22/05/2021: Resident Evil Village Review

Hello, dear readers! We apologize for our long absence, enforced by our commitments in school such as exams, moots and a jam-packed social calendar. (One of these is false. Can you guess which?) However, to make up for it, we’ve planned a special lineup of many exciting and interesting articles for the remainder of the summer break to keep you in good stead! To start off, here’s a review of the recently-released Resident Evil Village.

Note: If you’ve followed our IG page at all, you’ll know that I really enjoyed the game. Take my word for it and buy it immediately if you enjoy survival horror with hordes of fearsome and ferocious foes, bucket-loads of chilling atmosphere, a spinetingling narrative that will leave you dripping-wet (with fear and suspense, obviously) and just a tinge of humor. There will be some light spoilers in this review and I think it’s much better to play the game completely blind. However, if you think you might need convincing, the bulk of this review will only have very light spoilers and heavy plot-centric spoilers will be duly indicated in advance. The administrators of the page accept no liability for hurt feelings and loss of chance to enjoy one of the best survival-horrors released in recent memory.

Overview of Resident Evil

Before delving into the review of the game proper, perhaps an overview of Resident Evil is warranted. Basically, Resident Evil (original titled Biohazard in Japan) is a survival-horror video game series dealing with bioweapons-gone-bad, usually involving zombies and other monsters. I’ll only cover the main games and selected other games that I enjoyed. Spoiler alert for every Resident Evil game so far!

Resident Evil

RE1 sees the Racoon City Police Department’s special unit, STARS, to the nearby mountains to investigate strange disappearances and killings. Bravo team, which was sent first, loses contact and Alpha team is sent in after them. Upon arriving and discovering the corpses of some of their colleagues, Alpha team is set upon by vicious zombie dogs and takes refuge in a nearby Mansion (the Spencer Mansion) after their helicopter pilot Brad panics and flees without them. They discover that the mansion is full of traps and secret doors and actually a biological weapons research facility for the evil Umbrella Corporation that experienced a containment breach of the T-virus, resulting in the zombie creatures. The survivors, led by either Chris Redfield (a weapons expert) or Jill Valentine (an infiltration specialist), destroy the mansion and escape.

Enjoy this iconic scene:

Resident Evil 0

RE0 is a prequel that follows one member of Bravo team, the medic Rebecca Chambers, who happens upon a prisoner, Billy Cohen, while they are on a train and they have to work together to survive. Eventually, they kill a lot of zombies and Rebecca lets Billy free (there’s a good reason) before rejoining the events of RE1.

Resident Evil 2

RE2 revolves around Leon Kennedy, a rookie policeman reporting to his first day on the job in Racoon City, and Claire Redfield, Chris’s sister who’s a college student in town to visit her brother, who discover that the city is in the midst of a zombie outbreak. The city has gone to absolute hell and they have to survive and escape before the city gets destroyed. Over these events, Leon meets Ada Wong, a femme fatale who turns out to be a corporate-spy trying to recover virus samples; while Claire meets Sherry Birkin, daughter of an Umbrella Corporation researcher who gets mutated and becomes the game’s main boss (the researcher, not the daughter).

This was famously remade in 2018 – the RE2Make received rave reviews for expanding the game world, updating the graphics and gameplay and keeping to the intense survival-horror tone of the series.

Resident Evil Outbreak

RE Outbreak was an interesting game that followed a party of survivors with different skills who had to work together. You could get a variety of endings depending on how good you did so there was a lot of replay value in trying different characters.

Resident Evil 3

RE3 is set roughly at the same time as RE2, following Jill Valentine who’s chased by the Nemesis. She encounters other survivors like an Umbrella mercenary team (not all of them are bad guys) as they struggle to escape. In particular, she has a sort of love line with one of the mercenaries called Carlos. Personally, I thought that was crap because she’s meant to be with Chris!

