A 1742 word review of Resident Evil Village. 

I’m not a huge fan of scores that do not exist on the Real Doll scale. I don’t really like to focus on a number, and yet for once I feel like Resi 8 is a game where discussion of The Score is actively illustrative. Basically, I want to talk about that EDGE 6. 

I did not enjoy my time with Resident Evil 8 and my initial reaction would be to agree with that 6. My own experience, my own joy, puts the game at around 5 or 6. It’s not completely without its moments, but I’d be lying if I said I had a Good Time. And yet, the moment that 5 or 6 entered my mind, I actively felt a sense of guilt. A 6 is cruel here. There’s clearly been so much attention spent on this game – it stinks of care. From the gorgeously disheveled interiors of the village houses, to the beams of light streaming though the innards of the factory. There’s so much actual love here. Love for Resi, love for horror, love for the cast of the game. It’s inventive and tries new things and crams a whole Cinematic Universe’s worth of horribles into one game. And then I remember what it felt like to play the fucking thing, and I can’t see past a 6.   

There’s a term I used to describe my issues when talking about the game with Tempy. The pacing is too loud. I had the same issue with the recent Tomb Raider games. Lara can’t run and jump for 5 minutes without SOMETHING HAPENING. She can’t jump, she has to stumble and fall and crash against the rocks and slip and then there’s an avalanche and then and then and then... 

The problem with this loud pacing is that, if it doesn’t click, it gets old fast. Uncharted 2 got away with it, as it was paced to perfection, but the games that have followed in its footsteps have stumbled one after another. Resi stumbles here. The game shines in its moments of tension and quiet, with occasional bursts of violence, but for the first few hours it’s trying so hard to wow you that the end result is just insufferable. Ethan is chased and attacked by lycans and bitten by vampires and dragged and trapped and strung up and thrown through the floor (and more, like having your hand cut off in a SURPRISE MOMENT) within the first couple of hours. There’s never any real downtime and while Resi had done this before, it doesn’t land here. 

There’s 2 immediate points of reference. Early in the game there’s a scene reminiscent of the Resi 4 village opening. Now, I’m not fan of Resi 4 overall but I still know that opening fight is an absolute banger. Enemies from everywhere, Leon able to jump through windows, chuck ladders down and escape onto rooftops. The desperation if you climb the clock tower. The constant onslaught. Resi 8 tries the same thing but the area is far more limited. There’s only a tiny area to run in and Ethan is far more ponderous to control than Leon. There’s nothing to play with. You’re not really supposed to fend them off. You’re supposed to get hurt here, but that’s not clear at the time. You can fail by dying inside, but you’re supposed to die (or nearly die) outside. You need to guess what the trigger is so that the Resi 8 team can deliver another LOUD PACING cutscene moment. 

And during these loud pacing moments, your head and point of view is yanked around. This isn’t normally an issue in a lot of games, sure, but it’s horrid in Resi 8. Capcom have worked wonders in giving Ethan a genuine sense of weight – maybe the best sense of first-person weight and presence I’ve experienced outside of VR or, for a non-VR reference, Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay (Condemned: Criminal Origins is another good comparison). But when you have a body and a head that is so heavy, it’s obnoxious when your PoV is constantly tossed about. I know some people get serious motion sickness with this game, and that’s due to a very tight FoV and how often Capcom decide to rip control away from your head. They did the same thing in Resi 7 and I hated it there, but they really dialed it up here. I was so annoyed by it that I was about to just end the game and delete it within the first couple of hours, but thankfully that calms down a bit after you leave the castle and you’re disturbed less often. 

The other point of reference is Mr X and the Nemesis. Mr X was tweaked in the Remake, and that went some way to undermining the Remake of 3. Mr X was now the one to chase you constantly, and Nemesis was the set-piece pursuer. But the effect is the same – the player is constantly shuttled and not allowed to rest for prolonged periods of time. This can work of course. Nemesis was amazing in the OG 3, and Mr X (although divisive) worked well in the Remake of 2. But between those 2 games, and Resi 7 with the Bakers, we are now 4 games in a row where there’s a big person chasing you all the time That’s not 8’s fault, sure – but it’s compounded by the previously mentioned loud pacing. When my head isn’t being yanked around in scripted setpieces, I’m being chased by a dumb (yet large) AI through tight corridors. Frankly, it didn’t excite me or give me a sense of tension – I was just fucking bored of it. 

