If you are lucky or smart or both, you have already played Resident Evil 4. It is fizzingly excellent, unequaled by any video game yet released this year. Resident Evil 4 is gruesome and bloody and relentlessly frightening. It will worry you, and then it will disturb you, and then it will alarm you, and then you will pretend you are tough enough to shrug off the scares, and then it will pretend it is syrup of ipecac. The mood it engenders is equal parts wretched and irresistible.

Resident Evil Outbreak File #2, though, is merely wretched. It is boring. It is insulting. It is difficult to control. It is bad in new and creative ways. Here is an analogy. If the Resident Evil product line is a public swimming pool, and Resident Evil 4 is a beautiful renovation done in Italian glass mosaic tile, Outbreak File #2 is a nasty surprise of the sort that requires a) everyone getting out and drying off and b) a little net and c) several hours of enthusiastic chlorination. When you begin the year with a triumph like Resident Evil 4, you really need to work hard to dissipate all the attendant goodwill. Outbreak File #2 very nearly manages it.

The game is set, like many other Resident Evils, in a place called Raccoon City. If you saw the movies, you will recall that Raccoon City looks a lot like Toronto. This is true here too, except that there is a zoo downtown, and it is home to zombie hyenas and zombie lions and a zombie elephant.

Yes, there is a zombie elephant in Outbreak File #2. A really big mean one. With sharp tusks. And big stompy feet! And a trunk that can smack you super hard! And sometimes kill you!

Zombie elephants are not scary. Or, rather, they are not any scarier than, say, regular elephants. Elephants remain committed vegetarians even after they are zombified, so we never need worry about their enormous jaws clamping down on us in frenzied hunger. Instead, we must run away when they charge at us, and we must shoot them in the side whenever we have extra bullets. Which we rarely do, because we can only carry a few things at a time and apparently we are not very good at using our pockets.

Traditionally, the best way to play a Resident Evil game is alone in a dark room. The chills come more easily that way, and the gore and the violence are more deeply unsettling, and the jolts put more vertical space between chair and rear. But the Outbreak titles are not traditional Resident Evil games. Rather, they are Online Multiplayer Resident Evil games.

When video game reviewers in the enthusiast press need something to complain about, they note that the game they are dissing does not support Online Multiplayer. The enthusiast press loves Online Multiplayer games, because they attract hardcore players of high skill, and also because they intimidate and repel the uninitiated. Online Multiplayer games are like restaurant kitchens: sweaty, loud with in-jokes and trash talk, boiling with their own importance. Sadly, nobody behind this particular game realized all that would kill the Resident Evil mood.

So what survives? Just a collection of unrelated scenes set in crumbling Raccoon City. In each, we assume the role of one of eight survivors, and we take on a couple of partners, who are either played by AI software or by real online nerds like ourselves. Then we all go to the zoo, or to a subway station, or to a haunted hospital, and we kill some zombies and we run around looking for keys to open doors and puzzles to solve. When one of us gets hurt, the others can spray us with the first aid aerosol. We can share ammunition. We can team up on the bosses. There is no solitude, and no foreboding, and no fear.

One of the characters has a backpack. She can carry extra stuff.