It’s absolutely clear to me that the people behind Resident Evil Village were beyond thirsty when making this game. Maybe the term “thirsty” will lose its colloquial meaning at some point in the future, so let me be clear for future readers: these developers were horny as hell. Sure, the Resident Evil series has had some very attractive characters in the past, but they were usually limited to one or two a game. A Jill Valentine here, a Leon Kennedy there. Sprinkle in a little Sheva Alomar if ya fancy. But Resident Evil Village is filled with characters that seem made to lust after, which is in stark contrast to Resident Evil 7, which had virtually no characters worth pining for. I imagine an early development meeting where the game’s director was like “okay, everyone, with the power of the new consoles and the versatility of the RE Engine, I want this game to be very, very pretty.” And someone on the design team whipped out a forbidden thirst notebook that they’ve been sketching in for years. Anytime they had to draw yet another throbbing, slick, pustule-ridden monster, they would take a break and draw a character they wanted to kiss and do the naughty with. That notebook became the core design doc for this game.
I’m getting ahead of myself. Let me back up and start with my experience with the game. I’ve written about my love for the various Resident Evil games and characters in the past, so I guess for context I’ll just say that I’ve been a fan since the very beginning. I favor the earlier games and, like some other fans, was mostly turned off by some of the convoluted/silly twists and turns the series started taking. But I loved the new direction (also kind of throwback?) of Resident Evil 7 and I was all-in when I saw the first trailer for Village. Is there still silliness to be found? Sure. But Capcom has traded twisting, crisscrossing storylines for simpler narratives told in elaborate, well-crafted set pieces, much like the earliest games in the series. When I say that Resident Evil 7 and Village go back to the roots of what made the series special, that’s what I mean. I don’t mean that they’re returning to shuffling zombies and Raccoon City. They’re returning to interesting premises that are then fleshed out with minimal story and maximum atmosphere, and an attention to detail in world building.
We can see evidence of this shift even in how Capcom has handled the naming and marketing of Resident Evil 7 and Village. RE 7 was introduced as Resident Evil Biohazard, but many quickly took to calling it Resident Evil 7. The Biohazard moniker wasn’t just a tribute to the series’ Japanese title, which has always been Biohazard, though. Capcom treated RE 7 as a spiritual refresh of the series. New characters, new setting, new biological weapon type (fungus), new perspective. Old level design, themes, storytelling, atmosphere. I believe Capcom used Biohazard because they wanted the game to reach a new audience, and one thing that deters many gamers from a new entry in an old series is numbers. How many times have you heard (or asked yourself) “do I have to play the other games in the series to play this one?” The next Final Fantasy game is Final Fantasy XVI. 16! And there are still plenty of people who aren’t sure how the series works or whether or not you need to play previous titles in order to ‘get’ the newest entry. So, Capcom wanted players to think of RE 7 as a new title that was wholly unconnected from previous titles so that they could hop right in without worrying about feeling lost or confused about who a character was or why you were doing certain things. I don’t know how well it worked, though, because, as mentioned, people instantly began calling it RE 7 and not Biohazard. With Resident Evil Village, however, in some of the earliest interviews with developers about the game, they insisted this game be called Village. Yes, there is a very clearly highlighted VIII in the word “Village,” but when asked if this game was “Resident Evil 8,” the team stood fast and insisted that it was Resident Evil Village, probably for the same reason as with RE 7: they want to market it to people who may have never played a Resident Evil game before. This time, however, I think it worked. I hear the occasional person say “Resident Evil 8,” but for the most part both the gaming press and people I’ve seen on social media or Twitch refer to this entry as Resident Evil Village.
