Watch On
It’s not uncommon for Resident Evil games to open with a combat-free intro level—Resident Evil Village has two of them back to back. You play through a domestic scene at home and then walk through the night to the village where all the monster-murder finally kicks in. They’re characterful ways to begin a horror game, though they do put you off replays given all that slow-paced atmosphere-building only really works once.
Resident Evil 4’s remake would have had one of these intros, a Chapter 0 where you play Ashley in the moments leading up to her capture. You can see moments from it in the trailer, but it was cut at some point in development—perhaps due to complaints about how similar prologues messed with the pacing of other Residents Evil. (Capcom seems averse to giving players the option to skip stuff in replays, which you’d think would be an easy fix to the problem.)
Thanks to modder and YouTuber Michael Kemp, we can see what this mini Episode Ashley would have looked like. Well, sort of. The leftovers found among RE4R’s files don’t include the cutscenes, the enemies, or whatever Ashley would have used to light her way through the dark, though they do include a couple of different running animations including a more frantic version for chicken-flapping her arms around while being chased by a ganado.
I don’t know if I’m really disappointed about the lack of another stealth sequence where you play a girl that people on the internet would have complained about—fans of Resident Evil 4 are here for Leon doing roundhouse kicks and tend to talk about Ashley like she murdered their puppies and also grandparents, so it’s probably for the best this bit was cut.
