Resident Evil 1's remake and the OG Resident Evil 4 are still must-plays, and you can make them both look even better with HD remaster mods

The GameCube era of the early 2000s was a magical time for Resident Evil. Not only did Capcom return to the first game, releasing a much more challenging and intense remake (where mutating, self-reviving enemies first appeared, a feature every Requiem player is VERY familiar with by now), but it also pushed the genre towards a new, more action-oriented era with the gloriously camp Resident Evil 4.

Liberated from the GameCube and now over 20 years old each, both REmake and the OG RE4 are available with some mild enhancements on Steam. They're perfectly playable straight from the installer—but we can do better.

Thanks to painstaking efforts by the community, extensive graphical mods are available for both games, although not much gameplay-wise. Best not to mess with perfection, after all.

Resident Evil Remake

While REmake is fine without mods, at higher resolutions it's not hard to notice that the character models stand out against pre-rendered backdrops originally meant for 480i CRT TV screens. Capcom has done some cursory cleanup with its HD ports, but modders have gone one step further.

While the Nexus page for REmake has several options, your best bet is the well-titled REscale:

• Download (don't forget the Hotfix and the 3D Assets, plus this little fix)
• Unzip to your installed game directory and overwrite as needed
• Play as normal, simple as that

This is probably my ideal way to play Resident Evil, though I do recommend sticking to the classic tank-style controls—it wouldn't be RE1 without them.

As with any upscale (done with home-friendly tech predating the water- and power-guzzling AI tools now in wider use), it's never going to be perfect, with some things like the shadows around flickering fires looking a little warped. But this mod does a commendable job of blurring the line between foreground and background without losing that thick layer of grime and shadow that defined the look of the first remake.

Resident Evil 4: The Pain in Spain

While the first REmake's community-made remasters might have some minor tradeoffs, Resident Evil 4's HD Mod is widely considered one of the greatest ever made.

A massive labor of love that went far beyond upscaling textures, the two-man team (one of whom is now working for Nightdive) went as far as to track down the original source images used where possible for creating new high-res replacements. And where they couldn't, they travelled to locations around the world to create new source photography.

Most of the game's 3D models (including a lot of low-fi backdrop objects) have been entirely recreated too, but the final cherry on the las plagas sundae is refreshed dynamic lighting. With the mod, every light-source in the environment behaves as it "should" have. Something we take for granted now, but the old reliable GameCube would have started wheezing if asked to do it back in 2005.

Having replayed this version of Resident Evil 4 myself recently, it's shocking how much the remaster mod looks like I THOUGHT the game looked 20 years ago. But in comparison (see this before-and-after showcase) it's night and day.

RE4's HD mod looks pin-sharp and perfectly consistent with the game's original visuals, just better, and at minimal performance cost. The only tradeoff is the install size, nearly quadrupling the game's SSD footprint.

Installation is dead simple:

• Download from the RE4 HD site
• Unpack to wherever you have the Steam version of the game installed.
• If you want a smaller HUD, alternative controller glyphs or a patch to reduce flashing effects for those with photosensitivity issues, there are mini mods for those on the Extras page, too.

All of this is important, because as good as the Resident Evil 4 Remake is, it's effectively a whole new game following the same plot beats. It's not a replacement: Resident Evil 4 remains a blast to play, and features some fun setpieces cut from the remake. With this mod, the venerable 2005 original stands proud alongside its 2023 cousin. The only thing better than playing RE4 is playing it twice.