May 13, 2021
Resident Evil Village Spoiler-Free Review
The 8th main Resident Evil game is also one of the best!
I’m one of those unusual people, who (if pressed) would probably say that Resident Evil 5 is my favorite game in the long-running Capcom series. I love its blend of campy story, genuine horror moments, and fun gameplay that built even further on the foundational designs from the still-amazing and genre-defining Resident Evil 4. It’s far from a perfect game or a true “classic,” but it’s the entry I’ve personally played the most times through.
Resident Evil Village needs no such qualified defense. It’s a wonderful game that’s built both for newcomers and for fans of the entire franchise regardless of which is your favorite, with clever callbacks and story connections to many of the past games. On top of that, it also brilliantly follows on from the story in Resident Evil 7. Its first-person action gameplay is much better than the at-times clunky design of the last installment, and stands proudly next to the best examples of the action genre…while also offering plenty of puzzle solving, adventuring, and exploration. It nails a good balance between the campy horror of the older games, and the truly psychologically terrifying stuff seen in popular modern indie titles.
It’s also a game that’s refreshingly old-school in terms of its design. It’s not set in a huge open world. It doesn’t have a ton of optional objectives. Its story is completely linear and after about twelve hours and a satisfying conclusion, the credits roll…with only a hint of a tease at where future installments might go. It has a bunch of fun unlockable content to open after you finish, but it’s all locked behind playing the game more instead of a premium shop. Even the classic Mercenaries mode returns. The episodic nature of the game’s design means that DLC releases are certainly possible, but without giving anything away the core story here is intact without any obvious holes to be filled later with paid content.
This is a “complete” game in the same way games used to be before the modern era of live services. It’s an enjoyable romp that will last you a reasonable amount of time and provides some fun content if you’d like to play it again, but if you don’t you’ll still feel like you got your money’s worth. I imagine more people will finish this game than not, even just looking at early achievement percentages, because it’s paced well enough that you’ll want to see what happens in the story.
Village casts players as Ethan Winters, the extremely motivated husband from Resident Evil 7 who is now an extremely motivated dad. After Many Things Go Awry(TM), Ethan finds himself in a mysterious European village, where he must make his way through four large areas to complete video game tasks and fight bosses. Most of the marketing for the game was centered around the first of these four areas, and that’s brilliant. While Lady Dimitrescu and her vampire daughters represent a significant part of both the game’s threats and the storyline, there’s still a whole bunch of cool stuff for spoiler-averse players to discover.
The first, third, and fourth areas of the game all play very much like the iconic Resident Evil 4, but with the type of responsive action you’d expect from a modern game. There’s a large variety of weapons to find and upgrade at the game’s merchant, and ammo is never an issue unless you play on the harder difficulty settings. The game starts with three options for challenge level, and a couple more unlock as you play through the New Game Plus content. Enemies require a balance of careful movement and precise aiming to defeat, and while some of the later bosses can be pretty tough, if you’re used to action games it’s not the most difficult thing in the world. The easiest difficulty leaves enough of the game’s combat intact, but gives out more items and ammo…so if you’re looking to just see the story, don’t feel bad about knocking it down. Village is a game that wants you to have fun, action, and tense laughter…
Except for its second major area, which is a large gameplay left turn from the rest of the game into full blown dark mind-bending horror. The second zone plays like a modern indie horror adventure game, with an emphasis on puzzles and discovery and almost no action to speak of. It’s stunningly effective and one of the scariest sequences I’ve seen in a big budget horror game. The second zone is likely to make you yell at your screen, and is better played during the day.
The fourth zone of the game is probably the weakest, with an art design shift that feels like it fell in out of an unrelated sci fi game, and level designs that rely on samey twisting corridors a little too much. Still, this area has some of the most enjoyable monster combat in the whole game, and the ending is packed with so many enjoyable plot revelations and weird encounters that I quickly forgot how much the fourth area felt like a slog.
I’ll write a more detailed spoiler-filled discussion of this game in a month or two, but for right now I’ll say that Village has a wonderful story that manages to tie up loose ends from the previous game and also successfully connects to the larger Resident Evil universe. It’s fleshed-out enough that it actually feels pre-planned, instead of tacked on. If you’re a fan of the lore of this series, this entry is a must-play.
It’s also a wonderful game if you just love amazing graphics. The new consoles and powerful PC’s offer the option to play with beautiful ray traced lighting, but even if you’re on an older platform this is still a brilliant-looking game. Every area is dripping with dense geometric detail and atmosphere, textures and surfaces feel real at times, and the character models are some of the best I’ve ever seen, whether playing on my Xbox Series S or One X. The precisely-designed and linear nature of the environments means that artists could really pour their attention into places knowing that you’d have to look at them, and as a result every area feels truly special without the rubber-stamped look that can sometimes show up in more open games. The visual variety is remarkable, and is a great side effect of the segmented nature of the game’s world design.
Sound design is also excellent, with plenty of strong combat feedback from guns and monsters, eerie ambient noises, and excellent acting work from a talented cast of motion capture performers. The characters are grandly melodramatic, but all fit together to make for a cohesive tone that never strays so far into camp as to lose its atmosphere. If you missed out on Resident Evil 7, or stopped playing it nearly at the end like I did the first time around, there’s a great video included here that will get you up to speed, and the story revelations that connect to other titles in the series are organic enough that they won’t stick out and make you feel like you missed something.
I loved about seventy five percent of this game, and tolerated the parts that were a bit of a drag pacing-wise so I could see things through to the end. I finished this game over the course of a couple of days, which I used to do all the time back when everything wasn’t a hundred hours long. It was refreshing to play such a brilliantly-executed take on design concepts both past and present, and it made me excited about this franchise again. I appreciate that Resident Evil 7 did some cool new things, and the two recent remakes are also technically excellent, but their gameplay didn’t feel quite as snappy as 5 or 6 for my personal tastes. The balance in Village however is just right.
Resident Evil Village isn’t a genre-defining legend, but it’s a remarkable well-made thing that deserves to both be a hit and end up on many game of the year lists. It’s also a stunning technical achievement regardless of the age of your gaming hardware, and if you think you’d enjoy some action horror thrills (and one hilariously terrifying adventure sequence) it’s more than worth full price in spite of the “short” twelve hour first playthrough length.
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Originally published at https://www.worldbolding.com on May 13, 2021.
