Resident Evil Village

The Review

It’s been a while since I’ve put together a video game review around these parts but that changes today! The latest installment of the Resident Evil franchise, Resident Evil Village, released last Friday and if you’ve been with me for a while you know how much I love this whole series…so what was I gonna do? NOT play through it thrice, NOT watch several Youtube gamers play it, and NOT write a review? LOL I think NOT!

BEWARE

Spoilers probably lie ahead for both Resident Evil Village AND Resident Evil 7. Are they minor? Are they major? Honestly, it’s hard to say at this point, but if you haven’t played Resident Evil Village yourself yet or watched someone else play on the ol Youtube….be warned that you may have gameplay, plot points, or big reveals ruined for you! Read at your own risk.

Okie dokie, Resident Evil Village is an immediate sequel to Resident Evil 7 which followed Ethan Winters, a man who gets caught up in a strange situation when he goes to the Louisiana bayou on a mission to find his wife Mia who has been missing for the past three years. Over the course of the game you find out Mia was actually working for a secret company moving their latest bio-weapon, a little girl named Eveline with the power to infect others with mold to keep them under her control. In the end, Ethan defeats Eveline, saves Mia, and lives happily ever after…until Village that is.

See this time around, we’re three years later where Ethan and Mia have somehow managed to get over all of the job secrecy and extreme domestic violence from their time in Louisiana. They’ve even had a baby, Rosemary! But their happy European dream life is violently interrupted when the OG Resident Evil puzzle boy, Chris Redfield, shows up and straight up murders Mia in the dining room (that’s not really a spoiler ya’ll, it’s all up in the trailer.) Ethan and Rose are then taken by Chris’s operatives but face trouble when Ethan wakes up after an apparent car accident with Rose no where in sight. This leads Ethan on a journey to THE VILLAGE in the hopes of finding Rose and maybe discovering why Mia was killed.

I’ll be honest, we were torn on buying this one, mostly because of the $60-70 price tag. But my gamer dudes all had their early access to the game and had posted a couple of videos of their play throughs the day before release which gave us the perfect opportunity to check it out a little. It took two videos worth (I’d say the first 30 minutes are a little slow but when it picks up boy does it pick up) but obviously, we were eventually convinced.

To start, even though we’re in the next gen of consoles, in this house we still play on the PS4 and the game looked really great so I can only imagine how sharp it must be on the PS5. However, I will say that through out the game there are multiple elevators you’ve got to ride to transition from one area to another and they seem to take a hella long time. Like comically long. I don’t know if that’s because the old system is just not quite up to snuff to load in the new areas in a timely manner or it’s like that on both consoles just because that’s how it is. From watching videos on Youtube it seems like it could be the former but if someone who played on a PS5 wants to weigh in here, I’d appreciate it.

Now for the enemies. Ya’ll. RE Village is FAR superior to its immediate predecessor when it comes to the variety of enemies you get to encounter. Not only does it have the five main bosses, including the internet’s number 1 obsession, Lady Dimitrescu, who is not as big of a deal as the trailers would have you believe, there are fly girl daughters, dead vampire minions, bald zombos, mechanical beasties, and lycans for days! They all vary in difficulty as the game progresses too which makes each area exciting even if you’ve encountered the enemy type before. My personal favorite is probably the second boss and doll maker, Donna Beneviento’s house…that basement is a land of horrors in the most unexpected way!

This Resident Evil has also leaned heavily into the puzzle fun and straight horror of the first few games in the series and I loved it. There is a solid balance of action and fighting, scares, and puzzles that probably puts this game near the top of my list for the series.

Though RE Village has an obvious tie in to RE7, it’s the blatant similarities with Resident Evil 4 that are the most easily noticed. Like RE4, Village predominantly takes place in a village ravaged by bad shit, there’s a merchant that magically follows around the game all too willing to upgrade your weapons and sell you ammo, and you find treasures willy nilly all over the place to sell back to that merchant so you can keep buying and upgrading. Personally, it begs the question, why even bother remaking RE4 now when you’ve seemingly put out a similar (and in my opinion better) game already? Give us a remade Code Veronica instead you cowards!! But I digress.

The biggest takeaway from RE Village is that my boy Ethan doesn’t give a fuck about his own hands. That man’s hands go THROUGH IT over the course of the game with fingers bitten off, flies coming out, blood sucked, burned, cut off and then magically reattached with some quality juice. You’ll be asking yourself, how does this man’s hands take so much abuse?? And luckily, you’ll actually get an answer by games end! I know I said there’d be spoilers in this review but I just can’t bring myself to give up the surprising (and hilarious) twist that Ethan’s old nemesis, Eveline, shares with him in a dream world. It’s so good that Jonathan and I have been joking about it for days.

Final thoughts: Resident Evil Village is fantastic. The story is engaging, the bosses and enemies are interesting, and the balance of action with horror and puzzling makes for a fun 8-10 hours of gameplay. The replay-ability is high with the inclusion of challenges to earn points which can be spent unlocking different weapons or infinite ammo much like in the RE 3 remake that came out last year. If you’ve been on the fence, I personally think this game was well worth the money and you don’t need to have played any of the other games to get into this one. Not even RE7! They offer you a nice “last time on Resident Evil 7” video to watch before the game just to get you up to speed. If you’re into survival horror games you definitely don’t want to miss this one.

If you’ve had the chance to play, what were your thoughts on Resident Evil Village? Where does it fall on your list for the series? Do you think Ethan’s hands are the most indestructible things on the planet? And that twist! Did you see it coming? Let me know in the comments below!

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