Does Capcom even GET Resident Evil? Do I?

**Spoilers for Resident Evil VII: Biohazard & Resident Evil VIII: Village**

First off, let me say that I love the Resident Evil series. Well…, most of it. It’s been a constant presence in my games library since I first discovered Resident Evil 2 on the Playstation 1 and I’ve often returned to the older entries every few years or so. And I pounced on the remakes of RE 2 and RE 3 and I do hope there are more on the way. It’s one of my favorite game franchises. But it frustrates the hell out of me.

To set the stage for what I mean, I’ll start with a brief discussion of Resident Evil 6. There’s simply no way around it: RE6 is garbage. This fact is made worse by the fact that this was a big budget, AAA title. On paper, there are many elements that seem like they should be indicative of something at least pretty good. This chapter brought back series regular Chris Redfield as well fan favorite Leon Kennedy. The story featured four separate but intermixing campaigns, which means it was a lengthy entry for an action/survival horror game, and also brought back a key and much loved mechanic from Resident Evil 2. Visually, it was pretty impressive at the time. These single elements are all positive, but the finished game is a complete mess.

The game before it, Resident Evil 5, was already divisive in that it almost completely abandoned the series’ survival horror roots in favor of gun-toting action. Resident Evil is not alone in veering off course this way (looking at you, Dead Space) but RE 5 definitely felt very different than the scarier early entries and RE 6 continued this trajectory. As well, RE 6 also took the dumbest idea from its predecessor—2 player co-op—and really ran it into the ground. On its own, there’s nothing wrong with 2 player co-op. However, it’s something that completely breaks the tension in a horror game. There may yet emerge a horror game that can make this gameplay mechanic work but it hasn’t appeared yet and RE 5 and RE 6 provide strong reasoning for avoiding it. The earlier Resident Evil games felt distinctly claustrophobic. Even the convoluted control scheme, which emerged because of the fixed perspective required of pre-rendered backgrounds, fed into this feeling. It was hard to move around and evade enemies, which made encountering them scarier. 2 player co-op completely removes this tension and instead replaces it with controller-throwing frustration, especially if you’re stuck playing with an AI companion. 

And then there’s the story. Hoo boy. Let’s just keep it simple: it’s bad. Now, to be fair, Resident Evil has never had a very sophisticated story. A zombie virus unleashed by a greedy and unhinged pharmaceutical corporation is pure B-movie schlock but RE 6 definitely jumped the shark, landed in a helicopter, and then turned around and shot the shark in the face.

So considering that Capcom missed the mark on virtually every target, I find myself asking: Does Capcom even understand what players liked about the previous Resident Evil games? There was some renewed hope when Capcom eventually came out with Resident Evil VII, which marked a hard reset for the series. It seemed that they had understood what made RE 6 bad and they were committed to returning to the scarier flavour of the older games. The setting was scaled down to a (mostly) single location of the Baker homestead in Lousiana. The shift to a first-person perspective brought back the claustrophobia of the earlier games, but in a new way. The perspective also allowed for some different approaches to storytelling and there are more hallucinatory moments and what seems at first to be the ghost of a little girl, branching out significantly from the tired-out zombies. There are some minor issues, which I’ll get to later, but for the most part RE VII was a hard-fought victory and a promising course correction for the series. So it is with considerable disappointment that I noticed a lot of the same mistakes from RE 5 and RE 6 creeping their way back into Resident Evil Village. 

In the first game, the opening premise is exploring a creepy and daunting mansion that is filled with zombies and other horrible beasties. The reveal of the greedy multinational corporation behind it all and the secret experimental laboratory under the mansion are something of a twist. RE 2 is set in another gothic building, a former art gallery turned into the Raccoon City police precinct but then it works its way back around to the secret underground lab. And here’s where I think there’s evidence that perhaps Capcom misunderstands what the fans enjoy. At this point, 8 main entries in and several offshoots, each Resident Evil checks certain boxes over and over again. They all have some sort of secret lab. But these are always the weakest parts of every Resident Evil game. Over time, it would seem that Capcom has come to believe that RE fans play in order to get to the secret lab, rather than being drawn in by the creepy, atmospheric opening environments. It’s time to stop with the secret labs. It is getting more and more frustrating to see initial environments with some novelty and freshness, only for the last few hours to once again become a run through shiny corridors and alarm sirens shuttling you along toward the final boss. Resident Evil Village has a slight twist on this with Heisenberg’s factory but it is essentially the same idea: the factory is the secret laboratory and we eventually end up with a giant explosion that obliterates everything in the vicinity. 