The remake, RE3Make, was not as well-received as RE2Make. While the graphics and action were praised, the game suffered the same criticism of having an extremely short play-time. This is because RE3 was originally conceived as an expansion before being turned into a full game, although I think RE3Make doesn’t have any excuse since it already had a ready-made game engine and they’d promised to expand Racoon City as an explorable environment.

Resident Evil: Code Veronica

RE Code Veronica is a spin-off title with Claire Redfield and some dweeb stuck on an island when she looks for her brother Chris there. I’m not really sure what happened in this game besides it sort of being some Umbrella base.

Resident Evil 4

RE4 represented a seismic shift in RE games. Leon S Kennedy is now a US Secret Service agent who goes to Europe to rescue the President’s daughter, Ashley Graham, who went missing. He starts off being attacked by crazed villagers under the thrall of a mysterious overlord, before he makes his way to a castle in the village and rescues Ashley and then has to fight all sorts of weird monsters and cultists while making his escape. Along the way, he has to protect Ashley from getting captured and killed by the bad guys and receives unexpected assistance from Ada Wong. This series was praised for the increased gunplay which would eventually signal the series’ shift towards action-oriented gameplay. Moreover, the villains and monsters in this game weren’t created by the T-virus, or even zombies, but this new bioweapon called the Plagas. This meant that the “zombies” could use weapons like axes, chainsaws and even bows. Leon also became much more outspoken and more of an action hero, making one-liners and jokes along the way. The criticism was directed at Ashley, who was perceived as annoying (I disagree) and helpless (she could only scream for help). Personally, this was my favorite game in the franchise!

Resident Evil 5

RE5 went further down the action route with even more outrageous action scenes, including the epic, infamous boulder-punching incident. It’s set in Africa with Chris Redfield as a BSAA agent (that’s like the anti-bioweapon task force) working with his partner Sheva. Interestingly, the gameplay was designed so you could play it cooperatively with a friend. I hear it was pretty fun, but I never liked this entry that much. That said, the action elements seem to have gone down well because this is the best-selling in the franchise!

Resident Evil 6

RE6 was even more crazy. It featured branching stories (each with a pair of characters) following Chris, Leon and Sherry Birkin (now a DSO agent). Although the game received mixed reviews, it also sold well – over 10 million copies. (I didn’t play it, though.)

Resident Evil 7

RE7 sort of went the reverse way from RE4, bringing the series back to survival horror. At the time, games like Outlast and The Evil Within were in vogue and I think it was a smart choice to make RE7 super scary. First, the player character was a normal guy looking for his wife so he didn’t have the experience, skills or weapons that Leon, Chris, Jill or any of the other characters so far. Second, you had very limited ammunition for weapons that weren’t particularly powerful so there was no way that you could fight all of the villains. You had to pick your fights and run or hide from most of the villains, not just the main villains who you’d only be able to beat in a scripted boss fight but even the faceless drones. Third, the atmosphere was eerily similar to famous horror movies like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (cannibal family motif) and the lighting was very dark and the music super creepy, whereas the previous games were almost like Michael Bay action movies. This game was very well-received by mainstream audiences although some of the die-hard fans hated that it was a first-person horror game unlike the previous entries, not to mention the completely new characters. Just to recap the story, you, Ethan Winters, go to Louisiana to look for your wife, who’s been missing for like 2 years, and discover that she’s being held by this family of cannibals. It turns out that they weren’t always evil (they were actually quite pleasant) but they got infected by this bioweapon called the Mold and each became super powerful and crazy. This is all at the hands of some crazy evil super psychic little girl called Eveline, who’s a super bioweapon. Ethan does pretty well against most of the family but he’s almost killed in the final boss battle until Chris arrives and saves him by dropping him a super powerful gun to kill the boss and then the game ends with everybody saved. There are a few DLC where we see Chris chase down the last remaining villain and a cool swamp man (the family’s relative who is super strong and not infected) rescue one of the good uninfected family members. (Oh yeah, it turns out that Chris is now working with Blue Umbrella which is like a company using Umbrella’s resources to fight bioweapons so they’re the new good guys.) I love RE7 and the DLCs are extremely good.

