My thoughts on the Resident Evil Village demos

Note: I’m going dark for the entire month of May while I undergo some fairly heavy treatment for my migraines. Blogging will resume some time in June.

This is going to need a bit of explanation for my non-gamer readers.

In 2017 Resident Evil VII: Biohazard (which I’m going to refer to from this point on as simply Resident Evil 7 or RE7) came out and restored the venerable Resident Evil franchise to something approaching its former glory. Having established the modern survival horror genre back on the Playstation 1 and then reaching a second apotheosis with the “action survival” reinvention of Resident Evil 4, the series started to go downhill with Resident Evil 5, which took things even further in the action direction; while a fun romp, especially in co-op, it pretty much completely abandoned all pretense of horror. Then the series went totally off the rails with Resident Evil 6, a ridiculous Micheal Bay-esque spectacle that’s more or less universally reviled. Throw in a glut of spin-offs that received mixed-to-negative reception, and you’ve got a franchise in trouble.

Capcom needed to do something drastic to right the ship, and that something was RE7, a return to the series’ horror roots that was critically acclaimed in general and won over most of the hardcore fans after some initial skepticism. It also, helpfully, sold like gangbusters. Resident Evil is back, baby! It’s good again!

I am primarily a fan of Resident Evil 7, not of the franchise as a whole. I played RE3, 4 and 5 when they came out, as well as some of the beloved Gamecube remake of the first game, and while I liked them well enough, I never got infected with the Resident Evil virus the way a lot of people did. Silent Hill was always my horror gaming jam.

Until RE7. I absolutely love RE7. I think it’s the best horror game of the modern era. That’s why I’ve been a bit nervous about the upcoming sequel.

Resident Evil: Village or Resident Evil VIII (the “Vii” in “Village” is meant to look like an eight, it’s like a thing they’re doing now) or just RE8 is aiming to combine RE7 and RE4, keeping much of the dramatic changes that RE7 introduced like the first-person perspective and the renewed focus on being scary, and fusing it with the “action survival” approach to combat that RE4 pioneered. On paper, it’s a smart idea. RE7 and RE4 were both received well, you know what they say about great tastes that taste great together.

But I’ve got some nagging doubts about the idea. The Resident Evil franchise, for whatever reason, seems to have an irresistible inertial drift towards more action-heavy gameplay (even the DLC for RE7 gave you automatic rifles and a bionic gauntlet to punch enemies to death with), and I can’t help but worry that Capcom are going to throw away some of what made RE7 great in favour of chasing the action-addicted “Core Gamer”, which is what got the franchise into trouble before. Having clawed their way out of an apparent death spiral, are they going to end up throwing themselves back in?

I recently got to put these fears to the test via two time-limited demos for the PS4 (they’re going to be available again on all platforms next weekend). Since I won’t get to play RE8 on launch day due to a lengthy hospital stay, I’ve decided to write up my thoughts on the two demos now. When I do get my hands on the full thing, I’ll see how well these initial thoughts compare to my take on the game as a whole.

First off, I just want to say that I’m in awe of how good this game both looks and runs on my PS4 Pro. If you sat me down in front of the game and told me it was running on the PS5, I’d believe you. I’ll be playing the final game on my PC, but mad props to Capcom for pulling this off.

Sticking to visuals for a moment, the biggest and most obvious difference from RE7 is scale. The titular village, as an outdoors environment, was obviously going to be much bigger than anything in RE7, but even the castle setting of the second demo is far roomier than the Baker estate. I’m pretty sure the castle’s foyer alone is larger than most of the main house from RE7.

I can’t help but be slightly disappointed by this. RE7 is in my opinion an absolute masterpiece of environment design, using its claustrophobic surroundings in clever ways that make them feel far larger than they actually are. In RE8 everything is a lot more stretched out: whereas in RE7 every square foot of space felt like it was being put to use, here there’s a lot more filler. This is something that long-term Resident Evil fans are probably going to appreciate--the relative pokiness of the Baker house was one of the initial sticking points when RE7 was announced--but for me it feels like a less interesting direction.

On the other hand, the larger environments mean there’s a lot more scope for exploration. Both demos lead you past a large number of tasty locked doors, inactive elevators and unsolved puzzles, all of which really gets my gamer juices flowing. Given that the castle is set over multiple floors, I’m hoping for some Dark Souls-esque intricate backtracking.

My biggest fear, that the game has been actionized over RE7 to the same degree that RE4 was over its predecessors, appears at this stage to be unfounded. There’s plenty of quiet, tense exploration in both demos that’s obviously harkening back to the pre-RE4 entries in the series, and the enemy encounters that do occur are smaller in scale than RE4’s, which start out with an entire village coming after you and rapidly escalate to the point where enemies are firing rocket launchers. I don’t think RE8 is going to get to that point soon, if at all. It seems like Capcom are really trying not to go overboard and lapse into the excesses that sank the franchise before.

I was also relieved to see that the game is not forgetting to be scary. The outdoor battles in the first demo, while tense, really aren’t particularly frightening simply because they take place in broad daylight, but the castle is another story. You’ve either got creepy invincible vampire ladies stalking you through the opulent upstairs floors, or you’re fighting emaciated zombie-like dudes with swords in the pitch-dark dungeons below. Both options are pretty nerve-wracking, with the latter in particular clearly trying for the same kind of horror vibe that RE7 accomplished. I approve.

The action focus is still evident: enemies come in greater numbers, ammo is much more plentiful, protagonist Ethan can move faster and has more options to defend himself. But if the game can keep itself grounded and remember to be scary, then this is no bad thing. Firing off weapons certainly feels a lot more fun and satisfying than it did in RE7.

The overall tone of the game is clearly much more fanciful than in RE7. Whereas the events of RE7 play out in a secluded rural estate and feel like they could have plausibly taken place in the real world without anyone noticing, RE8 is a fantasy that departs from any notions of verisimilitude. This is in keeping with RE4, which was set in a secluded rural village in Spain that has somehow remained completely unknown to the outside world despite featuring what has to be the largest castle in Europe. Similarly, I’m pretty sure Castle Dimitrescu would be visible from space, and yet the rest of Romania has apparently failed to spot it.

This is another sideways shift that probably only feels like a minor step down due to the fact that I’m currently replaying RE7 and have fallen for its swampy, True Detective-inspired griminess all over again. The fact is that the game is actually extraordinarily silly, gleefully taking cues from cheesy, cleazy American horror properties without a hint of embarrassment. RE8 is doing the same thing, but it’s swapping out The Texas Chainsaw Massacre for Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Looking at it objectively, they’re just different flavours of nonsense. I think I can get used to that.

Lastly, I was happy to see that the excellent spatial sound design introduced in RE7 and then carried over into the Resident Evil 2 and 3 remakes has been preserved. Cleverly, the ambient audio has been crafted with the larger environments in mind: whereas RE7 had ominous creaks and thumps making it sound like something was constantly moving just behind the nearest wall, here you get the echo of distant footsteps or doors squeaking several rooms away. It’s terrifically spooky, especially when you know there’s a nine-foot tall vampire lady somewhere in the vicinity.

Overall, my time with these two demos has only increased my excitement for Village. I’ve always been of the opinion that gaming franchises should be free to evolve in radical new directions regardless of what their more vocal fans might want, engaging in many a heated debate along those lines back when I still thought that arguing with people on the internet was a good use of my time (now I post all my opinions on this blog, where I can delete comments I don’t like). RE8 represents an opportunity to practice what I preached, and I’ll be trying my hardest to do that once I get a chance to play the game in the back half of May.