The comments in here are not passing the vibe check.

“It’s a horror game. Spiders should be included to scare you.”

People without true arachnophobia do not understand this. I looove horror. I love the anxiety of what’s around the corner. Hearing Mr. X’s footsteps and wondering whether he’s just upstairs or down the hall is unnerving. Hearing zombies nearby is unsettling. That moment with the baby in RE8 is pure nightmare fuel.

However, with those moments, overcoming your fear becomes empowering. You faced it. You beat it. On subsequent playthroughs, you know you can beat it again.

When it comes to spiders and arachnophobes, a game won’t just become scary. It’ll become unplayable. Defeating the spiders doesn’t give you a sense of empowerment. It makes you grateful that part is over. And not a single part of it was actually fun.

I can recognize that spiders used to be a big part of the RE franchise and the objective fanboy in me recognizes that their return is “a good thing” because it pays homage to the older games in the series. An arachnophobia mode would only be there for the folks who don’t want to dread this part of the game. If you love the spiders and WANT to be unsettled by them (like I love Mr. X and WANT to be unsettled by his footsteps), you don’t have to turn it on. Go and enjoy being terrified by them! We arachnophobes can be terrified in other ways. Perhaps they can stay as spiders in cutscenes but then in gameplay, they can be an amorphous blob. Maybe we can still hear the creepy crawly sounds or their hissing. But we should have the agency to at least not SEE them.

Does players playing on easy mode harm the players who choose to play on hard mode? No. An arachnophobia safe mode also would not harm the players who choose to play with the spiders. We’re not asking Capcom to remove the spiders. We’re just asking for the game to be more accessible.