Resident Evil Village test: a countryside walk gone wrong

resident evil has already had several lives. Canonical episodes cherished then shunned by critics, gigantic or relative commercial successes and spin-offs more or less relevant have marked the 25 years of existence of the Capcom franchise, which in 2020 exceeded 100 million copies sold.

If the Japanese publisher started from scratch or almost with Resident Evil 7 - the first canonical episode in first person view - the avowed objective of the new opus is to consolidate these bases while making the bridge with the consequent heritage of the series: a major challenge that Resident evil village narrowly succeeds.

Resident Evil Village test: a countryside walk gone wrong See PriceRead ConclusionResident Evil Village

The Village, successful and coherent
Some notable sequences
Chiseled general atmosphere
Excavated decors, varied environments

Some off-topic sequences
Lack of playful ambition of some dungeons
Disappointing boss fights
Scenario tied up in a hurry

Hand game, villain game!

After surviving the “warm” welcome of the Baker family in Louisiana, Ethan Winters and his wife Mia fled to Europe to try to rebuild themselves and raise their newborn baby Rosemary. . Two years after the events of Resident Evil 7, the scars are still gaping, and here Ethan is forced to leave once again in search of answers: his daughter has been kidnapped, his wife riddled with bullets and he has been abandoned on the outskirts of a village. mysterious, following a car accident. Overlooked by an imposing castle, the dilapidated hamlet seems to be prey to this strange evil of which the series has the secret.

After viruses and parasites, it is now a fungus that plagues the populace. Already at work in RE7, the Mutamycete this time transforms humans into lycans and other critters with more or less hairiness. Ethan will quickly make the acquaintance of the local notables, a band of merry men with amazing powers, managed by a dark priestess, Mother Miranda. We no longer need to introduce Lady Dimitrescu, a three-meter Fellinian matron, as frightening as she is seductive, who already feeds many memes; Heisenberg has obviously given up on meth to focus on telekinesis of metal objects; the livid Bona Beneviento seems less animated than the creepy doll that accompanies it, and the monstrous Moreau is the ugly duckling of this new ramshackle “family” that will have to be faced.

Like its predecessor, RE8 goes to great lengths to introduce its antagonists, and even its NPCs in general: the elusive obese merchant, the crazy witch and her mystical incantations, or the shaggy giant and his huge hammer borrowed from Soul's Astaroth. Calibur complete a colorful cast that we will come across regularly throughout the adventure. An emphasis that contrasts greatly with the stakes of this new opus: between the esoteric rites, the internal conflicts and the interventions under testosterone of the inevitable Chris Redfield, Village does not really take the series on new narrative paths.

The plot, generally very agreed, ends in an implausible way, Capcom nonchalantly throwing in the face of the players the not very subtle connections of this episode with the other narrative arcs of the license. The fungal agent, Umbrella, Ethan, Louisiana: we would have appreciated a little more subtle intricacies of all the issues of Resident Evil, and above all a less abrupt way than these few written notes, thrown around in bulk, that we consult quickly before the final confrontation.

If Capcom has never been known for the subtlety of its storytelling and its ambition in the field, Village is no exception to this sad rule.

RE7 + RE4 = RE8 ?

Resident Evil 7 was above all a family story; the concept is taken up here but extended to the whole of a town, giving Capcom plenty of time to explore the mechanisms of the herd instinct and to ventilate the play area a little, deliciously suffocating and tight in the previous part.

A clever mix of action, reflection and horror, Resident Evil Village benefits from a more ambitious and balanced gameplay formula than its predecessor. The locations are more plentiful and varied, and the action overall much better incorporated into the exploration. After his claustrophobic wanderings in Louisiana, Ethan therefore benefits this time from a more ample and open terrain: the village, in which we will return regularly over the course of the game, serves as a central hub connecting the different environments.

The title gains a little in rhythm what it loses in pressure, the vice slackening regularly to allow the player to quietly explore the surroundings in search of keys, junk to spare, additional ammunition or animals to hunt. Without being gigantic, the village benefits from a remarkable care taken in its composition, and we end up appropriating with pleasure this central play space which conceals shortcuts, hidden objects and useless, therefore essential elements of lore.

This is a little less the case with the various dungeons, whose often cramped construction and fairly short visit duration stifle any playful ambition in the bud. The Dimitrescu castle is symptomatic: this gloomy promontory splendor, which we dreamed of as a Spencer mansion in the first Resident Evil of the name, finally turns out to be too corseted to touch the charisma and generosity of its prestigious model.

Worse, this mania for reducing the playing space to a trickle greatly affects the interest of the fights, against the classic brood as against the bosses: Lady Dimitrescu has nothing of the tenacity of Mr. X or the ferocity of the Nemesis, since it is enough to go around a table or to take refuge with the merchant to avoid his sluggish offensives.

Slow and often overwhelmed by the enemy presence, Ethan once again has a substantial arsenal to overcome the various enemies that come his way. A little dexterity is then enough to get out of most situations without a hitch, while a few proximity mines or explosive grenades will sometimes help to get out of a bad situation. The possibility of countering the enemy, used by chance two or three times at most during the adventure, turns out to be more approximate: the firepower is a much more reliable recourse than the strange timing of this defensive maneuver, more gimmicky than something else in the end.

Apart from a few interesting action sequences to play, in the village or the fortress for example, the fights of RE8 therefore offer nothing very exceptional, especially since the ammunition, which can be manufactured at leisure at the help of the resources gleaned from the decorations or from the enemies, never really run out.

