Resident Evil Village

A horror game that has an intriguing story to tell but gets lost between campy, serious, and terrifying.

Demetrius Atkins

May.17.2021

After surviving the horrors of Resident Evil 7, Resident Evil Village opens to Mia sitting on the couch with our protagonist Ethan, reading a story that should probably never be read to a toddler. It doesn't take long for things to go sideways and the story to start to unfold. Through a series of events you find yourself in an overturned truck in a village apparently lost in time, ravaged by monsters with nobody in sight. While the village itself is creepy the happenings here seem out of the norm, even for here.

Throughout the game the storytelling will veer pretty wildly between a very serious tone, genuinely terrifying, and campy horror. The change in tone throughout the game depending on where you are in the story can be at odds with what you're expecting. For me the camp is where the game shined because it fit in with how it played and the script itself. The second half of the game suffered from the pacing issues the most. The first half was intriguing and mysterious while the second half lost that environment. You learn more as you play the game so obviously a lot of the mysteriousness fades away with knowledge of what's going on, but also because the second half felt rushed. By that point I felt like I was simply trying to get through certain areas and finish up a couple of things as opposed to continue exploring. In some areas I felt the level and enemy design began to steer me away from exploration.

This isn't to say that I didn't enjoy the story. I think it tied in well with the events of Resident Evil 7 and made me want to continue through the game to learn what was happening. In the overall universe I like the direction that the series is taking to give us something newer. I still had a couple of questions that lingered but I think that was more because I didn't find everything there was to find, which increases the replayability.

Throughout the game you'll go through the process of sneaking your way around trying to avoid enemies (or if you're more like me just shooting anything that gets in your way). Because of the amount of ammo and weapons you can get, Resident Evil Village feels less survival horror and more suspense and action. There weren't too many times where I felt I couldn't shoot my way through (I played on normal so playing on a harder difficulty would lend itself more to the survival aspect of the game) but the times where I started to run short on ammo was when things got really interesting. I couldn't run into a room guns blazing and that added to the tension a great deal. But this outing felt like it wanted to go the route of a more action-based horror game which I felt it did well. There were a couple of times thrown in throughout that were genuinely terrifying to help remind you what genre you're in.

In horror games it's tough to get people to really explore areas because there could be a scare around every corner, but Resident Evil Village does a great job of making exploring worthwhile. Getting anything from trinkets worth a lot of money to sell or additional story elements scattered throughout the game, it's worth your time to take a look around no matter how scared you are. It also makes it worth your time to revisit some areas to find something new that wasn't there before that could be beneficial for you. I don't think there were any instances where I went searching for treasure and felt it set me back.

After completing the game you get access to bonus content in the form of additional movies, concept art, figures, and challenges. And boy are there a lot of challenges to hold your attention. While some of the challenges are more progress oriented (such as crafting a certain amount of items) some are one time things that show I clearly missed a decent amount of content, which means I need to play through it at least one more time. And with the points you get from the challenges you can purchase additional weapons to play through the story with and more collectables.

What it comes down to is Resident Evil Village is a fun game to play. I normally don't do well with horror games because I scare easily but I find this to be a good mix of horror- and action-based gameplay. Some of the story felt a little underwhelming to me which was exacerbated by just okay audio during some cutscenes but it kept me hooked to keep continuing on. I explored, I searched, I shot some monsters and was scared by others in my roughly nine-hour playthrough and I had fun doing it. This iteration made me look forward to what they'll come up with next in the series, so we'll have to wait and see what's in store in the future.