Whatever you call this entry, I loved it. I finished my fourth playthrough recently, a hardcore run, and I plan on getting the platinum trophy for it soonish. The above-mentioned blend of classic RE elements with gorgeous new settings and characters was a winning combo for me. In the early RE games, the pace was generally slow, plodding even, punctuated by moments of terror as you navigated just a few familiar spaces. Starting with Resident Evil 3, the series began working toward the concept of forward motion, where you’re constantly moving from one set to the next. It traded atmospheric horror for the anxiety of having to always be ready to act and react. I never felt like they got the balance between those two things right, if they were even trying. But with Village, it’s about as close as you can get. There are several areas in the game, each with its own style, design, enemies, and more. In some, the pace is slow and you’re meant to puzzle your way through various rooms. In others, you’re moving quickly and aren’t too concerned about exploration because the pressure is on and you have shit to get done. Maybe this blend of the two approaches to the RE formula will leave ardent fans of either upset that the game doesn’t lean heavily one way or the other, but I thought it made for a dynamic experience where in one stretch I was stressed and in distress, and in another I could take my time and explore the gorgeous scenery.
Speaking of gorgeous scenery, I really want to talk about how beautiful this game is. I’m not talking about the sexy thirst traps yet. We’ll get there. Keep your pants on. Pants on, eyes up, because we’re talking about some ceilings. There is so much visual detail in this game that I legitimately can’t fully do it justice in either writing or pictures. Virtually none of the screenshots I’m sharing really represent these visuals in their full glory. I do want to focus on a few examples of the graphics and visual design, though, and ceilings are one of them.
Our beloved Lady Dimitrescu’s castle is much like the lady herself: huge, beautiful, elegant, and I want to be inside it. Wait, what? Shhh. Let’s move on. At every turn I was overwhelmed by the level of detail in each new room or space I entered. Chairs, tables, shelves, a delicate teacup stained with lipstick and blood, a lace shawl draped over a regal couch with two black gloves thrown carelessly nearby. At some point I realized I’d also constantly been looking up at each new ceiling I stepped under. Ceilings in video games have long been an afterthought for game designers. Real house designers, too, I guess, but why would video game ceilings ever need to be unique and detailed? There’s never much of a reason to look at them. Yet here I was, constantly tilting the camera up to appreciate the virtual, digital woodwork, paint, and sculpting. I know that the designers use some kind of high resolution scanning technology to photograph objects and then render them in-game, so maybe these are real ceilings in some real castle or estate in Europe, but either way I was weirdly blown away by the care and attention that went into something as minor as this.
Something I liked more broadly about the game’s visuals was the variety of textures and the way light interacted with those textures. I’ve gushed about the RE Engine’s ability to render realistic looking surfaces before, but with the power of the PlayStation 5 at their disposal, the development team really went all out in producing an incredibly impressive variety of unique textures for this game. Again, these pictures don’t really do the game justice, but I want to talk through a few, starting with one that I think highlights how many different detailed and unique textures you encounter in the castle alone.
Maybe the picture above doesn’t look super impressive here, but if you get close to anything in this photo you’ll find a realistic surface that reflect the soft light from the window in its own way. The fabric of the carpet looks and “feels” different than the fabric of the decorative chair. The wood on the floor has a different grain and reflective surface than the wood of the wall or the wood of the chair or the wood of the small table. The canvas of the painting looks like canvas. The frame looks hand carved. The peeling wallpaper looks at once dated and perhaps formerly elegant, and it reflects both the light and shadow of the window and curtains. I could go on, but again, this is just one picture.
