Resident Evil Village
PC, PS4, PS5, Stadia, Xbox One, Xbox Series
You can tell a lot about someone from their hands. This is as true of videogame characters as anyone: what could be more Doom than Doomguy’s spiked knuckles, or more Dishonored than Emily Kaldwin’s aristocratic fingers? Resident Evil Village – a glamorous but underwhelming instalment with shades of Resident Evil 4, tossed with chunks of Dracula – stretches this idea to its limit. Save for the odd tangent about prophecies and bioweapons, it’s a cautionary tale about the terrible things that can happen to a pair of hands.
It starts with a nick from a barbed-wire fence, as the previous game’s protagonist Ethan Winters bumbles into the village of the title, searching for his abducted daughter. Shortly after, you lose a couple of digits to a werewolf’s maw. An hour later, Winters is hung up by skewered palms in a castle bedchamber, tearing himself free only to have one mitt lopped clean off, which he miraculously glues back on with a glug of herbal medicine. All of which has strangely little impact on the tense but unremarkable combat, in which you aim pistols, shotguns and rifles at joints and heads while backing away in circles. On the contrary: however much they’re mauled, Winters’ hands and forearms are nighunbreachable defences. On normal difficulty, at least, they can block power drills and meat hammers the size of cars with just a pinch of lost health. This is useful, given that there’s no dodge button and Winters has all the agility of a sack barrow dipped in treacle.
The rest of Winters’ body puts in an appearance now and then: he’s run through the torso, showered in acid and even takes an arrow to the knee, paving the way for a second career in another series entirely. Everything above his neck remains a mystery, however: mirrors reveal only darkness, and the closing thirdperson cutscenes refuse to film him from the front. A dread suspicion forms, confirmed by unlocking the character model for inspection after completion: he doesn’t have a face. His head is a black hollow with ears and a wig, a ‘blank tablet’ avatar with a touch of Junji Ito. Small wonder his hands bear the brunt of the characterisation.
Winters’ lack of a mug might sound eerie. In practice, it feels like a blunt acknowledgement that he is the least characterful protagonist Resident Evil has ever had – even more tedious than Chris Redfield, veteran of the Umbrella Mansion, who features here as a special operative leading soldiers in the shadows. Winters is the hollow heart of a landscape of great beauty that deserves a better class of hero. It’s a world divided between four supernatural Lords, each representing a different horror tradition, and all in thrall to a mysterious Mother Miranda, who has dark designs upon Winters’ stolen child that link back to Resident Evil 7’s finale.
North of the village lies the castle of the vampiress Lady Dimitrescu, who’ll need no introduction if you’ve spent any time on Twitter recently (or the NSFW parts of DeviantArt). Here, corridors of gold paint glimmer and velvet-draped lobbies offer no shelter from hungry eyes on the balconies above. There are room puzzles involving bells, statues and hanging braziers, catacombs of waist-deep gore, and several encounters with Lady Dimitrescu’s flyblown daughters. The realm of Moreau, a sickly amphibian, is the polar opposite. Here, you explore a lake that harbours a sunken town, tiptoeing across weedy rooftops and shooting out beams to create bridges as the scum froths around your ankles.
To the northeast lies the factory of Heisenberg, a slick and garrulous fiend with a Magneto-esque gift for metalworking. This area is the least engaging – it’s by and large a series of dingy, rattling corridors – but it’s pleasingly economical in its layout, looping back again and again to the same freight elevator. And then there’s Donna Beneviento’s house in the forest, a place of puppets, projections and distant, enticing music. The ruined hamlet that links these eldritch spaces is a triumph of churned snow, candlelit murals and grisly touches such as scarecrows and nodding goat shrines (this year’s blue medallions). There are hidden treasure chests, animals that can be slaughtered for upgrades, and emblem-key doors to encourage revisits. The time of day changes slowly during the game, painting the snow afresh and waking fond memories of Bloodborne.
