DEN
JPN
ENG
USA
POL
CAN
SWE
FRA
AUT
FIN
AUS
EST
BEL2026 Video Game Madness - South Region 2nd Round: 7 Alan Wake 2 vs. 2 Resident Evil 4
2026 Video Game Madness - South Region 2nd Round
South Region Round of 32 Matchup Preview: 7 Alan Wake 2 vs. 2 Resident Evil 4
Remedy's Thirteen-Year Masterpiece Against Capcom's Definitive Remake
Alan Wake 2 beat Street Fighter 6 in overtime in the Round of 64, a result that was tighter than a 7 vs 10 matchup might have been expected to produce and that confirmed something about the people who have been waiting for this game.
They waited thirteen years. Remedy Entertainment spent years trying to make a sequel to the 2010 original, and years more navigating the complex rights situation that meant they had to reacquire the Alan Wake IP from Microsoft before they could move forward with the project they wanted to make. The fanbase that formed around the original Alan Wake is not a large one by the standards of this tournament, but it is deeply committed in the way that cult fanbases always are, and it survived overtime against a 92-rated fighting game that won Best Fighting Game at The Game Awards 2023.
Street Fighter 6 is not a game that goes down easily. It revitalized a franchise that Street Fighter V had damaged with its troubled launch. It scored a 92 on Metacritic and won its category at the Game Awards. Its Drive system added strategic depth to every match. Its World Tour mode gave new players a way to learn the game's mechanics in a welcoming environment. The fighting game community is one of the most organized and competitive communities in gaming, and it showed up for Street Fighter 6 in overtime before running out of room by one vote.
Alan Wake 2 survived. The game is one of the most visually and narratively ambitious releases of 2023, the product of approximately seventy million euros of development budget and decades of creative investment from a studio that has been building toward this kind of work since Max Payne. It scored an 89 on Metacritic and won Best Art Direction at The Game Awards. The Dark Place sequences are unlike anything else in gaming, surreal and beautiful and deeply unsettling in ways that pure horror rarely manages to achieve. The game follows two protagonists simultaneously, Alan Wake trapped in a nightmare dimension and FBI agent Saga Anderson investigating murders in the real world that mirror the events of Alan's unpublished novel, and their stories intersect in a structure of remarkable complexity.
The people who played Alan Wake 2 felt it land in the specific way that only certain games manage, landing not just as entertainment but as something that changed how they think about what the medium is capable of. That feeling produced votes in overtime against Street Fighter 6. It is going to need to produce votes again against a 2 seed that is one of the most well-resourced franchises in gaming history.
Resident Evil 4 is the 2023 remake of a game that is widely regarded as one of the most influential in the action genre's history. The original Resident Evil 4 came out in 2005 and changed what action games could be. The over-the-shoulder camera. The contextual melee. The inventory management. The pacing. All of it influenced a generation of designers. Making a remake of it required navigating expectations built over nearly twenty years and delivering something that honored the original while making it genuinely new.
Capcom did it. The remake scored a 93 on Metacritic and won Best Adaptation at The Game Awards. It modernized the graphics, the controls, and aspects of the story while preserving the fundamental structure and design intent of the original. Leon is still Leon. The merchant is still there. The village, the castle, the island, the Ganados, all of it is still there. But it plays like the game you remembered rather than the game it actually was in 2005, which is the highest possible compliment for a remake. For players coming to the story fresh in 2023, it is the definitive entry point. For players who loved the original, it is a rare case of a classic treated with genuine respect.
It beat Dead Cells 3-1 in the Round of 64, a comfortable result for the 2 seed that demonstrated the Resident Evil franchise's ability to turn out voters regardless of the matchup. Dead Cells is a genuinely excellent game with a devoted community, and RE4 Remake still won by two votes.
A 7 seed that survived overtime with thirteen years of creative investment behind it against a 2 seed with one of gaming's most recognized franchises and a 93 Metacritic. The South bracket continues March 21. 12PM.
