Resident Evil Village
After I played the demos, I was left wondering what direction Resident Evil Village (aka Resident Evil 8 or RE8) would take the series in: a revival of Resident Evil 4’s frenetic “action survival”? A continuation of Resident Evil 7’s horror emphasis? A retread of the over the top Hollywood nonsense that got the franchise into trouble with Resident Evil 5 and 6? Or something entirely new?
As it turns out, the answer is: “Yes.” RE8 isn’t so much the next Resident Evil as it is all of Resident Evil, past, present, and future, offered up in a selection box of bite-size chunks that taste great separately but don’t always sit well together.
It’s three years after the events of Resident Evil 7 and Ethan Winters and his wife Mia are living in Somewhere, Europe (implied but never directly stated to be Romania) under the protection of Wide Chris and his anti-biological weapon paramilitary organization. Mia just wants to forget everything that happened to them in Louisiana and raise their baby daughter Rose, but Ethan has a nagging sense that the past isn’t going to let them go that easily. This suspicion is proven correct when Chris and his goons storm the house, seemingly kill Mia and drag him and Rose off into the night.
Ethan wakes up some time later to find that the transport vehicle has crashed and that Rose is missing. Stumbling through the snowy woods, he finds an isolated, frozen-in-time village that’s just been ransacked by werewolves. This village and the gothic structures surrounding it are the fiefdom of Mother Miranda, a cult figure whose dubious custodianship of the townspeople has suddenly turned violent. In order to recover Rose from Miranda, Ethan has to confront the four eccentric and powerful lords who serve under her and discover secrets that tie back into the events of Resident Evils past.
The fragmentary nature of RE8 is best illustrated by its opening action set-piece, which deliberately apes (wolfs?) the famous opening sequence of Resident Evil 4. As in RE4, your character has entered an anachronistically old-fashioned European village that’s in thrall to a cultish ruler, and just as in RE4 you quickly find yourself fighting for your life against hordes of hostile, melee-weapon wielding enemies, frantically jumping through windows and dragging furniture against doors in order to stay one step ahead of a small army of foes that you can’t possibly defeat in a straight fight. This time you’re in Romania instead of Spain, and you’re fighting villagers transformed into werewolves instead of villagers who seemingly just want to kill you for no reason, but the parallels are clear and obvious.
The difference is that in RE4 this is a mission statement for how the rest of the game will proceed, whereas in RE8 it absolutely isn’t. You spend most of RE4 basically engaging in variations on this scene, taking on large groups of enemies in a variety of semi-open arenas, but RE8 doesn’t put you against big lycan hordes for a very long time--well over two thirds of the way through the story--and you never really fight those hordes in the village again, except for arguably right at the end of the game, and even that sequence is very different from anything you’ve been doing up to that point.
RE8 reinvents itself with every change of location and goal--every “level”, for lack of a better term--often to the point of entirely switching genres. You barely get any amount of time in the titular village before you’re whisked off to a miniature version of Resident Evil 1’s puzzle-heavy mansion, and then after that there’s a combat-free psychological horror sequence that’s basically Capcom’s homage to PT, and after that the game never stops mutating: big area-spanning boss fights, linear Call Of Duty-esque military action, a return to the Resident Evil 4 stuff, and then at the end some utterly ridiculous bullshit that in some ways goes even more over the top than anything in Resident Evil 5 or 6.
The developers’ mission here seems to be to re-canonize all of Resident Evil, from the hard horror pivot that RE7 took the series in, to the bombastic explosion-heavy nonsense that that pivot was meant to be an antidote to. Even the infamous boulder-punching scene from Resident Evil 5 gets directly mentioned, just to confirm that yes, this Jason Bourne-esque version of Chris who’s all mopy and grim throughout this game because he killed Ethan’s wife in cold blood is the same guy who punched a cartoon Flinstones boulder into oblivion with his bare hands before shooting rockets at a mutated supervillain in an African volcano. All of this, they want the player to understand, is Resident Evil, and they reserve the right to engage in any or none of these modes going forward.
Personally, I had an absolute whale of a time with most of this. Yes, the game does in fact go absolutely balls to the wall in the way I was worried about, but that comes so late in the game that it feels cathartic instead of disappointing, and it’s balanced out by the surprisingly strong horror streak up until that point (including the excellent psychological horror sequence, which you should go into totally unspoiled if you possibly can). The problem is that as entertaining as all these Resident Evil nuggets are in isolation, they make for a very disjointed experience when taken as a whole.
The thing that’s supposed to tie them together, the village, ends up being possibly the weakest aspect of the game. It’s essentially a central hub that you return to multiple times, opening up new areas in a vaguely Metroidvania-esque fashion as you acquire keys and items. It’s a fascinating environment to inhabit, and a surprisingly creepy one given that you’re only ever there in broad daylight--a good example of how you don’t necessarily need darkness to cause spooks--but it’s disappointingly short-lived, with the vast majority explored before the halfway point of the game. There are still interesting secrets and nooks and crannies to discover after that point, but the entire area is a lot more cramped than it initially appears (this is noticeably the opposite of Resident Evil 7’s environments, which often felt far larger than they were due to clever design).
I also found the layout and visual language of the area frustrating. Your map doesn’t correspond to the actual environment--the only time this happens in the game--due to various unmarked obstacles blocking paths, which can make figuring out how to get to new areas unnecessarily opaque. Even when the way forward is clear, the entire village is extremely cluttered and visually busy in a way that often made exploring it less compelling than it might have been with a cleaner design.
But the village’s problems extend beyond gameplay terms and into the story. It initially appears to be a fascinating, lived-in environment with a detailed history and its own unique religion and mythology, and I was looking forward to the game digging into this strange microcosm. Unfortunately that doesn’t really happen; most of the inhabitants are dead or mutated by the time Ethan gets there, and the rest kick the bucket in short order. Once the townsfolk have been yanked off-stage, the rest of the game focuses almost exclusively on Miranda and the four lords, with the village itself serving as a backdrop that the game very occasionally remembers is supposed to have had people living in.
This sort of sloppiness extends to the overall plot. It’s entertainingly bonkers in a way that only Resident Evil stories can be, with lots of absolutely absurd plot twists, including one that re-contextualizes the events of Resident Evil 7 in an amazingly stupid way that I loved. However, it also seems to have gone through a few major rewrites, which leaves truncated storylines and dangling plot threads all over the place (Chris’s role in the story mostly involves him not telling Ethan important information for extremely flimsy reasons).
At least the ending is excitingly audacious, dropping two separate sequel hooks. If they actually represent the future direction of the franchise (Capcom has put apparent sequel hints into Resident Evil games in the past that ultimately weren’t picked up on), then it appears the series is going to split narratively in two, with one half tackling the leftover story threads from Resident Evil 5 and 6 that trace their routes back to the very first game, and the other directly following on from RE8 in an extremely audacious way. I’m hoping this turns out to be the case, as it would allow for this game’s wild experimentation to become the norm going forward--say, by having one game line re-focus on action while the other preserves RE7’s horror direction.
Or maybe that’s not what they’re doing at all. Whatever the case may be, Resident Evil Village makes me excited to see where the franchise goes from here. I still overall preferred Resident Evil 7’s focus on scares and more unified design, but Village is a wild ride that leaves a wide-open horizon for future experimentation.