RESIDENT EVIL VILLAGE

OK, that took much longer than I thought it would. That brings us to Resident Evil 8. After the events of RE7, Ethan and his wife Mia are living in Europe after being relocated there by Chris for their safety, and have since been blessed with baby Rosemary. However, Chris and his squad suddenly bust in one night and shoot the hell out of Mia, killing her, and they abduct Rosemary and Ethan! However, their truck is disabled and the soldiers aboard are killed. When Ethan wakes up, his stumbles across an Eastern European village situated near a grand castle whose villagers have been slaughtered by a variety of monsters. The rest of the game takes place over about 24 hours where he explores the village and learns that Rose may have been taken to the castle, and Ethan has to battle the 4 lords of the village (4 figures of immense power: the giantess vampire Lady D; a creepy animated doll Angie; a weirdo fishman Moreau; and a sort of Magneto-guy called Heisenberg) and their leader, the mysterious Mother Miranda, to get Rose back. (I won’t spoil any more of the story.)

Gameplay

First, I’ll talk about the gameplay.

As you might have gathered from the brief synopsis, the game is basically a “boss gauntlet”: kill these 4 bad guys and collect something that you’ll need to achieve your final goal. Each of them has a unique environment (Lady D’s castle, Angie’s small country manor, Moreau’s cave-lake and Heisenberg’s factory) populated by a specific kind of enemy or certain types of enemies correlating to the boss’s identity. There’s not too much variety since there’re only Lycans (werewolves), vampires (and flying vampires) and robotic vampires, electric-drill drones and various intermediate bosses like hammer-wielding giants or monstrous wolf-beasts and chainsaw-wielding freaks. However, there are a few models for each type so they do feel a bit distinct. Also, they have different characteristics: Lycans will run quite fast and mob you but are usually unarmed unless they decide to pull out their weapons, while the vampires are pretty weak but carry longer weapons which are usually already drawn; the flying zombies have weird flight paths and will charge at you; the wolf-beasts will prowl around the search area until they spot you in the open but can’t chase you into enclosed spaces. It’s not really that much variety, when you contrast it with some other horror or action games like RE4, but it’s still more than just a bunch of mob zombies or the Mold monsters in RE7.

That said, the way you beat them isn’t all that special: head shots, but the only difference is the way they stagger about. In that sense, a steady aim will get you through most of the enemies – it’s a matter of how many head shots you need, depending on how strong the villain is and how powerful your gun is. On higher difficulties, the enemies’ health and speed drastically scale up – it takes more shots to down them (and the game doesn’t award you with more ammunition drops) and they far more accurate with their swings and they react much more promptly to your movements. In that sense, the game is really scalable to your comfort level. On casual, it’s basically impossible to get killed unless you’re exceptionally slow-witted or you’re bad with reading the cues during moments that you have to react quickly or suffer 1-hit kills (they aren’t QTEs though, thankfully). However, higher difficulties, especially Village of Shadows mode, are absolutely killer due to the lack of ammunition. I can’t imagine finishing it without using weapons with unlimited ammunition, which you have to spend several replays to unlock. (More on that later.)

The next thing to mention is the inventory system. It’s a really neat system where you have to Tetris the items, each occupying a certain number of blocks, in your briefcase (which you can expand by buying things from the merchant) so you can fit all your new guns and ammunition inside. Hence, it’s a bit of a challenge to decide which gun you want – do you keep your upgraded but lower-level gun or sell it off so you can replace it with a better pistol and start upgrading it? It’s a challenge because the game rewards fully upgrading your weapons by allowing you to unlock additional goodies like unlimited ammunition and stuff like that from the bonus menu. Besides that, you’ve got to decide how to use your limited crafting items (chem fluids, herbs, rusted scrap, metal scrap, gunpowder) to make different resources like medicine or different kinds of bullets for your guns since they all occupy precious space.

