Earlier this week, something I thought truly impossible happened: Capcom released a new Dead Rising game. Yes, in spite of being declared dead and buried by the company many years ago alongside the abrupt shuttering of its main studio, this classic nearly two-decade-old zombie action franchise came back in the shiny new Dead Rising Deluxe Remaster.
That “Deluxe” in the title is doing a lot of work to cover up that this is more of a remake than a remaster. The game runs on Capcom’s modern RE engine even though it was mostly developed by an outside studio at NeoBards, and most of the graphical and audio assets in the new release are bespoke creations for this game. The production quality of every element is a little more low budget and sustainable than your average AAA game release, with a more modest visual target that feels like it’s designed to run on lower end PCs and maybe even the Switch 2. In spite of numerous quality of life upgrades and difficulty tweaks, underneath it all it seems like there’s still a fair amount of the original animation and game design humming along driving everything, making for a game that feels eighty percent new while still feeding off of nostalgia.
I’m blasting my way through its campaign so my thoughts could change in the next week, but it’s one of my favorite games of the year so far — and a very…
