With the remake of Resident Evil 4 arriving at the end of last week, it’s a great time to be a horror game buff in search of something to play with the lights off and scare yourself silly.
Some of these fearless fans have simply set the game to the highest difficulty possible, picked out their favourite weapon and dived into the terrifying action, but others are already experimenting with modding the game, just as they did with its demo.
While some of the efforts of these hardcore horror lovers have added the likes of Leon’s Fortnite skin, John Wick star Keanu Reeves and even Thomas the Tank Engine to Resi 4 so far, one modder has quietly set about filling it with bamboo-guzzling bears.
Fancy turning Resident Evil 4 into a spooky version of Planet Zoo?
The modder in question is SupremeLeader777, who has a long history of adding interesting characters to Resident Evil games, having previously brought the Yakuza series’ Kazuma Kiryu to Resi 3 and GTA San Andreas’ CJ to Resi 2.
This time, they’ve continued their apparent mission to replace both friendly characters and enemies in these games with bipedal giant pandas, by bringing a bunch of these ferocious folivores to Capcom’s latest remaster.
These efforts started prior to the game’s release, with a mod called ‘Panda (Leon)’, which, as you might imagine, transforms Mr Kennedy into a cultist-killing bear whose exploits will likely be the closest we ever get to a Kung Fu Panda survival horror game, unless someone DMs Jack Black the idea on Twitter and he takes a liking to it.
More recently, though, they’ve returned to give the Leon panda some in-game brethren in the form of ‘Giant Panda - Ashley’, who sports a cute yellow bow, and the fearsome ‘Titan Panda’, which seemingly replaces the game’s hulking El Gigante.
So, with all three of these mods installed, the game seemingly gains an interesting panda-based subplot with more intrigue than the average Edinburgh Zoo rom-com.
Regardless of whether your version of the Resident Evil 4 Remake has already morphed into a surreal mess of cute animals and children's TV characters, make sure to check out our massive array of helpful guides and updates on DLC for it.