A follow-on point would be the Duke, the merchant of the game. In RE4, Leon could find a mysterious merchant at various safe spots throughout the game world and buy goodies like new guns, upgrades and sell off treasures. A similar mechanic appears here. The Duke is a morbidly obese fellow who runs a shop, who somehow has friendly relations with the denizens of the village, and sells new guns and supplies and ammunition recipes. Also, throughout the game world, the developers have scattered all kinds of treasures ranging from generic crystal fragments, skull fragments (and other crystal substances like wings or crystal axes) dropped by defeated enemies, various colored jewels, special treasures that you have to find a special ball somewhere in the dungeon to unlock a puzzle to receive and special combinable treasures like a doll that you have to piece together to drastically increase the value. Finding these are a pretty big challenge and a lot of the them are in secret locations that force you to fight especially tough enemies, which is a treat in itself but it’s really, really, really satisfying to sell off the combined treasures to get a really big payout.

Some spoilers:

To this end, the excellent map system helps a lot. It highlights areas you’ve found by coloring the rooms in – red for areas you’ve not completely examined, and blue for those you’ve fully explored. Also, it points out the secret treasures for you to find really well with a special treasure box symbol, making it easier for you to know where to start looking, but leaving enough of a mystery so you can enjoy figuring out if you’re lacking a special item like a unique key or puzzle piece to open the way. That said, it can be frustrating to explore a place and not know what you need to do to turn it blue and even whether you’re too early in the game to unlock certain areas. I’d say there’s no shame in consulting a guide – I certainly did – but it can be really challenging if you’re a purist.

Also, let it be said that RE Village has the best replay value of all the games. The New Game + function returns, allowing you to carry over your current inventory (with all your money and goodies) to your next playthrough. Not only do you have the knowledge of where the danger and treasure lie, you’ve also got enough bullets and guns to deal with more villains more easily. This means that you’re able to not just tackle the game itself but the challenges, including things like knocking a flaming arrow out of the air, using enemies’ attacks to damage other enemies, defeating a certain total number of enemies, speeding through the game or certain bosses and accumulating a certain amount of wealth. There are many challenges to unlock which award you with Completion Points. These aren’t just for bragging rights but allow you to purchase things in the bonus shop such as special weapons, unlimited ammunition, collectibles like in-game virtual figures and concept art, just to name a few. After one playthrough, you should have enough CP to either purchase unlimited ammunition for one of your old weapons, if you’ve already upgraded it, or buy a special bonus weapon (like a super pistol or machine gun) and the corresponding unlimited ammunition bonus. I recommend doing this as soon as you can, so as to make it easier to unlock the other challenges.

Oh, I almost forgot – there are lots of cool guns for you to use. Initially, you start off with a ratty tiny pistol, an old shotgun and a sniper rifle. The latter’s not too bad and it’s the only sniper rifle in the game. However, the game also introduces stronger pistols and shotguns – by the endgame, the shotgun you have can take out most minions with one headshot and some of the items on sale include submachine guns and automatic rifles. There’s a lot of variety and much fun to be had in upgrading them by paying Duke obscene amounts of money. That adds to the replay value, if you enjoy levelling up your weapons or accumulating wealth to buy new guns, since you won’t be able to use them all in just one playthrough due to limited inventory space. Also, some equipment is only purchasable in the bonus shop after you’ve completed certain challenges, such as a lightsaber (replacing your rusty old knife as a close combat weapon) or even a super magnum that can punch through multiple minions and down even boss characters within several shots!

The final bit to mention here would be the boss fights, but I’ll leave that for a spoiler section at the end. Suffice it to say for now that I enjoyed them greatly, although I sympathize with some of the criticism flying about that they’re a bit anticlimactic and perhaps too easy in some parts. Broadly speaking, they’re about the same in the sense that you need to wait for a weak spot to appear (usually quite obvious, although it isn’t quite as obvious as RE2’s glowing eye) and then blast away while spending the rest of the time ducking away or running to cover. However, I think the way the bosses attack you are sufficiently varied to make it interesting. I don’t quite agree that they’re as monotone as some critics have made it out to be.

Atmosphere

Next, let’s discuss the setting and atmosphere.