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Magnificent but relatively classic, the castle lacks a bit of ambition in its construction

There remain a few strong sequences, remarkably staged, such as the discovery of the factory, the game of hide and seek or the fortress. Pivotal moments where the hybrid formula, summoning both the tension of Resident Evil 7 and the uninhibited exuberance of Resident Evil 4, takes on its full meaning. If we are often brought back to reality by a somewhat failed boss scene or a terrible dungeon (the mill, a purge), the few horrific flights of Resident Evil 8 alone justify the discovery of the game for fans of series.

And there was light

The production is also a determining factor in our appreciation of the game. The elaborate interior decorations testify to a fascinating naturalism of despair: crumpled tablecloths, bowls hastily abandoned on the fire, carpets gorged with viscous organic matter and other candles that are consumed in the background, dot the dilapidated huts and greatly lend credibility to this putrid hamlet, feeding our morbid fascination for deliciously glaucous screenshots. The exteriors are not left out, Village taking advantage of the FPS view to multiply the magnificent panoramas, the horrific visual happenings and the mysterious reliefs.

The bodies, heads of animals or pieces of dolls hanging from all the trees, the huge stone statues that litter the squares, the thick fog and even a disturbing ray of sunshine: Capcom has done a tremendous job on the sets of its title , and each new environment is an opportunity to admire his technical and artistic mastery. The faces are to die for, and while the enemy animations are nothing original for the series and a few collision issues punctuate the progression a bit, Resident Evil 8 is a visual marvel at all times.

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Each setting is an opportunity to admire the incredible technical and artistic work of Capcom

Not necessarily at the forefront on the finesse of the textures or the interactions with the decor - limited here to the strict minimum - the RE:Engine makes up for it on the lights. The natural and artificial sources perfectly flood each decor with their worrying orange or greyish hue, the god rays are always ideally placed and it is a real pleasure to discover each light composition in the first person. Particles, smoke effects and other reflective surfaces benefit superbly from this amazing lighting work, which spearheads the chiseled atmosphere that emerges from each environment.

A royal PC version, or almost...

On PC, Resident Evil Village benefits from many graphic customization options allowing you to find a viable compromise according to your screen and the power of your machine. The very correct optimization of the whole will allow many to enjoy the game in good conditions: our comfortable test configuration (Ryzen 5600X, RTX 2080 Super, 32 GB of Ram, Corsair MP600) allowed us to play in 2K at 144 constant frames per second, pushing almost all the parameters to the maximum (except "image quality", too demanding at high level for the material available in stock at the moment) while benefiting from particularly short loading times.

Once Ray Tracing is activated (no DLSS in Resident Evil Village), we generally stay between 85 and 110 fps depending on the location. We did not find the gain significant enough to play the entire adventure by activating this mode: the rendering of the lighting remains masterful in normal mode. For the rest, the dubious ergonomics of the game on PC reminds us that the series was born on console: the mapping of the keys in the menus is abstruse, the management of the calamitous wheel and certain controls are impossible to modify (how to change the type of pomegranate?). A simple Alt-Tab sometimes forced us to restart the game, which suddenly ran at 30 frames per second in an unexplained way.

The keyboard / mouse combo remains radical in first-person view: it greatly facilitates combat by avoiding scattering its ammunition in nature with each lycan sway. We do without the haptic feedback and adaptive triggers of the Dual Sense, and therefore a little immersion, but the possibility of turning around quickly without having to press a button remains a largely appreciable comfort.

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Left: RT OFF, high graphics settings / Right: RT ON, high graphics settings

The legal duration, but no more

An atmospheric marvel, awe-inspiring visual spectacle, clumsy narrative medley, and an unequal playful cocktail, Resident Evil Village isn't exactly a model for lifespan. If we add our few failures to the 8 hours 47 minutes displayed after the end credits, we arrive just at the level of the previous part and quite far from the consequent Resident Evil 4.

Much more replayable than RE7 with its few more or less secret sides to flush out by exploring the environments thoroughly, its many challenges to take up for the completionists and its new weapons to unlock for fun, we can easily spend around twenty hours on the game before completely playing it. We still strongly recommend that survival enthusiasts start directly on difficult, in order to densify the somewhat static clashes in normal given the firepower available.

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Ten hours of play maximum in normal, and some significant extras

The "Mercenary" mode and its four levels, available in two versions, offers a nice icing on the cake while waiting for Resident Evil RE: verse, the free multiplayer stand-alone promised by Capcom for this summer as a birthday present ( poisoned?) for the 25 years of his license.

Not sure that the few extra hours, gorging on special powers by investigating headshots, are enough to satisfy absolute fans of survival games, even if Resident Evil 8 is in line with games of the genre in terms of duration of life.

Resident Evil Village: the opinion of Clubic

Less radical than Resident Evil 7, but also better balanced and more generous, Resident Evil Village is a good sequel which, without transcending them, manages to reconcile different legacies of the series. Carried by its magnificently sinister atmosphere, its few strong sequences and its powerful decorum, Capcom's game most often manages to make people forget its playful and narrative pitfalls, even if we would have liked a little more ambition in the construction of the spaces of more inventive and surprising gameplay and boss battles.

Resident Evil continues its transformation and ensures its rear by including (sometimes awkwardly) its new optics in its standardized guns. Without being a huge slap in the face, Village is a solid episode, interesting in more ways than one, which restores the confidence of fans a little more. Long live the sequel.

Resident evil village

Thanks to its fantastic atmosphere and some strong sequences, Resident Evil Village is a solid sequel that gives Capcom's new approach to its license a little more credibility.