Resident Evil Village leaves you begging for more.

It's June 2020 and I'm watching the Sony internet totally-not E3 event with a couple of friends. One of the best parts of doing these watch-a-longs is playing into the marketing machine and guessing what a game could be before we see a title. A snowy village. Werewolves. A familiar voice. It was impossible to place what Resident Evil Village was going to be before we saw the Capcom logo. Even afterwards, I remember being left with this feeling of "what the fuck was that?" before I ever felt any sort of fangirl naive excitement. I'm not sure if Capcom likes to leave people confused, but I know that their directors love to leave you wanting more.

Resident Evil has had its ups and its downs. I was alive for most Resident Evil as a franchise, but I wasn't really a human being with thoughts and words until Resident Evil 4. I must've been 8 years old when I first got my eyes on it. My parents didn't really care too much about age ratings or warnings, and so I got to spend most days after school watching my stepdad blast through Ganados in Definitely-Not-Spain. It was really love at first sight. Leon was such a heart throb, and the Saturday Morning Cartoon dialogue and story combined with an ultraviolent romp through a gothic countryside just had me hooked. When I finally had the guts to play it, I almost couldn't handle how stressful it was. Every level had my anxious neurons firing at full speed. Sometimes my hands would actually SHAKE in fear. RE4 was hard to quit though, and over the years it's cemented itself as my favorite Resident Evil game.

What does this have to do with RE:Village? A lot, actually. But before I get to that, I need to briefly talk about RE7. See, I had already been a pretty big fan of Resident Evil moving forward from RE4. As far as I'm concerned, there are almost two different types of Resident Evil. There's the Spencer Mansion, lit dimly by candles as a storm rages outside, as lightning strikes and illuminates the dank dark hallway you're slowly trudging down. Was that a shadow? Or something far more sinister? It's Lisa Trevor, it's the itchy tasty note. It's also GIANT SHARKS, and CONSPIRACY THEORIES, and UNDERGROUND LABS, and HOMOEROTIC KNIFE FIGHTS, and OH MY GOD, WHY DOES CHRIS REDFIELD LOOK LIKE THAT?

Resident Evil is a lot of things, but it's also mostly just two things. And really those two things come together to form a great one thing. That one thing is camp. Resident Evil is so fucking campy. It's like the best of B-horror movies from the 60s seen through the lens of a nation that brought us Kamen Rider and Kaiju movies and ultraviolent torture porn. It's the grotesque and the childish combined to form a wonderfully campy rollercoaster ride.

RE7 is the first in a wave of new Resident Evil. After the tremendous disaster that was Resident Evil 6 said goodbye to the anime influenced action flick cover shooter, Resident Evil 7 said hello to the run-and-hide, first person Amnesia-clones. People were pretty worried by such a massive stylistic change, but I think Capcom was in sort of a great spot after RE6, because RE6 was like going on a reunion tour for that band you really liked when you were 14, like liked so much that you claim they "saved your life", and then they break up and you feel like you lost a loved one, but then years later they get back together, so you buy a ticket and you're so excited to see them play live, and they play all the songs that you loved, but they play em really bad and its mostly because everyone on stage is drunk and old, and you're older now, and it's just, it's just really weird. So you kind of sadly waddle to the merch table and you think about buying a t-shirt, but then you realize the 35 bucks that you'd be spending on just one t-shirt would probably be better spent on a bottle of liquor to just forget the whole mess, and then the car ride home is just sad and weird because you start to think "well maybe they were always that bad, and I was just young, and I liked bad things? or maybe I'm older and I-" and so on and so on, you get the picture. Basically, RE6 was great for Capcom and Resident Evil fans because it forced everyone to want something new. For the most part, RE7 exceeded expectations. It was bound to happen! It had a really weak second half, but most Resident Evil games do, right? So it was what it was. I don't really care for RE7, but I was really surprised at just how sort of well it played those familiar melodies. A giant, creepy house. Puzzles galore! Backtracking! Unlocking things! Looking for clues!