RE Village clearly evokes RE4’s image. We’re in a European village with rundown houses with no electricity and possibly no plumbing (hence the outhouses attached to every home and there’s even a challenge to open every outhouse door) and the villages are sort of dimwitted peons who observe blind obedience to some kind of superior figure. From the get-go, it’s already dripping with suspense. You’re stumbling from your crashed vehicle, your path obstructed by all sorts of rubble and you’ve spied an enormous creature dragging something bloody along the way. From then on, it’s a barrage of questions. Where are you? Where are the villagers? What killed them? Where are the creatures coming from? Who are these 4 Lords? What’s their backstories? Over the rest of the game, you’ve no clue whatsoever as to these answers and you’ve got to scrounge every box, drawer, shelf for any scrap of information (interactable files in the game world representing diary entries, letters and notes that tell you the story) to figure it out. As a result, you’re never quite sure what’s lurking around the corner of every strange new room you find and it’s fraught with tension since the boss could be patrolling that area or there might be a scripted fight with a boss when you’ve only got three bullets left for your pistol. Even in subsequent playthroughs, you might not remember exactly where the bad guys’ spawn points are or whether something has triggered a boss to start patrolling a certain area, and enemies do pop up in unexpected locations from time to time.

That said, even the production team admitted that RE Village was intentionally made to be less scary than previous installments, especially RE7. They even made a series of promotional videos with the evil bosses as cute puppets performing a children’s show to market the game as an un-scary game! (It’s adorable – you really should watch them.)

I will agree that there’s a lot more fighting in the game. There’s some horror in it and some survival, but it’s definitely closer to RE4-6 where they gave you plenty of weapons and bullets to fight the monsters. Also, the boss battles are less scary because you’re usually fighting in an open space and the fights are rather epic so it’s a little bit like a Power Rangers fight with a kaiju or something right out of Monster Hunter. That said, the consequences of failure are very grim – you’re usually horrifically melted by some biological acid or crushed to death by some strange contraption or torn apart by a chainsaw-machine-madman or eaten by a creature, so it isn’t all sunshine-and-rainbows either.

Even as you get better guns and more experience with targeting the enemies’ weak spots, so the actual combat gets less dangerous and therefore the enemies get less threatening, the atmosphere of the game still keeps you on your toes. One example is in the village near the graveyard where there’s an open field with tall grass. From afar, you can tell that there are three Lycans hiding there because of their growls and their heads pop up every now and then. However, even if you know they’re there, you can’t see where they are so it’s still nerve-wracking while you’re crawling through the grass and you’ll only know where they are when they’re right on top of you.

Another example is in the factory. It’s really dark and the only lights are red hazard lights along some of the walls so it’s already quite eerie. What makes it worse is that some of the monsters, which are quite strong and only vulnerable from some angles so they’re quite scary no matter what gun you’ve got, are dormant so you never really know when they’ll activate and start patrolling. Hence, the poor lighting and obstructed view from the winding paths makes it so you can only see (hear, really) them when they’re really close by.

HOWEVER, some of the worst scares come from scripted sections of the map that don’t trigger before a certain point. This means that, in subsequent playthroughs, you’ll know with certainty that the giant vampire lady isn’t going to appear yet or that a certain area, while scarily lit and there being scary music in the background, is actually absolutely safe since the specific event hasn’t triggered. Personally, I’m a bit of a coward so I was still unnerved from the atmosphere alone (it really is quite creepy) but I can understand if more seasoned horror fans lose some thrills at these sections.

Additionally, it’s true that RE Village is less scary because they try to make it funny. Ethan Winters, who was mostly silent in RE7, even makes one-liners like Leon Kennedy did in RE4, although the lines were somewhat clumsy. He also expresses his feelings a lot more, such as exasperation at how long a particular dungeon is or how sick he is of fighting a certain kind of enemy. I think this is meant to be him acting as a conduit for our own feelings – and it worked – but it’s also kind of funny. Of the villains, Heisenberg also has a few great lines where he screams at a minion angrily or makes quips about Ethan or some other characters. Besides these, there are also a number of unintentionally funny scenes. Chief among these involve the giant vampire lady, Lady Dimitrescu. I’m sure Capcom knew what they were doing when they stuffed the marketing full of her but the internet started simp-ing for her so her scenes lost some tension because of the memes. (Personally, I still found her scary because she was quite powerful and the letters scattered around her house were the most terrifying.)

