Resident Evil 4 Remake: Dr. Salvador
I watched every Dr. Salvador execution sequence. I watched Leon, Ada, Hunk, Krauser and Louis get sliced and then gored and ripped apart by the almost positively tetanus-infested rusty blades of that chainsawsaw one-by-one-by-one all in the interest of making sure I could say I did, and, to reiterate an important point.
Dr. Salvador, or Chainsaw-villager, is a great character.
He’s also a great game mechanic.
Dr. Salvador established my fear of chainsaws before Leatherface ever did. That’s entirely because before I had even seen the sack-faced antagonist on the cover of Resident Evil 4 at my local Hastings, I had never seen anyone use a chainsaw as a weapon. It was decades before I watched Ash in the film Evil Dead 2 strap one to his arm and say Groovy, and at least a few years before I would haphazardly watch sections of the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre before chickening out and changing the channel back to Adult Swim. He was the reason why when my Dad would bust out his chainsaw to cut a few limbs off of the trees in the yard, I found excuses to stay inside. There was something about the power-tool that really bothered me. And deep down I knew what it was.
Dr. Salvador was a boogeyman that lived in that chainsaw.
I admit with no hesitation, but a little shame, it was because of this non-playable-character (NPC) that I never actually played the original Resident Evil 4 until I was about 25. I purchased the game for the PS4 a decade or so later and tried playing it. I didn’t even make it through the opening village sequence because, sure enough, Dr. Salvador sawed off my head, and also because tank controls suck.
Tank controls suck all the butt dude.
Shift to 2023, I’m playing Resident Evil 7 while my girlfriend watches, and I’m shoving a giant pair of chainsaw scissors into Jack’s face. My how times can change a man.
On 24 March 2023 Resident Evil 4 Remake was released and this was my chance to finally grow the spine I lacked when I first stared wistfully at the cover of Vol 182 of NintendoPower. I had played the demo, and died horribly, and it was all because of that butt-sucking npc Dr. Salvador. But I was committed this time and bought a copy from my local Best Buy. Even had a fun conversation with the cashier about how awesome this game was gonna be. I played it, and beat it, and then I played it again. And then I played it again for my girlfriend because she’d never heard of it.
While I was writing about Imps in Classic Doom and how NPC’s can create the visual tone of a game, as well as shape gameplay mechanics, I started thinking about numbers, specifically the numbers of NPCS and how that can shape the experience of a game. And Dr. Salvadore’s appearance in Resident Evil 4 Remake, the version of the game I was able to play through to completion, began repeating in my head. How many times did that particular antagonist appear, and how did his appearance shape the levels he was in?
I looked at two other examples of game where npcs had a similarly dramatic and crucial role to gameplay.
While writing this I picked up a copy of Geometry Wars and began playing it falling in love almost immediately. It’s a beautiful shoot-’em-up entirely composed of geometric solids that will move randomly or towards the player’s icon while they fire, and like most shoot-’em-ups, the thrill becomes how these npcs create a claustrophobia around the player the further into the level you go. Dodging randomly moving enemies, while also avoiding the fire from antagonistic npcs is a straight jam because of how tense things can become.
Another great example would probably be PacMan. There are only 4 enemy npcs in Pacman, the four ghosts named Blinky, Pinky, Inky, and Clyde. These iconic sprites will move throughout the maze seemingly at random and then will, after a few moments depending on what level the player is on, begin to pursue PacMan through the maze according to their programming. The enjoyment of playing PacMan is navigating the maze and eating the pellets, while also avoiding being attacked by the ghosts. Even after 43 years Pacman’s mechanics are fun to play because they create this unnerving claustrophobia. The ghosts can chase PacMan even seemingly to the point where they are almost touching the player as they wiggle PacMan around a corner.
Both of these games build tension up before eventually releasing it when the player inevitably fails and touches the npc, or when they defeat the level.
It’s a beautiful formula: tension=excitement and contact=defeat.
These formulas are brilliantly executed when I play Resident Evil 4 Remake and encounter Dr. Salvador.
Dr. Salvador remains arguably one of the most challenging NPCs in the game because he encapsulates the previously established formulas. While not the most terrifying, or most difficult npc in the game (that would be the regeneradors which…I’m not ready to talk about them yet), Dr. Salvador is unique because his attack with the chainsaw is always going to kill the player. Leon Kennedy can be shot with arrows, stabbed, thrown, bitten, or even stung by giant insects and still manage to survive the attack. Because of this, any instances of Dr. Salvador, or the Chainsaw Sisters in one sequence of the early game, are limited. One fan count comes out to about 5 appearances of the character, while also arguing that it’s the same individual everytime. I personally doubt this, but I’ll leave it up to the reader to decide for themselves.