Also, I’m calling them “textures,” but for the majority of 3D gaming history, “texture” usually meant 2D art on a flat surface, meant to give the appearance of “texture.” So, a grass “texture” might have been mottled and green, maybe with some hash marks, to make it look, at a glance, like grass. Over time, other 2D elements were added, like clumps of tall grass, to increase the believability, but it wasn’t until relatively recently that some versatile video game engines were able to render surface to actually look like they had a texture and weren’t just 2D pictures plastered on a polygonal surface. The RE Engine is one of those engines. If you look at some of the surfaces in these pictures, like the floor here:
Or the table here:
You’ll see that things like imperfections, grooves, or separations, are actually rendered in 3D, meaning they’re affected by light and shadow as they would be in a real 3D space, which makes them look incredibly realistic. And these kinds of textures are everywhere. The basement floor in Donna Beneviento’s house, for example:
As soon as I saw it I knew what that floor felt like. I’m no interior designer or architect, so I don’t know if it’s glossy concrete or some other kind of poured material, but I just know that it’s hard, cool, and smooth, just by looking at it. And, again, you can see that it’s uneven, and the light reflects off of it as if those slight, broad bumps and waves are really 3D and not just a flat picture. I’m giving a lot of credit to the engine, but I think the actual visual artists deserve tons of credit, too, not just for the overall design of these spaces and elements, but for the amount of detail that they put into these designs as well. I went on a whole tear about Leon Kennedy’s radio case when I wrote about the RE 2 remake, and now I want to do the same for Donna Beneviento. I should give a general [SPOILER WARNING] here, because I’ll be getting into some light spoilers here, and then major spoilers later (especially in the pictures). Donna Beneviento is a great character, and I’ve seen some people claim that she “steals the show” from Lady D (blasphemy). And yet, we barely see her. She’s in, I think, two scenes (and a couple of very brief flashes), and you barely get a good look at her before she turns to dust. But let’s look at the level of detail they put into a character we’ll see on screen for less than five minutes, total:
Okay, so this isn’t her whole design, but there is one detail I want to laser focus on. Is it the lace doll dress, which has actual holes in the surface and isn’t just a picture of holes? No. Nor is it the thick fabric of Donna’s dress, the etched bone of the doll, the soft wood grain of the chair, or any of the other impressive surfaces and details of this model. You’ve probably guessed it by now, but it’s her hands. And not just the fine lines and creases of her skin, which are very realistic looking, but her nails:
Look at them! They are flawed and imperfectly perfect. Her nails have grown out a few days since they were painted, as evidenced by the fact that we can see some bare nail at the base, near the quick. The paint on her pointer finger looks bumpy, as if her first coat was uneven (or the nail itself is bumpy). The paint on the middle finger looks very smooth and glossy, and the light reflecting on it is clear and shiny. On her ring finger, however, the light is softer and more absorbed than reflected, which seems to indicate that she might have scuffed that nail or messed up the last coat of paint. And look at the little chip near the edge! All of this detail on a hand that virtually no one who plays the game will get close enough to see in their playthroughs. Might the visual designers have scanned in a real person’s nails and just mapped them on a model in the game? Maybe. Either way, a lot of care and thought went into these choices, it seems to me, and I will never shut up about how impressed I am by the visuals of these games. I legit want to live in either Castle Dimitrescu or House Beneviento. Elon Musk is running around spending all this money blowing up spaceships when he could be building an exact replica of one of these homes for me and I will never forgive him for that.
Visuals, aside, I found the gameplay to be surprisingly smooth and responsive. There’s a throwaway line in the very beginning the game that reveals that Ethan has been through military training, so maybe that’s why he’s so much steadier and more adept at using firearm than Leon Kennedy was in RE 4. When you tried to aim any weapon with Leon, it was like he was doing so while being tickled. He could not keep his aim straight. Ethan aims, reloads, and changes weapons like a pro, and it made for very satisfying combat, which is something I’m not used to in RE games (not that it was ever the point). With such precise aiming, shooting shambling zombies might be a breeze, but as with other recent RE games, the developers make up for it with enemies that have erratic, only semi-predictable movement. Lycans will walk menacingly, then suddenly shift to a low dash using their arms, then stand up and side-step a shot. Ghouls will shamble, like zombies, and lazily loll their heads or jerk their upper bodies dramatically to swing a weapon. The combination of precise weapon handling and erratic enemy movement meant that I mostly felt in control of situations, but when shit went sideways or I began to get overwhelmed, I panicked. I like that balance in RE games.
