Resident Evil Village is loaded with atmosphere. If you appreciate an intricate level of detail bordering on excessive in your video games, then this is the title for you, especially if you're well-versed in classic horror tropes. Village has baroque castles with dark secrets, a creepy blockaded Eastern-European town full of terrors, and traditional monsters pulled from fairy tales and tweaked with the series' mutated theme. Seven foot tall vampiress Lady Dimitrescu took the internet by storm, but she's joined by lycans, giant werewolves, blood-sucking witches composed of flies, possessed dolls, and a humongous amphibious catfish that vomits acid. Unlike the last Resident Evil game I played, Village uses a first person perspective, which heightens the horror without taking away the signature gamplay of the series. You'll still have to search rooms for loot and ammo, scrounging what you can while dealing with the occasional puzzle. The shooting feels solid, although the frame of view is too narrow, and Ethan, your doofus protagonist, moves at the pace of a wounded buffalo, which is fine most of the time, except when you're trapped in a cave or narrow rampart and you have to outmaneuver a giant mutated dragon. The story is nigh incomprehensible, especially for someone who didn't play Resident Evil 7. The game opens with Ethan sitting down to a nice dinner with his wife after putting his infant daughter to bed. A bunch of spec-op guys break in, shoot Ethan's wife, and steal his baby. You start following them, only to discover that they were ripped to shreds by a pack of werewolves. Turns out Ethan and family decided to move to the very worst possible place they could have, the titular village which is ruled by Mother Miranda and her monstrous lords. Resident Evil lore has never particularly interested me, yet the interesting juxtaposition of B movie shenanigans with incredible visual artistry won me over rather than pushed me away. This is the kind of game where your player character has a hand sliced off and sticks it back on about a minute later. Still, the Beneviento mansion chapter, with it's adventure game-esque escape room and subsequent nightmare fuel conclusion, scared the shit out of me. I might have giggled every time Ethan walked off a life-ending injury, but I was immersed enough in the game world to start babbling "oh shit oh shit oh shit" when SPOILER a huge mutated baby fetus started rambling after me. The only real complaint I have is that Village has crashed several times randomly. So far, it's my game of the year.
Screenshots for your viewing pleasure:
No comments:
Post a Comment