Episode 152 - The Winters of Our Discontent - Resident Evil: Village

How dare you talk about saving your podcast when you’ve murdered
mine? Welcome back to the podcast, and to our delightfully themed
Spooktember in July. We’re concluding our first set of games with
Resident Evil: Village, currently the latest main series,
non-remake Resident Evil game, and one that received a lot of hype
prior to release thanks to a marketing strategy that involved a
nine foot tall vampire lady. One of the first things you might
notice in the game itself is how it relates to other games in the
series. Specifically, RE8 features the same protagonist, Ethan
Winters, as RE7, a game that was making obvious strides to return
to the series’ survival horror roots, which had largely been
supplanted by a more action-heavy approach since RE4. Now, in
Village, it seems like Capcom wanted to mesh the two and the
inspiration taken from RE4 is pretty obvious with the game
containing a merchant who can upgrade your weapons, and a more
dynamic combat system with enemies who are faster and more
threatening than those in the previous title. While this persists
across most of the game, several quieter moments break up the
action (sometimes becoming the best parts of the game themselves),
but the two halves of the design philosophy never really meet in
the middle and it ends up feeling more episodic than a real blend.
That isn’t to say the game is bad, it’s actually quite good, but it
does sit in an awkward place in the series. Unless something this
game does is just really your “thing” it’s hard to recommend if you
haven’t played some of the games it is directly referencing in its
design. We’re going to be talking about the design of each of the
levels and how they follow a certain structure and brisk pace, we
talk about the inclusion of the merchant and an economy in the game
and how that effects how you play it compared to other RE titles,
and we discuss the nuances of the relationship between the “Big
Bad” and the “Small Bads”. Thank you for joining us again this
week! The Resident Evil cycle of the month is now over, so let us
know what you think. How do you feel RE8 stacks up against other
games in the series, or just other horror games in general? I
personally like that there is a high-profile triple-A horror
franchise that is willing to pour money into doing weird stuff like
this on occasion, but game development of this scale always comes
with some baggage. Continue the discussion over on our Discord
server or in the comment section. Next time, we’re moving into the
“Ghost” phase of Spooktember in July and talking about Ghostwire:
Tokyo, so we hope you’ll join us then, even if it is statistically
unlikely you played the game.