became more action heavy, but that ideal audience was people familiar with other genres.

Resident Evil 4 marks the end of what some consider to be the golden age of survival horror. However, it didn’t end the golden age through its failure, but it's overwhelming success in transforming the basic design language of the genre. Dead Space, released just three years later, is filled with breakable containers hiding precious ammunition and healing items, as is every subsequent Resident Evil game.

In the last two decades, the assumed audience of a massive, AAA title like the Resident Evil 4 remake has changed (albeit only slightly). Many modern AAA games are built around the assumption that they could be a given player’s first game, and so are designed to be very, very explicit about how they’re expected to interact with the world. This is extremely helpful for new players, and a minor inconvenience for people who have been playing games for a long time.

That signposting is needed is clear, and the question then becomes about how one should go about doing it. As evidenced by the massive influence Resident Evil 4 had on survival horror, and action games broadly, the design language of video games is iterative. One game sets a standard, and other games begin operating around that standard as a base assumption. This is normal for just about every artistic medium, but what sets games apart is their interactivity and insularity. 

Even if you don’t know standard film conventions, the movie doesn’t stop when you don’t understand why a particular cut happened. This gives movie-goers the actual time to do the pattern recognition required to internalize the basic language of the medium. If you don’t understand why a cut happened the first time, after a dozen more you’ll start to understand. Games do not have this luxury. If you do not learn certain lessons, or even know how to learn certain lessons, you won’t progress and that basic understanding will elude you.

This wouldn’t be as much of a problem if game design wasn’t as insular as it frequently is. In his 2015 GDC talk, environmental artist Dan Cox talks about the importance of basic interior design knowledge for good level design in 3D space. Logically, this makes perfect sense. Interior design, level design, and environmental art, all have massive points of overlap in their basic goals and language. However, studying interior design, or at least learning the basic theory of how spaces are constructed, is not particularly common for game developers. Instead, many devs learn 3D level design from other games. This insularity has led to games developing their own basic design language, which feels just off enough from real-world design that it becomes difficult for new players to intuit things. 

To borrow an example from Cox’s GDC talk, lighting is not usually used to signpost importance or signify where a person should be going in real-world situations—it's used to make a space more visually complex and, to borrow interior design language, enriching. In games, however, lighting is often the key to intuitively understanding where you should be going to make progress through an area—a hallway more brightly or interestingly lit than the surrounding area is clearly the way to go.

These slight differences have led to the brute force design on display in the Resident Evil 4 remake. Instead of adapting how games are designed to the ways in which people understand real world spaces, games have had to clearly signpost just about everything until players get the message and adapt their understanding of 3D space to games. If you couple this with the frequently strange logic of video games (just look at the Resident Evil mansions), you have an artistic medium which runs the risk of losing all legibility to outsiders. In a way, the Resident Evil 4 remake is looping back around to its original self, a victim of its own innovative success.

Video games do not have to become less complex to be readable to an outside audience, instead, they can pull their basic design language from things people are more familiar with in the real world. This basic design language can then be used to facilitate the kinds of pattern recognition common in other artistic mediums without being unceasingly on the nose, allowing games to retain their wonderful, goofy internal logic, while simultaneously becoming legible to everyone else.