Into this world blunders Ethan Winters, with his vibrant palette of emotions ranging from “screw you” to “argh”
Into this richly appointed world blunders Ethan Winters, with his warmed-over dad-saviour complex, over-theatrical breathing and vibrant palette of emotions ranging from “screw you” to “argh”. He and his quest are to the game’s setting what bleach is to a tapestry. It would be less problematic if Winters were mute, but he insists on responding to everything, killing the mood with oafish exclamations. His first act – a few minutes before the barbed-wire fence – is to ask his relatively interesting wife Mia to stop reading their child a spooky bedtime book in case it causes her to develop a personality, cutting off a Tim-Burton-style prologue that is the most engaging piece of storytelling in the game.
He’s the symptom of a project that, for all its Gothic flourishes, often feels like it’s trying not to be too exciting lest it frighten away players who struggled with RE7. Mother Miranda and her cohort have charisma to spare, but even at their nastiest they’re more gruesome than horrifying, and the process of reaching and defeating them is startlingly straightforward. Some areas reward exploration and backtracking (the map screen colour-codes rooms you’ve cleared) but never to the same degree as Resident Evil 2’s police station. The puzzles are condescendingly simple: you glance around for barely hidden number combinations or follow scribbled hints that are pretty much lists of instructions.
The bulk of the firefights are with garden-variety zombies and lycans equipped with the usual range of
fakeout animations – sagging unexpectedly or jerking to one side as they approach. They’re far less intimidating than RE7’s groaning hulks of mould, and more predictable than the RE2 remake’s zombies: where you’re kept guessing about whether the latter are down for good, you quickly memorise how many bullets it takes to erase one of Village’s critters. Later werewolves fire arrows, adding an irritating element of quickdraw. In the factory, meanwhile, you’ll fight cyborgs with glowing heatsinks, which raises the pressure to aim carefully but is hardly a change of tune.
As is often the case with Resident Evil, the intrigue of the gunplay is more what you do outside it, how you manage your finite inventory and ammunition. Village is generous with salvage on normal difficulty but even so, shortages meant we often had to use an inappropriate gun for the situation – a sniper rifle in the catacombs, for example. It’s gently thrilling. The commendably user-friendly crafting system shares a few ingredients between several recipes, with corresponding trade-offs: cobble together some shotgun shells and you might run out of healing sprays when least convenient. Best of all, this side of the game involves spending time with the Duke, Village’s amiable shopkeeper, who is much better company than his visual design initially suggests.
When it finally introduces the headline enemies, Village pulls its punches. Lady Dimitrescu channels Mr X, hounding you from room to room, but her section is over before this has a chance to get interesting. (The character’s sheer magnificence also makes it hard to be afraid of her, which removes some of the mouth-drying dread that accompanied RE2’s most fraught moments.) The bosses are agreeably oversized – stamping arachnids, molten griffins – but they all fight, and die, the same way, filling the screen with their attacks, then striking a pose so you can retaliate. The only thing that changes over the course of each fight and the campaign itself is the speed of this alternation. Very occasionally, you have to tamper with something in the environment to soften them up before striking back.
If Lady Dimitrescu stole the spotlight pre-release, Village’s star performer is her withdrawn sibling Donna Beneviento, whose puppet-infested house trades literal for psychological warfare. Stripped of your arsenal, you must poke about workshops and libraries, slowly completing an autopsy of a marionette painted to resemble your missing wife. The refreshing sensation of actual fear aside, it’s the area that comes closest to saving Winters from his own tediousness, turning his parental anxieties against him. To be clear, this isn’t Silent Hill 2 – but it’s a sign that Village might have hosted a more involving story in the adventure-game tradition, with combat dialled down and extra time given to the origins of Mother Miranda and her brood.
Sadly, Beneviento’s mansion is the second area of the game and the shooting takes over from there; a few hours later, you’ll be rampaging through the village’s wreckage with an assault rifle. It’s a loud, mindless end to a game that features many stunningly crafted elements but rarely puts them to memorable use – a letdown after RE7 rescued the series from the convolutions of Resident Evil 6. One consolation is that Ethan Winters is unlikely to feature in whatever comes next. His retirement is overdue – in terms of its story, at least, Resident Evil needs a fresh set of hands.