Resident Evil Village begins with a scene of domestic bliss, as our hero Ethan Winters (returning from Resident Evil 7) and his wife Mia prepare dinner and look after their newborn baby, Rosemary. Then something bad happens—I won’t say what, because it’s pretty shocking—and soon Ethan finds himself lost in an isolated village in a snowstorm, searching for his kidnapped child. It’s a sharp, sudden intro, but an effective one, immediately setting the stakes high and establishing Village’s brutal, sadistic tone.
It’s never explicitly stated where the village the game takes its name from is located, but a few clues point towards it being nestled somewhere in the wintry mountains of Romania. The village itself is a scrappy, ramshackle scattering of wood and brick houses, farmer’s fields, and the occasional church. Over it looms a gothic castle with immense spires stretching into the mist, and there are also traces of ancient ruins, suggesting a long and strange history. It’s a magnificent setting, dripping with atmosphere, menace, and mystery—and a place I wanted to explore every dark, dingy corner of.
Ethan is a boring guy who always seems confused about what’s going on, and never has anything interesting to say. This makes him a slightly unremarkable protagonist, but his extreme normality does heighten the eccentricity of the village’s many oddball residents. The previous game’s Baker family were a relatively grounded bunch of ghouls, but here Capcom has seriously ramped up the monstrousness of its antagonists. As Ethan hunts for Rose, he goes up against an impossibly tall and glamorous vampire, a weird mutant fish-man, a killer porcelain doll, and other assorted weirdos.
What I love about Village is that it never settles on being just one kind of horror game. Each villain’s lair features a very different take on the genre, from breathless, action-packed survival against hordes of enemies, to a more slow-burning, psychological brand of horror. It’s a game overflowing with cool, memorable ideas, constantly inventing clever, surprising new ways to raise your heart rate and jolt you out of your comfort zone. And it manages to keep this up for pretty much the entire duration of the game.
Each section is so wildly different, Village almost has the feel of a horror anthology. Admittedly, this can make it feel inconsistent at times, as if all the parts are flimsily strung together. You often get the sense that Capcom had the ideas for the game’s many brilliant set-pieces first, then decided how to connect them all together at the last minute. But it’s worth it for the variety this approach offers. You genuinely never know what fresh weirdness the developer is going to throw at you next.
This not only makes this the most varied Resident Evil to date, but arguably the scariest. One of the best examples of this is the mansion of Donna Beneviento, a dollmaker and one of the village’s rulers. In her creaking, dusty old house—which is littered with dozens of eerie, black-eyed dolls in various states of disrepair—you’re forced through a series of brilliantly constructed moments of understated, excruciatingly tense horror, culminating in an encounter that might well be the scariest single moment in Resident Evil history.
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