Genuinely frightening. The atmosphere in the gameplay video was skin crawling. Holy shit it didn't even trigger my zombie fatigue unlike Days Gone.
I think a big part of it is that many zombie games have kinda' gone done a route for 'standard zombie', making them more a popcorn unit and honestly a 'sterilized' version of itself. Add to this it's been done to death.
REmake 2 however instead of just making a popcorn zombie is actually putting in effort to make an interesting morbid take on zombies, focusing on why they're scary and nailing it. A lot of small things, like the diversity in appearance (a lot of zombie games all the zombies look kinda' the same, while REmake 2 will certainly have repeating zombie models there's a WIDE variety of them and of all sorts of different body types, plus the body types actually make some gameplay difference in how you tackle them), the fact they actually look morbid and gnarly, the animations are on-point, they lumber like a zombie but tail you and can corner you and provide an actual threat alone, plus their damage system is surprisingly well done yet grotesque (the GameSpot video where the guy is shooting the one zombie in the face and it's not dying, shooting off layers of face skin so you see the muscles and then the skull beneath, actually was both awesome and terrifying at once).
It's one of the few games to focus on making the zombies have personality and try to tap into what fundamentally makes a zombie scary, which if often forgotten due to the popular media depiction of them and how overused they are. Plus it also helps RE2 won't really have an issue in enemy variety, so zombies aren't all that the player will be dealing with.
I don't like how the game points out your objective or where you should be going next. Let the player freely explore in their own way and figure it out for themselves.
RE7 let you turn that off, so I bet REmake 2 will as well. The bright side is it isn't all knowing, after the initial shutter scene you're tasked with finding three medallions, but the map doesn't tell you where they are.
