Frankenstein’s monster

Resident Evil Village

As far as horror games go, Resident Evil has a stellar reputation, good enough to become a movie franchise as well. The latest installment is Resident Evil 8 or VII.I.AGE, as they would like to call it, I am not calling it that. The game is a fusion of some of the older games bringing in some new thrills and keeping the franchise fresh.

The story continues with Ethan Whisper, three years after Resident Evil 7. He and Mia now have a child named Rose, and they have moved to Europe to restart their lives. The game begins when your wife is shot down and your baby abducted. You get knocked out and wake up after the van you were being held in crashes. From there, you have to follow a narrow path in the dark snowy place as the game trains you about the basics. It feels like RE7 in the beginning, but the pace quickly changes from dark and scary, to first-person action, when you come upon an abandoned village. Your first task in the game is to survive and escape a horde of werewolves.

There are essentially four sections and four major bosses to get past. The pace of the game through each section is different. For example, the area ruled by Lady Dimitrescu is slow-paced and more about stealth, while the Stronghold is all about dealing with hordes of monsters. Every section is distinct enough to not feel like they are part of the same village.

There is a lot of variety in gameplay and a lot of elements imported from previous RE games. The environmental horror sections create a claustrophobic environment perfectly. These sections are thrown in with a bunch of jump scares and that is what I enjoyed most. The action provided a much-needed change in pace. They provided a different kind of tension, more to do with ammo depletion and an onslaught of monsters to take care of. That said, the controls are a little clunky, especially for action and Ethan doesn't move like he is in an action game; everything is slow-paced and at times it can be hard to adjust. This does give you time to think and plan your moves, but I sometimes craved some fast traditional action.

Running out of bullets is, however, less of a concern now than it was in some of the other titles in this series. They have fortunately bought the merchant system back, and this means you can stock up before you enter most areas of the game. Resident Evil Village also lets you craft things and make them better: you can make sniper rifles, mines and all sorts of lovelies. This means scavenging and looking for loot around in the game is more important than before. It also encourages you to go around exploring the map, which throws up some good surprises now and then, not to mention jump scares. Yes, I do think jump scares are cheap, but when they are paired with impeccable environmental horror, they are acceptable to take things over the top.

The puzzles in the game were a little disappointing. They were all too easy and there were several hints around that told you exactly what you needed to do to finish the puzzle. Thus, defeating the purpose. They were nothing more than a stop-gap in most cases.

As far as the graphics for the game go, I am a little mixed about it. The environment and mood set were perfect, I even liked the monsters. At the same time, things like the movement of liquids and lots of small details of things in the environment looked very unnatural and put me off. I was especially put off by how everyone's hands in the game looked. Even the baby wasn't spared from overly wrinkly and weird shaped hands. Considering you spend most of the time looking at Ethan's hands, I thought they should have done a better job.

The big question is where will Resident Evil go from here, will it continue this mishmash or will it take a completely new approach? I for one want to see them improve on this. Even though this went on and experimented with gameplay and varied pace, I think it still lacks refinement. If the next title could address the refinement and figure out a crazy good storyline, we could have a winner on our hands. Not to say this isn't a winner, I think Capcom has struck gold here, they just now need to refine it to perfection.

Overall, Resident Evil Village is a very good game for the franchise. Not only does it redefine itself, it also gives the user a nice change in pace through the 15 hours of gameplay. There are a few things that I didn't like, but they were small enough to ignore in the grand scheme of things. If you have the stomach for a creepy horror action game, get Resident Evil Village. It is a lot of fun.

Resident Evil Village
Rating: 4.5/5
Developer: Capcom
Publisher: Capcom
Platform: PC, PS4, PS5, XBO
Price: PC: Rs 3,499 Consoles: Rs 3,999