Resident Evil Village review: Apparently, good horror takes more than a village (2024)

2017's Resident Evil 7 was one of the greatest gaming comeback stories of all time. After the series lost its way over the years with unwieldy blockbuster aspirations, Capcom's horror team wiped the slate clean and scaled everything down to a creepier, tighter, personality-driven scope.

The resulting 2017 game is still a series highlight—which is likely why Capcom hasn't yet let go just yet. Its direct sequel, this week's Resident Evil Village, earns serious "direct sequel" stripes. The same protagonist returns to contend with zombies, monsters, and creeping dread. His tribulations are once again framed within a first-person perspective, and they're once again controlled by a certain set of moves and weapon types.

Sequels like this sometimes turn out well—ain't broke, you know the rest—but that's often because the game maker in question uses lessons learned from the prior game to make something bigger, badder, and crazier, or executes concepts that couldn't quite fit into the first attempt. RE Village is not that sequel. The more I think about its elements, the more I'm left wondering what got cut, changed, or compressed to get this game out the door, because it largely fails tosurpass RE7's scope.

RE Village is still a solid experience, and at its best, it doubles down on RE7's "front-row seat to horror" twists in terms of giddy, silly horror-violence entertainment. (Think '80s cheese, not '00s torture porn.) But as both a video game and an interactive horror film, RE Village is best served by lower expectations.

Four plus seven equals eight?

I say this because it's easy for well-versed series fans to look at RE Village promotional materials and make up a great-sounding math equation: Resident Evil 4 plus Resident Evil 7 equals... Resident Evil 8? (In the newest game's logo, "Village" has its letters mocked up so that "VIII" appears in bold. But it's not RE8. Whatever you say, Capcom.)

The newest game's titular village certainly resembles the downtrodden Spanish villa from 2005's RE4. Various homes and shacks appear in a countryside (this time snowier and more mountainous), connected by fields of tall grass, ancient architecture, creepy gothic stuff, and rubble left behind by the town's once-thriving population. Ungreased metal doors squeak, spooky sounds linger in breezes, and monsters and zombies snarl in various hard-to-discern directions.

The RE7 influence is most evident with its first-person traversal and combat (more on those in a bit), but it additionally seeps in during an early plot sequence where various villains argue about the fate of protagonist Ethan Winters. Like RE7, this is a family affair, with a matriarch named Miranda apparently calling the bad-guy shots. (No, Miranda is not the "tall lady.") Unlike RE7,this sequence hints at a larger gameplay scope: five significant villains in all, each with their own lairs full of monsters, puzzles, and frights.

RE7 revolved around a single Louisiana-bayou estate with smaller splinter locations, and it felt like a callback to the original series' intricate mansions. Puzzles and new items forced a significant amount of re-traversal through various floors, hallways, and basements—and heaped on the sense of terror about what might come next, should you return somewhere you've been before.

This review's first spate of bad news comes from how Capcom fails to execute on this plot point and broaden RE Village's scope. Sure enough, the game's central village connects players to a network of lairs, unlocking one at a time for Ethan to explore in a journey to save his daughter. But those lairs are terribly uneven.

Opulence in the observatory, bloodstains in the basement

RE Village's best lair is its first one, controlled by the fiendish, charismatic Countess Alcina Dimitrescu and her three vampiric daughters. Capcom has been bullish about featuring this lair in previews and demos, since it's the opulent stuff of corset-bound dilettantes traipsing around castle estates with neoclassicist flair. Opulence in the observatory contrasts violently with entrails and bloodstains in the wine cellar. (Whatever they're bottling down there, it's red.)

Dimitrescu's castle is indeed a picturesque showcase for the series' modern, first-person mix of action and puzzles, even if it wraps up too briefly and with little in the way of memorable puzzles. This is saved in part by an ongoing struggle to piece together exactly how to take down the members of the Dimitrescu family—finding their weaknesses and exploiting them in cleverly designed battle chambers, all while each family member taunts and cackles. (Some of them have a great trick of dissolving into swarms of locusts, which means Capcom can mess with your first-person perspectives when a ghoul "flies" through your view.)