But more than this, were Village repeats the biggest misstep of the previous entries is in pretty much abandoning horror altogether. There are certainly horror tropes: there’s a spooky castle, mad scientists, vampires and werewolves (I was at least relieved that Village did not devolve into a full-on vampires vs. werewolves story, but they certainly don’t get bonus points for replacing zombies with the next-most tired horror monsters). But nothing about Village is scary. It’s even very light on jump scares. The atmosphere in the opening hour is promising, as Ethan awakes on the outskirts of the village in the middle of the  night, flashlight in hand. But this is soon abandoned for onslaughts of mindless enemies to be dispatched with copious firepower. Even the normal survival horror edge of scarce resources is abandoned in favour of making sure players are always well-equipped to fend off danger. This may all be part of a mindset discussed by one of Capcom’s developers where he mentions that gamers found RE VII too scary. Which gamers are these? You mean the ones who flocked to the franchise’s revival in RE VII, were elated by the return to horror, and made the game a runaway hit? THOSE gamers found it too scary? I doubt it. Someone in marketing, going off some inane blather of what else is popular and making money, said it’s too scary for mass appeal and so Capcom dumbed it down to appeal to a bigger audience. It seems to have worked, as far as the bottom line goes. RE Village is a huge hit. But it ain’t scary. And you’d think that would be important to one of the biggest pillars in the horror genre.

Building off this idea of marketers and corporate committees making design decisions, RE Village is also walking a very thin tightrope of paying homage to its influences and just plain ripping off other popular games. This was a problem in RE VII as well. The first-person perspective was an obvious rip-off of P.T., the playable trailer for the now-cancelled Silent Hills. But since Silent Hills was never made, and the first-person perspective worked so well, there’s nothing really underhanded about Capcom using it in Resident Evil. It’s just very clear where they got the idea. RE VII is also set in Louisiana, fresh off the heels of other recent and successful horror media set in the region (True Detective, American Horror Story: Coven) and borrows pretty heavily from the Saw films for a large section of the game. There is even a clown mannequin that is basically a cross between the Jigsaw puppet and Pennywise. But none of these were overwhelming.

In Village, however, the connections are far more obvious and even less has been done to adapt these influential ideas to the Resident Evil universe. I’ve already mentioned that Village features both werewolves and vampires, a bizarre departure for a zombie-focused series. The game features 4 main bosses, or Lords, which feels an awful lot like Castlevania: Lords of Shadow. It’s one of Village’s most video gamey choices. And while the character named Heisenberg really doesn’t share anything in common with Walter White as played by Bryan Cranston, the name is simply too loaded to avoid such comparison and, as such, Village suffers from being held up against Breaking Bad. As well, Village received incredible buzz just before launch when they first revealed Lady Dimitrescu. Fans adored this new villain. But the brevity of her part in the game, along with the goofiness of the other lords suggests to me that Lady Dimitrescu was a fluke: Capcom had no idea she would resonate so thoroughly with fans and its unclear if they even understand why she is such a fan favourite. 

But by far the most standout and obvious influence for Resident Evil Village is Bloodborne. While the feral townsfolk are at least a nice departure away from zombies, the beastified inhabitants (especially the larger, hammer wielding mini-bosses) share a striking resemblance to the inhabitants of Yharnam. And though it was eventually pulled (thankfully) concept art released by Capcom showed they even had plans to insert Ada Wong in an outfit that was, in every detail, a copy of Eileen the Crow from Bloodborne. The environments also share many common qualities with Bloodborne: gothic castles, dilapidated wooden houses and structures, mysteriously arcane sculptures and passageways. The grave of Claudia Beneviento even features tiny gravestones all cluttered atop each other, which is lifted directly from Bloodborne’s Forbidden Woods. Now Bloodborne is fantastic game to be inspired by, but Capcom simply didn’t seem to try very hard to integrate any of their inspirations into Resident Evil Village; they just lifted things they liked and put them in the game. And this would seem to coalesce well with a frequent and warranted criticism that the elements that connect Village to the overall Resident Evil arc feel like after thoughts and are shoe horned in. Even Chris Redfield’s appearance has no real bearing at all and the story would have been largely the same without him. This has happened before: the early concept designs for Resident Evil 4 were promising, but felt like something distinct and separate from Resident Evil. Those designs would eventually morph into Devil May Cry and both that game and the actual Resident Evil 4 both benefitted from recognizing what did and didn’t belong in the more established series. If only Capcom had made a similar decision with Resident Evill Village. It’s undeniably a fun game. I’ve just finished my second playthrough. But it definitely feels like something separate from Resident Evil. And the biggest thing I used to love about the series, the horror, just isn’t a priority anymore. But Village is a huge hit and so, Capcom is likely to use a lot of the same elements in future games. This isn’t to say that horror fans should abandon the series, but perhaps it’s time to adjust expectations.