Some thoughts about… Resident Evil Village

Village feels like a fairly un-Resident Evil Resident Evil. The game is mostly going from set-piece to set-piece with moments of exploration or combat in-between, but the set-pieces are danged good, so I didn’t really mind. The beginning is a string of escalating “what the hell is going on” moments where Ethan fumbles his way through everything confused, exasperated, and forced to accept that every one of his quips falls horribly flat so he may not be an action star. He just gets knocked around like one. I love how every other line of Ethan’s dialogue is (rightfully) something along the lines of “What the hell is going on!?”, but then there are moments where his hand gets lopped off and he casually just pops it back on and sprinkles it with magic healing juice and all is right with the world. So much hand trauma in this game. So, so much. What’s the polar opposite of a foot fetish? Hand trauma? Hand gore? The story does a really nice job of making the antagonists a bit tragic so you feel bad for them, but also never letting you forget that they are all absolute monsters. The cast is a real strong point for the game.

Towards the end, they tie the story back to the classic games’ roots but it all feels superficial. Do you want to know where Umbrella got the idea for their logo from? Or who Spencer’s teacher was? I mean, not really, but okay. Chris is the main connection and the intro sets him up to be a bad guy with a really intense opening. THINGS get revealed as you progress and you ultimately find out that, you know,  Chris had plenty of time to say something and explain a few things in the beginning. Jill would be so disappointed in him being a jerk. This also might be the only time I’ve seen a normal looking 3D model of a baby in a video game. Or movie? But also later, the most abnormal looking 3D model of a baby. Ewww!

I really enjoyed the story and characters, but the gameplay ended up just being okay. It came down to all the chase sequences ruining my fun. I want to be able to explore and look around, not always be in a rush and then cut off from investigating because I hit a point of no return and the area closes off. I also hated the stalker/chase enemies from the remakes of RE 2 and 3, but those games as a whole felt more “Resident Evil-y” due to them having more exploration and puzzles, versus Village being more action and combat focused. So I liked Village but not nearly as much as I could have. It’s also not great about signposting what your goal is in an area. The Factory especially just dumps you in with no goal. You just keep advancing and for some reason, Ethan knows where to climb or drop down or what vents to climb through. Trying to explore around the castle is a huge pain because the whole area feels like a chase sequence. I put off collecting things until I completed a puzzle, hoping that would end the chase bits, only to find out the puzzle was a point of no return and shut me off of the rest of the castle.

When trying to explore, there are so many blocked or one-way paths in the village that the map isn’t very helpful. You just need to stumble around enough until you remember each section and which path has which object Ethan refuses to just… walk around. And Mother Miranda help you if you go through an area but take a different path and miss the door that you can only unlock from one side that would let you shortcut back there.

The game is also bad about not auto-selecting the item you need to interact with a lock when you own it. Like with the wells, you have to scroll through and select the “well wheel” from your inventory and then he’ll use it. But it’s always the same wheel and there’s nothing else that interacts with the well other than that wheel. It sounds like a petty complaint but there are a lot of doors/wells to interact with and having to keep selecting specific keys is a nuisance. Also on the minor front, there are tons of collectibles between story files, wells, windows, hunting animals, outhouses, goat statues, and I’m probably forgetting more, but the game doesn’t tell you which ones you missed or leave a blank spot for missed files. The files are the most annoying because they have story tied to them so there’s an actual benefit to them. At least tell me what part of the game they’re in, like you’re missing 3 in the village, 2 in Castle X, 2 in Castle Y, and so on. All the collectibles are a real “just use an FAQ” design that hurts the spirit of exploration.

This is a very dark game. Not in a spooky way, just in a “I think they forgot to light this scene” way. It would be really great if entertainment companies realized that just making things hard to see doesn’t make things scary. And it’s doubly annoying in a game where there’s so much pixel hunting for items.

The layout is also weird about save points. Sometimes, there will be two or three or them all grouped near each other and other times, there are long stretches where you can’t save/quit. There is an auto-save that activates, but I really don’t trust that enough to quit on an auto-save rather than a manual one. Does the auto-save slot work if I turn the game off or is it just for checkpoints if you die? Is it like a suspend state that will delete after using it? I don’t know and the game doesn’t tell you.