On the whole, I think that the overall tension and scariness does take a dip compared to RE7 and possibly RE2-3. It’s definitely a little bit less of a horror game and more of an action game that will be within more players’ comfort level. I think that’s a good thing because it’s known that a number of those who chose not to buy RE7 felt that it was too scary so I think it’s better if more people got to play the game. I don’t consider it a betrayal of the original fans because RE has always been a series that adapted. A lot of the tension in RE1-3 was due to the fixed camera angles and tank controls. RE4 saw a massive drop in difficulty and increase in action (it was still incredibly challenging but it was easier to get good at it) and this trend only got more pronounced until RE7 dropped. (In the first place, I don’t think RE Village is really not scary at all because it’s still tough on higher difficulties and the imagery is still quite chilling.) In my view, RE Village actually strikes a fine balance between the scares and fun. It was important to bring RE back towards something more familiar to placate fans of RE4-6 who got upset at RE7 and keep it scary enough not to alienate the new fans from RE7 and the recent REMakes who were more accustomed to scary games. Besides a straightforward assessment of absolute scariness, RE Village handles the tone of the game very well – it isn’t an Outlast or Amnesia clone, but a proper Resident Evil title with a first-person perspective (a major sore point for RE7 critics). RE Village effectively bridges the gap between the cheesy and crazy RE5-6 and the more serious titles like RE1-3-7. This was especially important for a series that was undergoing some kind of identity crisis.

Story

The last thing I want to talk about is the story.

First off, they did an excellent of making Ethan a fully-realized character. Everybody knew we’d be starting from where RE7 left off because Ethan Winters wasn’t given that much development and they wouldn’t be able to just skip him without looking like idiots. They took the chance to flesh him out a lot by giving us a peek into his home life, the books he reads and his hobbies in the introduction level where we get to look around the Winters home. This carries on throughout the rest of the game because Ethan speaks A LOT with various characters and expresses his feelings on a lot of things. None of it is very character-specific, but it really makes Ethan feel more like a real character. Also, lots of silent characters like Master Chief are developed through the story although they don’t have much dialogue because they’re actively involved in doing things throughout the story. Likewise, Ethan’s path to rescue his daughter brings him in contact with different people and obstacles like puzzles and stuff like that and his reactions tell us about him as a character. He’s put through increasingly intense situations and the gauntlet really gets worse and worse as we go along until the climax and you can hear his heightening frustration and exasperation at the situation. In terms of the actual plot, the game actually fills in a very big plot hole from RE7 and answers a number of questions that were left open.

Second, the concept of the Universal monsters (werewolf, vampires, Frankenstein, swamp creatures) was really clever. Each of the bosses has a certain theme: there are Lycans wandering around the village, the vampires are at Lady D’s castle, there are creepy dolls at Angie’s house, Moreau’s lake has a sort of swamp-man or giant fish thing and Heisenberg’s factory has a lot of mechanical monsters who are sort of like Frankenstein. Some critics felt like putting Lady D at the center of the marketing made her out to be the central villain of the game so they felt betrayed when she was the first boss to go down and you cleared her castle within 2 hours. (It took me 3 hours but I’m slow.) However, I think that was intentional because you were in the dark about the rest of the game so it was even more unsettling. Besides that, the diverse environments and monsters made it so you learned more as you went along. I think that’s a very important factor in video games and even suspenseful TV shows that people overlook. I think these sorts of media only stay interesting as long as the audience keeps learning new information. Once the game/show reveals the big secret, the audience is going to lose interest unless something new happens e.g., more questions or something exciting like a battle etc. Village accomplishes this by having an impressively-sized game world spanning diverse environments (the village, the castle, a mountain path, a swampy area and a factory) with lots of non-essential but interesting information about the denizens of each area and establishes a very long history for the region.

