Game
Resident Evil
Resident Evil is Capcom's survival horror series, begun in 1996 with the Spencer Mansion and the T-virus and continued through the fall of Raccoon City, the remakes of its early entries and the first-person turn of Resident Evil 7. Its games are on PC, PlayStation, Xbox and Nintendo platforms, and the Umbrella Corporation, the Arklay Mountains and the green herb are among the most recognized fixtures in horror games.
CRIT6 has looked at the series' worldbuilding: the botany behind its herbs, read from the files in the games, and the way the destruction of Raccoon City in Resident Evil 2 and 3 follows the same structure as the Chernobyl disaster without ever drawing on it.
Stories
Raccoon City and Chernobyl: two disasters built the same way
Capcom never based Resident Evil on Chernobyl, yet both catastrophes follow the same chain of greed, warnings ignored, cover-ups and erasure.
The botany of survival: what Resident Evil's herbs really are
Green, red and blue herbs look like a convenience, but Resident Evil's files give them a native habitat, a lab history and even a pie recipe.