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Dead Rising Deluxe Remaster achieves exactly what it set out to do—but maybe that's not enough

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Frankness is a virtue.
We’re finally back, baby! Dead Rising is a Capcom gem and a true original, but boy did the publisher fumble it after the original. Heavily inspired by George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead, Dead Rising would be arguably the last masterpiece from Capcom production genius Keiji Inafune (it was released in 2006—Inafune worked on a variety of other projects subsequently, but left in 2010) and was a cutting-edge technological feat with that ’80s/’90s arcade DNA running right through it: something old and something new, all at once.
Dead Rising is an open world game, in the limited sense of the open world being a shopping mall, and it operates like no other open world game you’ve played. It begins with a scene-setting flight into Willamette, during which you take control of protagonist Frank West, photojournalist extraordinaire, and start snapping the scenes on the streets. Even now it’s an effective, albeit highly choreographed, introduction to a world where the zombie apocalypse is here but no-one is quite sure that’s what it is yet. The most brilliant touch, as you take snap after snap and the rating system praises your work, is the poor souls on the ground trying to wave down the chopper as you capture their horrific last moments.
Once Frank’s at the mall, after agreeing that the chopper will return three in-game days later, the first hour or so of Dead Rising is carefully guided. There’s a non-optional opening where you meet a boatload of other survivors in the mall lobby, and are free to take your time chatting away to them and listening to incidental dialogue, before the zombies break through the mall’s doors in a flood and, as you struggle to escape, the death notices pop up one-by-one. It’s hard to overstate how effective this is: the slow build before the combination of a dozen videogame-y pings one after the other saying „SO-AND-SO HAS DIED!“
After this you’re in the mall’s security room, meet a pair of mysterious government spooks and get access to a save point, then you’re off. You can do what you will within the parts of the mall you have access to (with shortcuts and new routes opening up as you explore), and are free to ignore any and all prompts, but most players will follow the opening quest and rescue their first survivors as well as assisting Brad (one of the feds). After this is where the structure blossoms.
You begin to juggle relatively freeform exploration with tips from Otis, a security guard watching on the cameras who’ll tell you when he spots other survivors, in concert with pursuing the true story behind the outbreak. Everything is on the clock: when you find out about something happening, there’s a limited time to investigate it before that opportunity is lost forever. Maybe you can do everything, especially at the start, but soon the tips pile up and choices have to be made: especially when you’re trying to get someone who can barely walk back to safety.Let’s be Frank
That’s the basic outline, but Dead Rising Deluxe Remaster is a strange old beast, and die-hards could almost take it as a tacit admission from Capcom that it never quite worked out how to improve on this structure. This remaster has all the fancy graphical swizz that Capcom can throw at it, but for better or worse still plays like the Xbox 360 game it is. All of the things I’m going to criticise about it are true of the original, and this only ever promised to be a remaster (as opposed to something like the ground-up remake of Resident Evil 4). But when Dead Rising gets it right, it gets it so right that you almost wish Capcom had been bolder in the many moments when it slips up.
The first unqualified success is Frank West. A middle-aged cynic with a widow’s peak and an indefatigable focus on the story, later entries would dilute Frank’s character to the degree he became a generic (and unforgivably handsome) bore. But here he is chasing the scoop and, to begin with at least, almost indifferent to the suffering he witnesses. The game leans into this, too, encouraging you to score great shots of the calamity unfolding, and showing Frank as someone who’ll help out. if he gets something back.
But it’s that heft that DRDR gets so right. Frank is a big man, and he’s athletic and in decent shape, but he’s not some spring chicken cartwheeling around zombie mobs. He’s a brute. You positively bully individual zombies and, in the crowds, barrel through them like a dad who’s just seen his kid fall over. This is not a simulation, of course, and the other side of it is the comedic animations as you explore the mall’s vast array of items, almost all of which can be used as weapons, and start to see the exaggerated golf swings, wind-ups and hell-for-leather thwacks he can deliver.

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