Resident Evil Village

 I could have sworn there was a number in the title but, nope, it's just "Resident Evil Village". Regardless, this game was excellent.

I played this on my PS5.

As was the case with RE7, I actually started with something other than the game itself. Village was preceded by a demo titled "MAIDEN", so I played that beforehand. Much like The Beginning Hour, it's a pretty basic walk through part of the actual game's main environment and has you play as someone other than Ethan, but outside of being a visual showcase of what to expect from the main game there isn't a whole lot to it. It's fine, and I imagine it probably would have been interesting in the runup to the game, but on its own a few years later it's little more than a novelty.

It gave people an early glimpse at Lady Dimitrescu, which is something I suppose.

Now, onto the game itself. While there is a PSVR2 version of this game, I don't own one of those headsets so I played this in 2D, like a plebeian. Also, while there is a third-person mode that got added when the DLC dropped (I'll talk about that later) I played this in first-person as that seemed like the way to go.

The start screen changes as you progress through the game. Pretty cool.

Unsurprisingly, this game is a sequel to Resident Evil 7: Biohazard and, as such, it builds on mechanics and gameplay elements from that game. It's another adventure starring Ethan Winters that has you fighting off not-zombies (they're lycans this time!) in first-person (primarily). Ethan still has a guard, and a quickturn, and all of the mechanics I remember from his earlier game, but the structure of this game is a bit different than RE7. While it does still have you exploring the nooks and crannies of a handful of specific locations, returning to a central hub or saferoom frequently, there is no longer and item box and, instead, there is a merchant who is very similar, mechanically, to the one from Resident Evil 4.

The push and pull of this game, then, is far more like Resident Evil 4 than the return to the series' roots that RE7 was. You're picking up treasures, hunting animals for resources, buying weapon upgrades and replacement weapons, it's much more about managing an economy than the ferrying of items from place to place. In a lot of ways it feels like a modern take on Resident Evil 4, which is strange because I know the next game I'm going to tackle is, quite literally, a modern take on Resident Evil 4. Still, this game does it well and I imagine it'll be fun to compare and contrast that game with this one, once I get to it.

They wear their influences on their sleeves in this.

The combat and movement are, as I mentioned, similar to their predecessor, though the way I engaged with it was slightly different. As I played RE7 in VR I grew accustomed to aiming with my face because that's how that game functioned, but switching to a traditional control scheme was easier than I expected thanks to gyro controls. For the first time in (my time with) this series, they've added gyro aiming which allows me to use my controller's, um, gyro-sensors to aim. Using the joysticks to make large movements and tilting my controller for fine adjustments gave me a similar level of control and accuracy to what I had in VR, which was lovely. Gyro-aiming, when done well, can be a godsend and this game has a good implementation of it.

This next criticism might seem like a bit of a nitpick, but I frequently found myself lost without knowing where to go. There are copious amounts of yellow tape and paint scattered about plot-critical locations but I would often not be able to progress because I simply didn't see the object I needed to interact with or pick up. Yellow paint gets a lot of hate but when games are as realistic and visually dark as this having some indicator that, "hey, you can interact with this thing" is sometimes necessary. What I'm saying is that maybe this game needed more yellow paint because all too often it felt like a pixel hunt.

This was pretty funny.

The story is... a bit out there. While the series has always had its quirks and recent games already introduced some difficult to believe ideas, this game feels the closest to a straight fantasy they've done. The MacGuffin you're trying to assemble, without spoiling what exactly it is, is quite frankly absurd. The enemies and antagonists are riffing on classic horror tropes, yes, but while there's still a veneer of bio-experimentation and deadly viruses, the explanations for why some of these characters are the way they are feel more like afterthoughts than a true justification. That's not to say I dislike it, the vibes are great and I love that this game kind of covers some of the Universal monster archetypes, but you need to be willing to suspend your disbelief quite a bit if you want this narrative to make sense.

Ethan's hands also survive some truly unbelievable things, though they actually justify it this time.

I've included my results screen below.

No "score" for this game, sadly, though I doubt I'd have done well.

As I mentioned earlier, there was DLC for this game that added a third-person mode because, well, the DLC itself is only playable in third-person. That DLC, "Shadows of Rose" is a bit of an odd thing, and not just because it's a change in perspective at the eleventh hour.

To start, it almost feels more Silent Hill than Resident Evil, at times at least. It builds on the vaguely supernatural themes of the base game and goes even further with them. I liked it, personally, but I can understand why some people might have been put off by it. It's also a significant jump ahead in the timeline for the series. The series has always been set close to modern day, with its own timeline fairly consistent, but this jumps ahead sixteen years after the end of RE8. This either means that future entries in the series will be similarly far-in-the-future, or they'll essentially be prequels to this DLC. It's an odd choice.

Still, I liked this DLC, as a whole. It has a weak stealth sequence near the end but there's a horror sequence involving some mannequins that I thought was effective. Getting to re-explore some of these locations was neat, and Rose and her "guardian angel" had a dynamic that I enjoyed watching. Maybe this is just a "me" thing, but I found myself getting genuinely emotional during part of it, which is maybe a first in the series for me. It's a departure from the main game but it's not bad, and it functions as a sort of sendoff or coda to the story that, to some extent, started in RE7.

I've included my results screen for the DLC below.

No score or ranking here either.

In summary, this game was great. Capcom figured out what worked in this series and has been putting out banger after banger for a while, and by all accounts my next game should be no different. When all is said and done I'll need to rank the entries in this series and I truly don't know how I'd even begin to do that when so many of the games are this good.