I’ve mentioned them a few times now, but I really disliked the focus on the chase sequences. Some of them are just unfair on your first time through, but never scary. Unless you already know what to do, it’s you flailing around until you figure out that there is a puzzle. It’s hard to search for a solution when you don’t even know there is a puzzle or you stand in just the wrong spot so the interact prompts don’t display and you get stuck. In a particularly tense scene, you’re fleeing an enemy towards a door that then starts closing. I hit the crouch button, expecting to slide under it (which Ethan had more than enough room to do), but I instead bugged the game and Ethan got stuck crouching and the game wouldn’t let me stand up anymore. By the time I figured out what was going on, the chase enemy caught up to me, killed me, and redoing that scene had zero excitement because now I was still a bit confused but mostly annoyed and the solution was “don’t go for the door, run down the hallway”. The chase scenes aren’t tense or exciting because of anything good, it’s just the fear of “if I make one mistake, I’m going to die and lose progress”. At least in the RE2 and 3 remakes, you could KO Mr. X/Nemesis for a bit and get back to exploring. Here, it’s a lot of standing around and hoping the chaser goes away, because they’re invincible and some are one-hit deaths. Even on the final unlockable difficulty, the regular combat probably won’t be your cause of deaths until the very end. It’s that the chase sequences are harder and more frequent in some areas. It’s not fun or a good challenge, it just sucks.

Actually, playing through the unlockable difficulty retroactively kind of gutted my feelings for the game. It’s like they sat down and decided to highlight everything bad about the game and the last few sections had the power to go back in time and suck away the fun I had earlier. There’s a boss fight that uses different mechanics from the rest of the game and on the normal difficulties, it’s not a good boss fight but it’s different so it feels special. On the extra difficulty, I think it just comes down to luck? I spent about an hour dying over and over, listening to the same speech from the boss over and over. I checked websites and watched Youtube videos on how to do it and they were either no help at all or the boss I was fighting was not doing what the boss in the videos was doing. I was about three attempts away from “guess I’m uninstalling this game” when I guess I just got lucky and beat the fight. I didn’t do anything special or different on that last attempt, the boss just did different things and rushed me less and the debris on the field appeared in better spots. Oh, and you can’t heal through the whole fight. Then this section is followed by one where you have a different inventory and have to fight swarms and swarms of enemies with a peashooter of a gun that takes forever to reload. I genuinely don’t know if that section has infinite enemies or just entirely too many of them. And there’s only a single checkpoint at the very end of the section. Followed by a boss fight that’s lousy even on the normal difficulties because you’re in this shitty little cramped space for the fight and the boss’s hit/hurt boxes are wonky and the boss just has entirely too much health. Once you figure out how to cheese the fight, it’s just a prolonged and boring war of attrition. The reward you get for beating the highest difficulty isn’t even good! The gun is weaker than the ones you already have and you can’t upgrade it. It feels like they left a 0 off the values and it only does 500 damage instead of 5000.

But as long you’re playing on the normal difficulties, Village probably the best ending of all the RE games. I love the ending of Outbreak, but Village’s is super well done. Ethan’s story wrapped up nicely and did the character justice. Ethan is such a dork through that whole game but for that entire stretch of the ending, the dude is a champ. Then they toss in a revelation right at the end to set up RE9 and that might get bonkers. And man, with the scene over the ending credits. I’d love to know if they wrote that pre or post Covid.

They unfortunately don’t explain or get deeper into a lot of the interesting lore Village sets up. What was the deal with the tinkerer guy with four wives? There are enough details that it seems like he’ll be important and he’s never mentioned again. The Duke is great, I want to know more about the Duke! The RE4 merchant didn’t need a lot of backstory because he’s more gameplay mechanic than actual character, but the Duke is a key part of the story and actively involved with your progress beyond just selling things, but they never explore it. Is he supposed to be the tinkerer? Is he Eve’s dad? Tell meeee.

This is weirdly the most “it’s magic” of the RE games. The Mold/ceremony kind of just devolves into mysticism at the end. One of the reasons I love Resident Evil is because of the lengths they go to to explain all their pseudoscience. But here, we have a character proclaiming that at dawn the ritual will be complete and powers being magically taken away/transferred. That’s just out of a fantasy story. Some better writing on those spots could have made them all work, but as it is, you’re left wondering why some things happen/why the town is the way it is and the game doesn’t seem interested in giving you any information. The Village is a cool place and gives you the feeling that it has real history but the game is just, nope, look at these cool ominous statues, sure bet there’s a story behind those, okay bye.

Village is a good game, but again, not as good as it could have been. There’s too much of a focus on gun fights and chase scenes and the exploration feels held back by a lot of decisions. I really liked most of my time with it, but after I beat it and thought back on it, I had those moments of disappointment. But it did leave me excited for what RE9 has to offer, but I have no real desire to play the DLC for Village with Rose’s mission, so take all that as you will.

I will end with my repeated appeal: Capcom, please just release a new RE Raid Mode game. Mercenaries Mode is tedious memorization and not very fun. Just give me another Raid Mode. Make it a standalone game. You don’t need to make Revelations 3. Reuse assets and stages galore! I don’t care, I just want to play more Raid Mode. I think I’ve now said “Raid Mode” enough to appeal to the search engine optimization deities that will ensure it gets made.