For example, the villagers worship Mother Miranda, even to the point that they have a church dedicated to her and the lords’ worship and memorized prayers that they chant out together, showing that she must have been around for a long time.

The game also tries to make the logistics of the world feel a bit more plausible, such as the villagers finding employment at Lady D’s castle and the factory. My favorite entries include the notes and diary entries left by maids and chefs at the castle that tell of their experiences working for the monsters, such as maids being dragged off to the basement after making certain mistakes or about the monsters’ strange behaviors. These aren’t just important (some of them give you hints as to their weaknesses) but also make you think about what living there must have been like and it’s quite scary to think of the number of people who’ve met a grisly end there. Lastly, the game double-downs on this by having stories link from one area to another. For example, you might find one area in the village locked off because the key’s missing and some notes as to where the key might be. Later on, you could find that key somewhere else, on the opposite side of the map, with more information about what happened to the key’s holder. Leaving notes and environmental storytelling isn’t that new but the level of interconnectedness in Village is to be commended.

Finally, I just want to gush a little bit about the characters. This section will have spoilers – you have been warned!

Lady Dimitrescu has a really good design. It didn’t occur to me until recently that she’s basically a taller version of Mr X from RE2Make! I like that she’s super intelligent and snooty, which is what you’d expect from a “nobleman” type of villain. She and her daughters (3 girls who she experimented on with the Mold) are “vampires” because they feed on blood. That’s a pretty interesting spin on the concept. Their lair, the castle, was set up a bit like RE2Make in the sense that it’s a big house and the villains patrol around the place like Mr X in RE2Make. At first, you only creep around and follow Lady D around because you’re doing some snooping but then the daughters pop up here and there and chase you around. Like I said, you have to use hints in the notes to kill them. I thought they were the best bosses in the game because you really had to think outside the box to figure out what their weakness was and what about the battle arena could be turned against them. Later on, Lady D goes nuts – understandably, since you’re murdering her daughters, and she seems genuinely saddened by it – and she poses an enormous threat to you. In fact, I don’t think I’ve seen another villain who inflicts that much damage to a main character in a video game. It’s actually quite easy to escape from her when you run into her in some areas since her walking speed is quite slow and her attack has a very obvious telegraph but it’s quite frightening when meeting her in a corridor since she blocks the whole corridor with her size so you can only run straight off. Her boss fight actually takes a 180 because it’s not at all about running away – she turns into a flying dragon – so it’s a straight up fight by shooting her weak spot. I found it enjoyable but I can understand someone getting mad that it’s different from the “scary” type of fight.

Angie – the talking doll – is actually being psychically controlled by Donna. We learn the least about her because she’s very shy and we hardly ever see her. Her dungeon is basically her cottage house (it’s a very big house with luxurious furniture) and you start out by exploring the house and then going to the basement, where you find an operating table but it’s actually a dollmaker’s workroom. Suddenly, the lights go out and you lose all your guns and you have to try to restart the elevator. This part of the game was really frightening. It only got worse when the lights went out and you saw the main boss of this area, which is a horrific-looking mutated baby who can swallow you in one hit and it’s really frightening because it’s reminiscent of the Thing. I recall being so frightened at this part that I suffered a really bad stomach cramp because I was clenching my abs so hard. After that, you escape (I won’t spoil how) and get back to the top level where Angie confronts you and makes you play hide and seek. You’ve got to find the Angie doll among all the other doll and stab her three times to win. I thought this part was really weird because there was no reason for her not to engage in a more straightforward fight and the other dolls were scary but they weren’t dangerous unless you took too long to find Angie. It was a shame that we didn’t get to learn more about Donna. The only bits we got to learn came from some scattered notes from a gardener describing her as being very shy because her parents were killed and her face was scarred so she liked dolls a lot. I imagine that the Mold infected her and made her evil because the gardener talks about seeing his deceased family (she’s got psychic powers, remember) and she invited him to her house (presumably to kill him). I thought she had the most potential because she was really frightening because of the creepy doll thing and her lair was set up to be like Silent Hill PT so it was a terrible shame that they didn’t give us more intel on her. It would have been nice to have her talk over a PA system while you were wandering around, or maybe they could have some medical tanks around her lair where we see her turning her captives into living dolls (just an idea).