What’s important is that Dr. Salvador’s appearances coincide with swarms of Ganado, villagers who have become infected with the Las Plagas parasite. These are low level npcs comparable to Imps and Soldiers in Doom; they’re only a real threat in overwhelming numbers. The Ganado create the tension that makes players feel the claustrophobia of the level, but it’s Dr. Salvador with his chainsaw that the real stakes are introduced. Like Blinky charging directly at PacMan, Dr. Salvador will pursue Leon no matter what direction he goes, and if the player is not quick enough to navigate the maze of the terrain, then the chainsaw will land, and PacMan will die.
Leon.
Leon will die.
I meant to say Leon.
You get the idea.
I do want to make sure the reader understands that this analysis is not arguing that no other enemy npc in the game compares in difficulty to Dr. Salvador. Far from it. Whether it’s Ramon Salazar, Del Lago, Verdugo, Agent Krauser, Regenadores (*shudder*), or Lord Sadler there are plenty of Boss-npc characters in Resident Evil 4 Remake that provide plenty of challenges to the player. The only difference I’m trying to highlight is that Dr. Salvador operates a different sort of challenge. He’s not a Boss-npc and his role is not part of the end-game narrative; he’s just a mechanic to increase tension for lower level fights. Boss-npcs are often employed for narrative purposes rather than solely for gameplay mechanics. A Boss-npc is designed to create a sense of closure to the player after pushing through a level, dungeon, chapter, etc. If bosses were designed so that they could KO the player with a single attack, there’d be a lot more smashed controllers in the world, and probably fewer video game players.
Then again, I’ve played two hours of Elden Ring and four hours of Cuphead so maybe that isn’t an accurate statement.
While writing this essay I began rereading the book The Art of Failure: An Essay on the Pain of Playing Video Games by Jesper Juul, and one passage gave me some insight on why Dr. Salvador has the effect he does. Juul says:
It is the threat of failure that gives us something to do in the first place. It is painful for humans to feel incompetent or lacking, but games hurt us and then induce an urgency to repair our self image. Much of the positive effect of failure comes from the fact that we can learn to escape from it, feeling more competent than we did before. This connects games to the general fact that it is enjoyable to learn something, but it also shows games as different from regular learning: we are not necessarily disappointed if we find it easy to learn to drive a car, but we are disappointed if a game is too easy. This means that failure is integral to the enjoyment of game playing in a way that is not integral to the enjoyment of learning in general. Games are a perspective on failure, and learning as enjoyment or satisfaction. (45)
Dr. Salvadore will slice Leon, or Ada, or Louis, or Krauser, or Hunk and then shove his chainsaw into their torso, killing them. This action is explicitly violent and can be disturbing to watch, even if you’re a hardened horror junkie. There’s a lasting potency to chainsaws in the media, and while researching for this essay I even found a website dedicated to the tool that had its own article offering explanations why people find them so frightening.
Fun fact: as of this writing there is no name for a phobia of chainsaws.
Somebody needs to get on this.
While the character frightened me when I was younger because of his chainsaw, the character terrifies me today largely because of the way he works so well in the game. The opening scene in the village would not have the panic-inducing energy that it did if Dr. Salvador was not there. Like watching Blinky corner me in the maze or watching a blue icosahedron slam into my ship, Dr. Salvador’s pursuit is one of the best crafted uses of an npc in a video game I’ve ever experienced. Playing levels against him is about employing every tool and aspect of character movement to avoid physical contact and these become, in their own way, one of the most enjoyable sequences of Resident Evil 4 Remake.
Watching Leon get massacred by that rusty, blood-stained power-tool is difficult because it is disturbing to watch. But now when I hear the character’s scream there’s a part of my head that also hears the sound of PacMan collapsing into himself.
I note as an aside that the fact that no one has made this into a youtube short is criminal.
Dr. Salvadore adds real weight to whatever scene he’s in because he builds the tension and then perfectly creates the stakes of a fight; he is a perfect encapsulation of the equations I wrote before: Tension=Excitement and Contact=Defeat. This is the reason why I remember and care about the opening fight in the village far more than my fight with Krauser or Lord Saddler. Those fights are fun, and memorable, and have all the monster transformation goofiness that makes Resident Evil the franchise that it is. But nothing in Resident Evil 4 Remake has left me feeling so excited, exhausted, and exhilarated as just barely dodging a swipe from that chainsaw.
Joshua “Jammer” Smith
11.11.2023
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