Wherever you look there are clues to the building's past. Various features like the unusual clock tower and the goddess statue in the main hall remind us of a bygone era.' This idea is also reinforced by the oil paintings, old statues, and other artefacts you find littered around the station-often in storage rooms with dust sheets draped over them. 'The building in the centre of town wasn't always a police station,' reads a tourism pamphlet you can pick up in a waiting room. But these days, Kadoi says, people question this stuff more, which led to additional backstory being written for the station. When I first played Resident Evil 2 as a teenager, I never questioned the fact that the RPD was headquartered in an elaborate old building filled with arcane puzzles. Kadoi explains that, because of advances in graphics technology and player expectation, videogame settings have to be more believable today. 'But at the same time I wanted to make changes that would make the gameplay more fun, and make the station feel more like a believable space.' 'I wanted to carry the statue and the taxidermy animals over to the new police station,” he says. The statue is noticeably bigger in the remake, dramatically lit by moonlight streaming through glass windows in the ceiling. This statue is something Kadoi felt was important to bring back, as well as the eerie stuffed animals found in the office of the corrupt Chief Irons. I mean, how many police stations do you know with a giant marble statue of a goddess behind the reception desk? If the station had been designed by a western studio-one that is perhaps more familiar with the kind of bland government building police departments usually operate out of-it might not have been quite so idiosyncratic and memorable.

There's also an uncanny quality to the station that I think comes from Raccoon City, an American city, being viewed through a Japanese lens.

Resident evil 2 remake rpd map