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RESIDENT EVIL 0

the goal here was (seemingly) to make good on all the corporate mythologizing and finally reintroduce some sweet home back into the series, but the graft is crude and never quite takes. the item boxes, dual protagonists, etc. don't feel like extensions of the classic resident evil format so much as interjections that constantly divert you from the reasons you're actually here. for every moment where you have to work in tandem or wield a character's specificity toward some clever end, there are a dozen more where you're playing hot potato with a red herb or some shotgun shells. with lack of central item storage everything spills out, room by room, eventually hitting maximum item capacity in several, yet never even hinting at what this is intended to encourage or what the payoff for sinking neck deep into a menu hole every 10 minutes is supposed to be. it can't even manage to make the split-up moments interesting since they happen so infrequently and generally allow you to transfer items back & forth anyway, while the rest of the game has its glass jaw shattered by beefcake billy & an abundance of resources that had me leaving dozens of rounds, gas cans, and entire ass shotguns (plural) on the ground. would love to say the silver lining's that metaknowledge carves the ugliest gristle off this thing, but no one needs to play this once, let alone twice