The remaining "lairs" and sequences can't maintain the same momentum, even if the central village connecting them continues to generate surprises, scares, puzzles, and discoveries every time you pick through its corners and find new paths and doorways. From a classic Resident Evil series standpoint, the biggest breakdown between these various lairs is one of plot and stakes. Lady Dimitrescu captivates with her mix of charisma and apparent centuries of life, and her voice actor revels in owning every scene. Plus, battling through her castle while solving puzzles is the gooey stuff of great video game storytelling, because its chambers and secrets tell her life's story in delightfully organic ways.

But the other lairs feel divorced from this design philosophy. The most intricate one, owned by a dollmaker, is also the smallest, and it leaves zero trace of how its owner lived and suffered up to the point where she became a villain—a fact that becomes glaringly apparent when a text document at the segment's end tells her story in roughly four paragraphs. Instead, the physical location revolves around hallucinations and creepy dolls. That's all well and good if we're talking about a horror film, but since this house's puzzles rarely surpass the threshold of "follow a trail by the nose until a scary cut scene plays out," it feels like it blows sometrippy opportunities, either with lore or gameplay (let alone both combined).

Do you lycan what you see?

Additional lairs fall into the same rut: abrupt conclusions, underwhelming puzzles, and last-second dumps of lore that hint at a more involved and interesting relationship with the village's looming Miranda character. These lairs' copy-and-pasted geometry makes their respective rooms look too similar, whether they're in a boggy, swamp-like biome or a pipes-and-concrete refinery. In the latter, retracing steps to solve puzzles or use newly discovered items becomes an utter chore of cross-referencing a built-in map to figure out where the heck to run to next.

Maybe a producer made some hard calls midway through production to get the game out the door—and there's no telling what kind of compromises the global pandemic choked out of Capcom's best intentions. But the end result pales compared to RE7's impeccable execution, and RE Village's increased emphasis on combat doesn't make up for the game's shortcomings.

Some classic RE games have made combat more intense by forcing players to run away from fights to save their ammo. RE Village hints at a similar philosophy in its very first battle—and it's an absolute series highlight, thanks to its insane odds, nastily designed zombies (dubbed "lycans" here), and path through various houses where players must quickly use built-in explosives, barricades, and dust clouds to outlast a timer.

This opening conflagration also makes clear that dead foes drop coins, and the hardest ones drop lots of coins. The storefront concept from games likeRE4 returns, and players can routinely buy ammo, items, storage space, new weapons, gun upgrades, and more, in addition to the copious supplies found throughout the game's buildings and catacombs. Plus, a few of the game's earliest fights are simple and manageable enough to give you time to breathe and notice those coins. Surviving RE Village comes down to this: you can run, but maybe you should stay and fight.

The best (and worst) parts about combat

Here's some good news: Capcom has made sure that every weapon looks, sounds, and feels punchy within a first-person battling interface. Grotesquely rendered zombies are a visual step up from RE7's moldy-goo monsters, and their unwieldy, shambling aggression feels like a marked improvement, as well. The game's foes are all beady eyes and drooling hunger, and they look genuinely determined to kill you—a sensation that can get lost after a zillion other games' slow-and-grunting zombies. Plus, when RE Village's hairy, fleshy faces meet your buckshot, they a'splode real nice. And while "normal" difficulty fills the game's universe with copious cash and items, it stillrestricts income enough to gate bigger-ticket purchases, particularly new guns, behind reasonable amounts of progress, so you're not mowing foes down with overpowered semi-automatic rifles here.

Still, for every RE Village battle that stages its foes in tight, terrifying quarters while beautifully juggling their tension with your firepower, at least four other melees put slow enemies into conveniently staged tunnels so that you can yawn while picking them off. This is even true no matter the difficulty setting, which is a shame; Capcom certainly finds ways to ramp up the difficulty, but the most uninspired battling zones aren't saved by Capcom merely fudging its numerical sliders (how hard enemies hit, how many bullets they takes to kill, etc.). That pacing is bad news for the full campaign, as RE Village simply doesn't succeed enough with its battling to make up for other lapses.