As far as the story goes, there are certainly some silly, anime-esque aspects (I mean, you fight a flying vampire dragon lady, a fishman, and a giant mech dude, all in the same game), but it all made sense in the context of the new storyline that started in RE 7. I especially liked the idea that this fungus, able to transform only specific types of people, was around for centuries in Europe and is likely the source of many mythic characters and creatures that we’re familiar with, like vampires, werewolves, ghosts, and more. It’s an interesting if minor twist on the original concept of a virus being the source of modern zombies. I’m not necessarily fully invested in Ethan’s story, but I thought they told his tale well. Do I think he’s really dead? Probably not, unless the developers want him to be. If his seeming unpopularity affects their decision, it would be easy to leave him dead. He did blow up, after all. But they wrote themselves a nice little insurance policy that would allow them to bring him back, too. Chris Redfield and his Blue Umbrella crew are in the area to investigate this new type of mold, and in one audio clip right near the end of the game, one of Chris’s team mentions that testing shows this new mold is very different than the mold found in Louisiana in RE 7. It’s revealed, again near the end of the game, that Ethan actually died in RE 7 and is, himself, a mold monster. How does he have all of the memories and mannerisms of the real Ethan, then? Well, they also explain that the European strain of mold has a huge underground root system that acts as a database, storing any and all DNA that it comes in contact with. It’s how Mother Miranda, the game’s antagonist, plans on bringing her dead child back to life. Her DNA is stored in this “database” and Miranda has been seeking a vessel to transfer her daughter’s essence into. If this mold has a “database,” it stands to reason that the mold in Louisiana did/does as well, given that Evelyn (the antagonist of that game and a test copy of Miranda’s daughter) was able to commune with all mold creatures in the area and communicates with Ethen now, who she recreated through potentially similar means. If that’s true, Ethan’s essence is still alive and able to be transferred to a new vessel or reformed by Evelyn at any time.
In another twist, the BSAA shows up in the final assault, and it’s revealed that they were using bioweapons that looked like ghouls in tactical gear to infiltrate Heisenberg’s compound. Chris is confused, and I think we are supposed to also be confused as the audience, especially given that at the very end of the game Chris says that he’s going to BSAA headquarters to investigate. There is one clue that I noticed on Heisenberg’s very low-effort, basic-ass conspiracy board that I think explains why the BSAA was there:
Heisenberg was creating an army of bioweapons in his factory. There were literal production lines of bioweapons constantly cycling in the background of the main factory floor. In his notes, he reveals that he is trying to create an army to challenge Miranda and basically rule the world. On this board, he very clearly writes “BSAA Come!!” While this could mean a few things, it makes me think that he summoned the BSAA, perhaps with the intent of partnering with them or selling them his bioweapon army. It can’t be a coincidence that the BSAA happens to be using bioweapon soldiers when they show up to a facility that’s manufacturing bioweapon soldiers. Either Heisenberg called them or he simply predicted they would come. I have a hard time believing the latter, given the lack of contextual evidence.
There’s so much more I could talk about but we’re getting long in the tooth here and I need to cover the most important aspect of this game, which is what you’re here for anyway, right? Let’s get to it. These character designers take the term “horny on main” to a new level. Instead of publically pining after virtual sexy people, they just went ahead and created them. A game full of them. The most obvious, of course, is Lady Dimitrescu and her lovely, bite-y daughters.
Besides being featured prominently in the game’s promotional material, sexuality is just a part of their design. Even as the Dimitrescu “daughters,” Bela, Daniela, and Cassandra, are hunting me down to kill me, they’re seemingly in an erotic frenzy, talking about tasting my man blood, tying me up, and shouting things like “don’t you love me?” as I attack them. They chain me up, sniff at a handkerchief that has my blood on it, and are desperate to “consume my man flesh.” When they catch me and chomp into my neck, their eyes roll back into their heads in ecstasy. Yes, most of this is about them wanting to eat me, but their mannerisms and tone are undeniably sexual. And look at them! They’re just sexy, vampy, Nicks-ian babes.