Moreau is a creepy fish-man. That’s pretty much it about him because we only see him in the swampy area and he turns into a giant fish-creature when he can’t control his mutation and he’s normally in the lake being a nuisance and killing villagers who go fishing. I think that he’s really sad because he yearns for the approval of his siblings (the other lords) and Mother Miranda but he’s just being used as a laborer and researcher since they seem to make him do the experimentation on villagers with the Mold. His area doesn’t have that much lore but there are a lot of puzzles since you have to figure out what to push to create a path for you to evade fish-Moreau after he floods the area so you can only move on floating planks. However, if you look in the other optional exploration areas, you can find his clinic with some information about the experiments, which tells you how the lords create their army of minions. Yeah… so he’s a bit sad but he’s an asshole who experimented on a lot of innocent people so screw him.

Heisenberg has the longest section. It’s a factory with many levels and you have to find ladders to get from B4 to level 1 of the factory and escape, but you need to go back and forth using an elevator to find different parts from different levels to make various keys and treasures to unlock everything. I thought it was quite confusing because of the multiple layers on each floor and it almost feels like you can go one way but not the other, but I suppose that’s part of the challenge. There was also the most variety of monsters here: vampires with a mechanical headpiece (so they have more health); mechanical automations with a drill (they can block their glowing weak spot with their drill until you knock their arm away); super drill automatons (they have two drills and jetpacks so they’re really fast); and a sub-boss, Sturm. Sturm is really scary because he’s got this chainsaw fan in front of him and he just charges at you so you have no choice but to run away whenever you encounter him. When you fight him, it’s in this tiny maze-like room and he’ll just charge right into the walls and break off portions of it so you can make the fighting arena bigger. It’s an absolute nightmare on higher difficulties because there’s nowhere to run and you need him to charge into something to expose his weak spot, which can take a hell of a lot of damage.

Anyway, it turns out that Heisenberg actually wanted to work with you to take out Mother Miranda, who he resents for experimenting on him and the villagers, but he’s still an asshole who experimented on innocents so you’ve got to kill him too. He’s got magneto powers and uses them to mutate into a giant metal monster with chainsaw arms and tentacles like a kaiju. You end up fighting him in a tractor modified with a machine gun, cannon and chainsaw like a tank and I really thought it was epic AF. It was completely like something you’d see in the RE animated movies (which are EXCELLENT) and RE5 or 6.

Mother Miranda is the ultimate boss of the whole game. She’s actually a 300-year-old researcher who discovered the Mold and wants to use it to resurrect her dead daughter by implanting her mind into a host body. It’s quite cool because it’s like she’s the ultimate and first bioweapon, and there’s this great section where you examine her lab and realize that she actually mentored the founder of Umbrella so it sort of ties the entire series together. It’s really cool. Her boss fight is also one of the most fun I’ve had because there are some creative sections where you really need to think about what the arena can do for you or you’ll take the hit. You also have to use your brain to figure out which parts to target and it’s not 100% obvious. That said, I wish she’d play a more active role in the story by interacting with you, or at least telling you more when she did interact.

OK… so this turned out to be an almost-7000-word-long article about Resident Evil and it took me 2 days to write. It’s way longer than I expected so I’m sorry if it’s too wordy. It’s just that I really enjoyed RE Village and I love RE a lot so I’m hoping that this managed to bring across my feelings on the matter. I really think this is a game that you can play regardless of your experience level and comfort level with horror and it’s a lot of fun. Tune in soon for more (manageable-length) articles about a variety of weeb-related subjects. Bye!