Did I say one AI? Technically the beginning of the game has you chased by multiple AIs as there’s Lady D plus her daughters, who you need to defeat one by one. The daughters each make up a boss fight, and then you can fight Lady D at the end. 

Resi 8 has quite a few boss fights, and I can tell you two things about them:
1.With one exception, they’re all the same.
2.Each and every one of them is absolute dog shit.

They’re crap. They’re peepeepoopoo. Awful. Tedious. Insipid. Overlong. Overloud. Dreadful, drawn-out, monotonous shit.

None of them are hard, per se, but they’re all big slow monsters in tight rectangular arena, wobbling about while Ethan aims with all the technique and precision of a Hamas foot soldier. Resi has always done bosses like this – big bois in tight arenas – and they were never particular engaging on a mechanical level. They did generally have better feedback, though, and I can forgive a lot since Tyrant in Resi 2 was designed in fucking 1998 with tank controls. 

Lady D’s daughters? Dogshit. Dogshit. Dogshit.
Lady D fight? Bigger dogshit
Angie? Great area, dogshit boss. However, the closest boss fight to not being dogshit.
Moreau? Super fucking dogshit.
Big dude with hammer? Dogshit in an actual sandwich.
The weakspot dudes while climbing up to the propeller? D-d-d-d-o-g-sh-i-t 
Pyramid head Propeller Face? Can you guess? Spoiler: It’s dogshit.
Heisenberg? Actually really cool. Hammer dude version 2? Laser-guided dogshit.
Mother Miranda? Ripped out my heart, and she’s to blame. She gives dogshit a bad name. 

And yet I also love the bosses. Interacting with them in any way was awful, sure, but they were great characters, maybe even better than the Bakers. I grew tired of the Lady D “step on me mummy” shit long before I even played the game, but she was still cool. Truth be told, though, she was actually the weakest of the bunch (besides maybe Mother Miranda who we barely see until the end). Angie, Fish Boi and Bloodborne Nicholas Cage were all far more interesting than her, being unsettling, pitiable and devilishly charismatic in that order. 

There’s been a lot of talk about The Dollhouse from people, saying it’s the highlight of Resi 8 and, honestly, that’s true. The dollhouse is the best Resi has been since 2 (the original) and is also one of the only moments where the game lets you breathe. It’s not always yanking your attention away. It’s not always trying to keep you entertained. And yet, there’s a lot of jumps and noises and bumps and they work – despite there being the least action of any point in the game, it’s actually the scariest part of the game. And then, when it does decide to let rip and try to freak you out, it lands. It lands hard. Why? Because the game earnt it. It built to it. It was Silent Hill 2 tier. And then you escape upstairs and have to do the boss fight. The boss fight isn’t terrible, but it could never live up to that downstairs section, and it made slightly more annoying by some weirdo pseudo-stereoscopic filter that just made me think HOLY EYE-STRAIN BATMAN. Eye-strain while playing hide and seek on a time limit wasn’t super fun, but I’d still rather that than Big Boss in Small Arena. 

It’s a shame. It has some incredible moments. It has some real beauty. Some of the lighting and texture work – especially when there was flame bouncing off of wet stone, was jaw dropping. The weapons felt chunky. The environments were beautifully put together in terms of how they funneled players through them. I actually quite liked the plot. It was dumb as fuck, but it was Resi and unlike some, I actually think they managed to justify the whole werewolves and vampires in a Resi game thing. I’m onboard. Resi 8 has the best cast of heroes, baddies and monsters of any Resi since 2. It also turns into CoD in the end and I really don’t know how I feel about it. 

Resi 8 is one of the most infuriating games I have played in a long time. It’s so good. And I really didn’t enjoy playing it. This isn’t a flawed gem. This isn’t a more than the sum of its parts. It’s a poor game propped up by a couple of moments of inspiration and some genuine all-round artistry. So many things in the game, taken in isolation, are an 8 or 9. And yet, I can’t see past that 6 and, at times, I can’t help but feel that the 6 was a little bit generous.