Resident Evil 4 contains some of the most gruesome images ever to appear on a TV screen. It is chock-a-block with gunshots to the eye and pickaxes to the temple and shotgun blasts taking heads clean off. Its violence (or, more accurately, its butchery) is savage and merciless and unrelenting. It will put a wobble in the hardiest of stomachs, and it will send the lightweights racing for the bowl, their dinners aboil and their lunches tumbling after. It features large yucky cisterns full of excrement and raw sewage, into which you, the protagonist, must dip your hands and your sleeves. It is really not very nice.

Here is the surprising thing. For all that, for all its grime and its blood and its spraying fountains of entrails, Resident Evil 4 is fundamentally sweet-natured and friendly. It is fair and even-handed with the challenges. It likes to crack jokes. As it backs you into a corner and threatens to cut off your ears and feed them to pigs, you know in your heart that you will find a way out, and you quiver not with despair but with intermittent confidence and nervous excitement. Every bleak situation the game offers is a puzzle to be solved; the key is to calm your racing heart long enough to think it through.

Earlier Resident Evil games told the story of the evil Umbrella Corporation and its experiments with chemical weapons, which turned well-adjusted citizens into flesh-eating zombies. It was a good idea at the time, and it made for many games' worth of chills and neck-chewings. But in the age of the Dawn of the Dead remake and Shaun of the Dead and, most importantly, the resolutely terrible Resident Evil movies, zombies have lost their steam. Zombies are dull. Zombies are not scary any more. Zombies are punchlines. So there are no zombies in Resident Evil 4. Instead, there is something far more terrifying: Europeans.

The uninitiated among you are shaking your heads right now. This is OK. The Resident Evil series has always been short on credibility and long on dumb. It spent many, many titles, remember, on a supervillain multinational pharmaceutical company whose headquarters were located, inexplicably, in a creepy old mansion in the woods. That is its formula, really: magnums of blood + cheerful obliviousness.

Anyway, the Europeans. Years after the demise of Umbrella, U.S. super-agent Leon Kennedy (who starred in Resident Evil 2) is slumming around looking for something to do. He gets the call: The President's daughter has been kidnapped, and the latest reports have her being held somewhere in rural Europe. So Leon and his gun go deep into the woods, hoping to pull off the big rescue. Leon is blond and slight and he doesn't say much, but he has lovely hair and his cheekbones are gorgeous. For that matter, everything else on the screen is gorgeous too. This is one of the first games with proper animation in the talky cut-scenes. The lip-synching actually matches the voices.

Just what country we're in is a little vague. Spain would be a reasonable guess, except that this particular chunk of it looks as if nothing has changed since the mid-1800s. The villagers pull haycarts around, wear simple handmade clothing, live in close proximity with animals, and frequently lapse into murderous rages. You, as a visitor, are not on the welcome list. The moment anyone spots you, he or she will lunge at you with a sharp hand tool, and will not stop swinging until somebody is dead.

In the early going, we have no idea what what is wrong with everybody. We know only that the people are all very angry, and that they can take multiple shots to the face and keep charging. Still, these are not zombies. They are much more clever than zombies. They want you dead, but are not at all interested in eating you. They watch where you're going. They mutter at you and at each other in a gibberish language that sounds vaguely Eastern European. They chase you around corners and out of buildings. And when they begin swarming at you with their axes and their shovels, you will feel very frightened and very happy.

On the downside, these Europeans leave leg-hold traps all over the place. You will suffer several bloody clampings-on before you learn to shoot first and step second.