Our most cherished and worshipful Lady D is, of course, the most famous of the sexy characters in this game, though, and my only complaint concerning her is that she wasn’t featured more prominently. That’s not a real complaint. I knew going in that she was probably just one of several major characters, but I love her design and personality so much that I just want more. So much is made of her size, but that is on the lower end of her most attractive qualities in my eyes. A huge part of it is just how she holds herself and her mannerisms. She is constantly aware of her posture and pose, and moves with determined grace. She doesn’t just command her daughters to string me up – she does so with a stylish flourish of her hands before placing them firmly on her hips. In her argument with Heisenberg, she booms at him with a commanding voice before switching effortlessly to a soft lilt and tossing her head back to show her superiority. Yes, I understand all of this makes her sound like a bitch. And she is. A big, boss-ass bitch. And that is hot. Her fair skin and dark eyes, peeking out from her wide, stylish hat don’t hurt either. I should note that she wasn’t as scary and intimidating as Mr. X from RE 2. If Mr. X caught you, there was a chance that he’d insta-kill you, but other than slashing at me, Lady D didn’t seem to have that ability, which was kind of sad. It would have made it that much scarier. I wish they’d either added an insta-kill move, or a hug move. That would have worked, too.
There are plenty of other sexy characters in the game, but there were two that surprised me. No, not Heisenberg and Chris (though I was actually surprised at how many people I’ve seen thirsting after Heisenberg. Really?). We’ve already talked about the first: Donna Beneviento. Okay, okay, so she has some issues and she is incredibly shy when it comes to showing her face. But she is a major, under-the-radar beauty. Yes, she plays with dolls, but I have shelves and shelves of action figures, statues, and amiibo, so if she can make Batman or Princess Peach fly around and talk, I’m going to take that as a fun party trick. She also loves games! We played hide-and-seek and tag. So. I’m just saying, I don’t think it would be hard to convince her to sit down and play some games with me. She would love Little Big Planet! And, like my high school self, she has a majorly goth, black-centric wardrobe. She doesn’t have Lady D’s presence, but I think we could make it work.
Lastly, the big baddie herself, Mother Miranda is a stone cold fox. And a stone hearted monster. A minor detail. Look at her!
I don’t know nearly as much about her as the others, because she doesn’t have her own house that I can snoop through to get a sense of who she is and how she lives. I know that she tore a baby apart and put it in jars that she gave to her friends. Which, you know. Not cool. She also did so in order to get a new version of her old baby, and I’m not necessarily looking for kids right now, especially of the moldy variety, but… well, that’s all I got. She’s hot. That’s about it. She’s got the face of an angel and six wings to match. The developers of this game were thirsty as hell and it came out in all of these designs, but you know what? I am not complaining. After a whole run of games filled with bulgy eyeball creatures and slimy mutant blobs of teeth and tentacles, I will take a slew of sexy ladies.
Okay, I have to let you go, but I have so many thoughts about this game so I will just randomly throw out some final blurbs. I was disappointed by how they treated The Duke’s character. Many people seem to like him, but his design is very fatphobic. My first run of the game was surprisingly easy. I didn’t mind, though, and the hardcore run was, indeed, pretty tough. I’ve seen people claim that the House Beneviento part of the game “rips off” PT. It certainly seems inspired by it, but the game borrows from tons of horror media, including Dracula, The Island of Dr. Moreau, Saw, A Nightmare on Elm Street, and more. If anything, it seemed like homage to PT, particularly given the fact that there is little chance Silent Hills, the game that PT was a demo for, will ever come out. I was one of the people that thought Chris might become a werewolf at some point, but I wasn’t necessarily upset that he didn’t. He was a little more brusque than I would have expected. With how much Ethan suffered, and his pierced hands, and his sacrifice and resurrection, it’s hard not to see him as a Christ figure. I thought the concept of family was super interesting, especially given the previous game’s focus on it as well. Evelyn, in the previous game, was made from a sample of Miranda’s daughter’s DNA, right? And she was obsessed with family. She kept looking for a family. Miranda, her sorta-kinda mother, in this game, is also deeply concerned with family. Also, Evelyn seems to make Ethan as a mold creature, and he’s also obsessed with family and will do anything he can to protect/save his daughter, Rose. Was he “programmed” to do that by Evelyn? Hmm. I didn’t mind the action-packed Chris section at all. After being so precious and careful about my ammo and aim for most of the game, it felt cathartic to just let loose. Lastly, who is this figure in the very last shot of the game? They’re walking on the road in the far distance, and they’re far too small to make out any features, but I don’t for a second believe this was just a random design choice.
A New Game Plus 