Resident Evil Village Is Its Own Beast
The influences of the newest Resident Evil
Resident Evil is a franchise that has had its fair share of struggles. These struggles are often about identity. Granted, you don’t exist as a gaming franchise for 25 years without the occasional hiccup. When the series kicked off in 1996, it was a new kind of horror game. Slow-paced survival horror set in a secret-filled mansion. You had weapons, but they felt almost secondary. The roots had grown. The second game was set in a police station. The third broadened it’s scope to parts of Raccoon City. The fourth changed everything for the franchise, and set the tone for the next couple of spin-offs and direct sequels.
Unfortunately, Resident Evil 5 and 6 were the first major hiccups. They’d gotten too big, too high on their own supply. 6 has a 60 on Metacritic. 5 technically fared better at 69, but is still considered one of the worst in the series.
With the release of Resident Evil 7: Biohazard, we had a return to quality with a shift in form. For starters, the game was played in first person. The zombies were gone and replaced with the most terrifying family in gaming history. Resident Evil 7 had examined the indie horror games that had sky-rocketed in popularity and had smartly plucked some winning parts. Games like Amnesia: The Dark Descent did not have boulder punching or back-flipping super villains. They were scary, which Resident Evil had left behind long ago.
Resident Evil 7: Biohazard is my favorite game in the franchise. It ticked a lot of boxes for me and genuinely terrified me. As much as I liked the remake of RE 2, Biohazard captured horror in a way that other entries haven’t in the past.
A New Formula
Resident Evil Village is very special. It takes RE7 and the first four titles in the franchise and mashes them together into a digital amalgamation that would make Umbrella proud.
As a direct sequel to RE7, you see those elements first. We have the startling 1st person violence. We have the distinct areas and the atmosphere. We also have my favorite element: the clear inspiration from horror history.
RE7 rocks because of the way it takes our expectations and uses them in fascinating ways. Other than comic fans, horror fans have to be one of the most genre literate people around. Fans know the horror genre. They know it’s influences, pillars, and its bloody tropes. So when something like RE7 comes along, we immediately notice all the elements that Capcom gave us. Texas Chainsaw Massacre. The Fly. The Saw. Even PT — Hideo Kojima’s long dead Silent Hills demo — is seen in the game through both the grimy hallways and your wife’s Lisa-like transformation.
The fact that Village finds a new set of tropes to explore with is what makes it so fun to play. I would say Gothic Horror would be the first and clear trope-pull, but we may have to move a little further to the Universal Monster pictures from the 1930s and 1940s. These films introduced a wider audience to Dracula, Frankenstein’s Creature, The Wolfman, The Creature from the Black Lagoon, and various other black and white terrors. This series of films gave us monster archetypes and instituted many of the tropes we take as canon nearly a century later.
If RE7 is grimy horror, than Village is Universal classic. Of course, I won’t say that these games don’t have their own spin on these ideas. And I also won’t say that previous games in the RE franchise didn’t use famous cinema to inform them. It’s George Romero everywhere in those games. But that’s just the start. I would actually argue that Resident Evil’s own unique flavor is its defining and strongest quality. The games that I mentioned above took our expectations and familiarity with these films and found innovative scares along the way.
The Duke is Calling
I’m about halfway through Resident Evil Village. I’m on the third section of the game, and I’m having a fantastic time. I see the inspiration, but I know that Resident Evil Village is very much it’s own beast. I’ve fought many kinds of monsters and ran through a lot of ammo. I’m excited to see what other monsters await me as I tour this terrifying village.
