Leaf through the history of independent video games and the pages are drenched in horror. It was there in the 1990s shareware era of Doom and Hugo's House of Horrors. It was there too in the Flash games of the early 2000s: Exmortis, the House series, the now lost Hotel 626. And it is here now, in the modern indie age. Lone coders and small development studios have always explored dark stories in haunted houses, lonely forests and seemingly abandoned spacecraft populated by demonic entities.

If you want to know what it sounds like to root around in someone's chest cavity without the bloody mess, a grapefruit will do just fine. With a little tuning on the audio side, the sour fruit is now a gag-worthy imitation of a gurgling death. Sound designers in video games have mastered the art of turning mundane noises into art of the grossest kind. Cracking apart a walnut becomes the sound of bones snapping. Nickelodeon green goo splashed onto the floor is a dead ringer for blood, vomit, and spilled guts, while using a plunger to slurp through that same mess conjures up any number of wet, squelching scenarios.

The perfect Resident Evil game doesn't exist. The series, among the most consequential in gaming, has shifted its focus so often, a "Resident Evil fan" could be many things. One player's definition of a perfect Resident Evil game is another's mark of where the series went astray. Like the Zelda or Mario series, Resident Evil is due some credit for innovating and becoming an industry leader, even if it eventually began to borrow from its action-adventure peers. Still, there are plenty of ideas that persist through each game.