A "Mercenaries" mode unlocks once you beat the game on any difficulty, and I strongly suggest RE Village owners start by beating the game on "normal" in order to reach this content faster. It resembles similar modes from RE5 and RE6, along with Call of Duty's unimaginatively named "Zombies" modes, and it asks you to kill waves of foes within a time limit to rack up points, buy new upgrades between rounds, and keep killing. You'll find mild changes from older RE Mercenaries modes, particularly a newfound lack of forced "loadouts," but they don't disrupt the basic thrust—or the surprising fun. The mode is a welcome, arcade-styled perk, especially since it lets players skip straight to the game's finely honed first-person combat on a lark, and it reuses some of the campaign's best zones to fill the screen with terrifying zombie-attack patterns.

But c'mon, Capcom: no two-player split-screen option? Not even on next-gen consoles? This modescreams for a shared couch experience, and I'd love to see Capcom flex the newer consoles' power on this last-gen game by patching in a Mercenaries two-player option.

Not the best poster quote

Most of my nitpicking in this review comes as a result of direct comparisons to RE7. Those comparisons aren't just a matter of the games looking similar; RE Village hingesentirely on RE7's events and plot developments, so much so that it asks you to watch a "previously on Resident Evil" video before you boot the game. And in the end, the 2017 game does pretty much everything better. It's scarier. It's crazier. Its boss battles are some of the most clever and inventive first-person boss sequences on modern consoles, especially when compared to RE Village's uninspired "shoot at a thing, then hide, and repeat" boss showdowns.

More disturbingly, the writers in charge of stitching the plot together, and connecting it to prior games, eventually lose the thread of RE Village's matriarch Miranda and her intentions. After I finished the game, I restarted it to watch its characters' introductions, and I was left scratching my head. What they say in the beginning doesn't match the motivations we learn about by the game's conclusion. Did Capcom make a big change, only to get stuck with recorded dialogue from a prior session? Did they think nobody would notice?

On the other hand, if you go into RE Village eager to turn off your brain and revel in about 10 hours of campy, inconsistent horror-movie bombast, you'll have a much better time—so long as you don't skip the cut scenes. The game's opening hours include a number of delightful "are you freaking kidding me?!" twists, all ferried by lead character Ethan Winters exclaiming in agony about everything wacky going on around him. The game's dialogue has its lapses in logic, but on a moment-by-moment basis, the script and its actors' performances left me laughing, cheering, and gasping.

Those highs are arguably reason enough forRE7 fans to return for at least one more first-person entry in this horror series, plus there are major series stakes playing out in the ending.But ultimately, we're still left with a paltry poster quote: "If you loved RE7, you might like RE Village." As a result, anyone unfamiliar with RE7 should instead start with that 2017 game—it still looks and plays fantastically—before spending a minute on its sequel.

The Good:

• More guns, and more terrifyingly rendered, cleverly animated monsters to shoot them at.
• The best plot beats and cut scenes revel in the giddy, violent cheese that only the horror genre can pull off—worth laughing at and laughing with simultaneously.
• If you can't find a next-gen console yet, never fear; the past-gen version (at least on PS4 Pro) looks and runs quite well, or scale it manually on PC.
• Already praying for the "tall vampire lady" spinoff, as LadyDimitrescu is one of the series' best-ever characters.

The Bad:

• Speaking of height: RE7's very tall shadow looms over everything here. Very little in this week's game is better than that 2017 classic.
• Focus on combat can fall apart when battle sequences are often quite uncreative.
• Issues with reduced scope and disjointed plot imply that this game faced a brutal, cut-filled path to completion.
• RE7 scaled perfectly to PSVR, but Capcom has elected not to offer the same option this time around for some reason.
• LadyDimitrescu appears a lot less than trailers might lead you to believe.

The Ugly:

• The fun wave-shooter mode comes without split-screen options, and that's a shame.
• Ho-hum boss battles are a shocking fall-from-grace compared to the previous game.

Verdict: Play RE7 first. If you want more of the same, lower your general expectations and revel in RE Village's improved gunplay. If not, skip.