What RE7 really did well for me though, was in recognizing the tropes of genre and the medium of video games. With each member of the Baker family, RE7's experience was about forcing the player through the greatest hits of the horror genre. Take the first section, with Mia. Playing up the possession imagery was weird for Resident Evil! Resident Evil was never about ghosts. And yet it slotted into itself so seamlessly and with such confidence! Then you're treated to Papa Baker and his weird Evil Dead, Texas Chainsaw Massacre callbacks? I mean, could anyone have called that? It was so -NOT- Resident Evil... and yet it was totally Resident Evil! Resident Evil has always been a love letter to the horror genre! The spooky mansion, the gothic interior design, the grand open foyer of the Spencer Mansion, all of it is evocative of classic genre tropes and tools and the confidence with which Resident Evil delivers this to the player has -always- been its strongest point.

So what happens when Resident Evil writes a love letter to itself? There are two ways to really go about it. You either get RE6, which misses the mark completely thanks to its hyperfixation on branding, or you get Resident Evil Village.

It's no secret to anyone familiar with the Resident Evil franchise that RE4 is the golden child of the series. REmake MIGHT be better, but 4 has always been the shining standard with which to judge the rest of the franchise on. It was a groundbreaking game that, if I wanted to get into it, could merit its own essay and I refuse to write about RE4 right now, because I want to talk about Resident Evil Village. But it feels almost impossible to talk about Resident Evil Village without talking about Resident Evil the FRANCHISE. Because Resident Evil Village is a love letter to everything this franchise has ever stood for, and in doing so, its callbacks and its homages to RE4 are done not out of insecurity on its own part, but of love and reverence for the series it belongs to. It's with that confidence, that sheer swagger that Resident Evil Village manages to deliver the best horror experience in AAA gaming since Amnesia the Dark Descent, an experience that improves tenfold on all of the groundwork that RE7 established as to what the franchise was going to be moving forward, and doubles down on a unique vision for the franchise and for Capcom moving forward.

I simply was not prepared to love Resident Evil Village as much as I did. In fact, for the first hour and the weeks leading up to the game's release, I was prepared to be disappointed. 7 was not my Resident Evil. I didn't hate it, but it's not what I went to the franchise for at all. It had everything, it did everything, and I respect it, but I've never felt like replaying it. It exceeded my expectations, but my expectations were already fairly low. Resident Evil Village absolutely blew me away. I was not expecting to be smiling ear-to-ear for the 15 hours I spent with this game, I was not expecting to finish my playthrough and feel legitimately sad that there wasn't more to come. I was not expecting to boot it up on hardcore immediately after and to discuss Village of Shadows (RE8's insanely difficult post-game unlock mode) techniques with my friends.

Resident Evil Village plays the notes you know so well as a Resident Evil fan but it plays them like a true artist does. RE6 is the Dream Theater of Resident Evil games. All flash, no substance. RE:Village is the Bjork of Resident Evil games. Each note hits different. From the LOUD and ON THE NOSE OH MY GOD I GET IT, IT'S AN RE4 REFERENCE to the 12 hour revelation that was the game's titular village and what it represented from a design philosophy, Resident Evil Village is a masterwork. Every zone offers something so fresh to the series and yet so familiar. It operates on a wealth of history to draw from, while never afraid to do something bigger, do something weird. It's pacing is immaculate, it knows just when the player is getting comfortable and it pulls the rug out from under you as soon as it is. You kids wanted RE4 with a fixed third act? BUDDY HERE IT IS.

RE4 was groundbreaking for video games. It fixed third person shooters. Gears of War would take RE4 and improve upon it to the point that every AAA cinematic experience that isn't a David Cage or Hideo Kojima production has played the exact same way. Will Village be as groundbreaking in that department as 4? No. It's familiar. It's fine. Where Village shines however, is everywhere else. The presentation, the level design, the gunplay, the enemy design, the pacing, the setting, the characters, the performances, the narrative. It's a new high that the series hasn't seen since 2004. Resident Evil Village is Resident Evil perfected.