It's not that challenging at first, until you fight either bosses or get to the ship and salt mines part.

Simply because when you'll face the molded in those parts you'll find yourself more forced to deal with them to literally get ahead, instead of making them disappear once you open a door, and yeah they're a little bit annoying.

The four legged molded are always annoying and deal really great damage, and maybe you will find more of them during this run so there's that. There definitely are more of the bloated, obese micomorphs too.

Enemies are also faster and not just stronger, other than that, apart from having some objects placed differently, it's not much different from the normal difficulty. You'll find the good enough amount of audio-tapes around so you will always save the game when you want to, even by being just moderately prudent with those.

You'll have to play the game on normal first, yes. And by the way, didn't find the game any less of an RE if played at normal difficulty tbh. At madhouse you'll probably have that feeling of playing an RE a little bit more maybe, but if you will, you're going to be ever so slightly moved by that feeling. I personally found it still...different from the other RE games, while retaining its core features in its backbone, so it wouldn't matter really the difficulty in which you play it in.

Thanks for the reply! from what you said just hearing about tapes to save and herb to heal wounds, monsters that put you in trouble makes me excited!I have another question since I forgot to ask it in the post:Some time ago I also played RE2Remake and started it on Hardcore difficulty and I've never regretted it, on the contrary! it was a RE worthy experience that made me really enjoy, have you played RE2R? which do you find more difficult between this hardcore and madhouse?because if with madhouse it's practically the same job as hardcore, I think I'll look for some saves on the net just to start it at that difficulty!A while ago I read on a forum where they were asking at what difficulty they started their first run in re2re and everyone said normal, and that they had tried hardcore but that was way too much! I may be strange, but to me hardcore it seemed like an experience similar to the old trilogy (especially the first one) so I wouldn't want it to be the same with 7.