Some old, some new, all good
In recent years, Capcom has brought the once-floundering Resident Evil series back to life. The publisher found its cadence with a soft reboot (Resident Evil 7) and two lavish remakes (Resident Evil 2 and Resident Evil 3). Now, Capcom follows those successes with the $59.99 Resident Evil Village, a PC game that deftly blends the old and new. Resident Evil Village is a direct Resident Evil 7 follow-up that continues Ethan Winters’s story by dropping him in a new locale, the eponymous village in a fictional Eastern European country. Although Resident Evil 7’s first-person camera remains, Capcom mixed older flavors into the pot. Village walks like a remix of Resident Evil 4, with gameplay that hews closer to RE2 or Code Veronica. Village is bigger and weirder than its grounded predecessor, but it doesn’t go into full action hero mode like Resident Evil 5 or 6. The foundation of modern survival horror was already good, and Capcom has successfully built upon it. Winters Is Coming Ethan Winters does not have the best of lives. In Resident Evil 7, he entered Louisiana’s swamps to find his presumed-dead wife, Mia, only to survive horrific happenings at the hands of the mutated Baker family. Village picks up some time later, with Ethan and his wife caring for their baby girl, Rose. The domestic bliss is destroyed when a paramilitary team, led by RE mainstay Chris Redfield, breaks into their home, kills Mia, and takes Rose. Ethan awakens from the attack and sets out to find Rose—and discover what’s going on in this hellscape of a hamlet. In the intervening years, Ethan has leveled up a bit. His character splits that difference between resembling Resident Evil 7’s hapless nobody and the hardened soldiers that Redfield, Jill Valentine, and other RE protagonists have become. Think Die Hard 2 ’s John McClane, rather than his Die Hard or A Good Day to Die Hard incarnations. Village sets you up with a knife and handgun in short order. It’s a good thing too, because Village takes a page from Resident Evil 4, with an immediately hostile populace coming after you. While RE4 had the zombie-ish Ganados, here the people have turned into the Lycans, werewolf-like creatures that are far more mobile and vicious. Even the chainsaw-bearing Ganado is outclassed by a giant Lycan wielding a massive hammer. The Resident Evil 4 vibe doesn’t stop there. That game put Leon Kennedy up against the Los Iluminados cult, headed up by cult leader Lord Saddler and tiny dictator Ramon Salazar. The pair were holed up in an ancient castle, a vast manor you had to traverse while saving the President’s daughter. The village here is the main hub that connects five regions that house a cult led by Mother Miranda. Four of the five regions reflect their master. The giant, meme queen vampiress, Lady Dimitrescu, guards the ostentatious Castle Dimitrescu. The hunched Salvatore Moreau hides in his damp and decaying Reservoir full of living mold. Puppeteer Donna Beneviento resides in House Beneviento, a manor full of dolls and illusions. Finally, twisted engineer Karl Heisenberg builds inhuman mechanical things in his Factory. The lords are similar to Resident Evil 4’s odd, larger-than-life figures, but their appearances feed into the unique flavor of their regions, like the Baker family in RE7. Each region does a good job of focusing on a slightly different horror style.
