Announced at the PlayStation 5 showcase in 2020, Resident Evil Village had some pretty big shoes to fill. Its predecessor Resident Evil 7: Biohazard was an absolute revelation when it came out of seemingly nowhere. An often forgotten title when it comes to people fawning over Capcom’s ongoing renaissance of the last few years.
Most people attribute Capcom’s present-day good will to the success of Monster Hunter World, but it was in fact RE7 that got this train rolling all the way in 2017. A trailer and some demos that made it look like some sort of Outlast wanna made way for an absolutely electrifying experience that showed itself as something much slower and weirder than what we know, only to gradually reveal itself to be far truer to the series roots than I could’ve imagined.
Even as we got more ‘faithful’ remakes of RE2 and RE3 over the last two years, the fact of the matter than everyone instinctively understood was that whatever the direct sequel to RE7 had an uphill climb ahead of itself. And boy howdy did this game deliver what it needed to and then some.
Right off the bat, the most surprising thing about Resident Evil Village is just how direct a sequel to RE7 it is. It’s still in first person, you’re still placed in the shoes of Ethan Winters (a character most long-time fans don’t love very much but I find him relatively more interesting than the usual RE cast). The game starts off with Ethan and his wife Mia living a quiet life with their infant daughter Rose as they try to move on from the abject terror they suffered in Louisiana. After a brief introduction, their home is invaded by a squad of Umbrella soldiers led by Chris Redfield who shoots Mia and makes off with Rose. One thing leads to another and you end up in the titular Village. Weird shit ensues.
All of the above happens within the first 10 minutes of the game, which is about as much as I’m willing to spoil of what ended up being a really quite engaging little tale. It’s got everything: drama, thrills, theatricality, betrayals, tall vampire mommies, you name it. If I had to tell you what the game is ‘about’, it’s about fatherhood in the same way as many sad murder dad games tend to be. But really it’s just a Resident Evil story with slightly more narrative depth than usual and a bucket load of style.
Like the previous game, Resident Evil Village pits you against a “family” of villains (though they aren’t blood relatives in this one) who take turns to torment you one by one in locations themed after their individual idiosyncrasies culminating in a crazy boss fight. Lady Dimitrescu – or “tall vamp mammy” as we call her in this household – was a focal point of a lot of this game’s marketing but she’s actually one of five major villains here. The rest of the cast is just as horrifyingly iconic as her, and their boss fights are some of the best this series has ever had. Not just in mechanics, but in visual design. Gone are the days of shapeless flesh blobs, the bosses here have genuine iconography built into their designs, making each fight a true showcase for Capcom’s art team.
The moment to moment gameplay is excellent, too. While functionally identical to what you saw in RE7, the controls in Resident Evil Village are vastly more responsive. You walk faster, turn quicker, and your aim is snappier. And you’ll need that, too, because the enemies you fight here are… tricky. The series’ staple shambling zombies have been replaced with enemies that are smarter, for lack of a better word. You can’t exactly expect wolfment to take cover and throw grenades, but their AI can still make your life difficult. They will zig-zag across the arenas as they rush towards you, and dodge out of the way if your sights are trained on them for too long, forcing you to be a quick shot rather than a methodical one. It’s quite a change of pace as far as combat is concerned.
I’ve maintained that the first-person combat of RE7 was closer to the tank controls of the originals than the over-the-shoulder shooting seen in the subsequent remakes, and that’s just as true of Resident Evil Village. These fights are tense and visceral, always keeping you on your toes.
The puzzles were also kind of a sticking point in RE7, and Resident Evil Village provides quite a drastic improvement in that department. You won’t find anything that stymies you for more than five minutes or so at a time, but the environmental and logic puzzles here are cleverly put together and provide a welcome change of pace from the scares and the action.
Resident Evil Village also has a bunch of quality-of-life changes that modernise some of the series’ more traditional mechanics in ways that long-time fans may not appreciate, but I did. Crafting, for instance, is much easier now. Instead of combining items with trial and error and then memorising the recipes, you now craft any recipe you have learned from a separate menu as long as you have the ingredients. You start the game with a few basic recipes unlocked, and acquire the rest from the merchant or loot drops.
The inventory has also been changed a bit. It still works mostly as before, grid-based inventory where you need to play tetris with your items to fit them in, with unlockable expansions that let you carry more. The big difference this time is that treasure and key items don’t take up inventory space. They’re accessed from the different tab in the inventory menu that doesn’t take up grid space at all. This means you never have to make a choice between carrying a key item or carrying more guns/ammo, and as a result I found myself always well-equipped. Again, I really liked this but long-term fans may not.
Visually, Resident Evil Village is utterly gorgeous. The village has a very different vibe from the sweltering Louisiana Bayou. It’s prettier, but also colder and more… dead. There are no people, dead bodies and cultish effigies scattered across the environments. The few people left alive are, to be gentle, not having a good time. It helps that the guts and squalor of the village is rendered with next-gen (or is it current-gen?) fidelity.
I tested the game on a PS4 Pro and a PS5 and it’s a stunner on both consoles. PS4 Pro users get to choose between a resolution mode that aims for 4K with an unlocked framerate, and a performance mode that also has an unlocked framerate but stays closer to the 60fps range due to more aggressive resolution scaling. I barely noticed the scaling thanks to the RE Engine’s excellent anti-aliasing but your mileage may vary. PS5 users get the same modes but with vastly better visual quality across the board with ray-traced global illumination and subsurface scattering (but not ray-traced reflections).
Character models are equally detailed and meticulously animated. The enemy and boss design in particular deserve special mention. I’ve never been a fan of the flesh blob aesthetic of Resident Evil bosses, but the villains in Resident Evil Village look like something straight out of Bloodborne. I’m not to name them here or use any screenshot but you’ll just have to trust me that these are the best-looking bosses in the series in my opinion. The audio design is also top-notch. Enemies sound horrifying, guns sound devastating, environmental audio is as immersive as it is horrifying when it needs to be. The audiovisual presentation is every bit as perfect as you expect from a Resident Evil title.
My one gripe with Resident Evil Village, is more a matter of personal taste than an actual flaw with the game. I miss the swamp ghost story vibe of RE7. It felt like something weird and cool and new, a slow-burning haunt that slowly revealed itself to be classically RE. Resident Evil Village, by comparison, gets into RE territory very early on and then just kinda stays there. So it doesn’t feel as fresh as RE7 even if it’s a better game across the board.
That one very minor and admittedly idiosyncratic nitpick aside, Resident Evil Village is an absolute blast. I’ve completed the game four times now, once on each difficulty, and I’m still unlocking things. The RE faithfuls will get a lot of bang for their buck here, while newcomers will find a solid 8-10 hour game depending on what difficulty they choose and how they play. This is my new favourite Resident Evil game, and I’ll be shocked if it’s not in the conversation of Game of the Year. Do not sleep on Resident Evil Village.