Narrative progression is not one of the strengths of video games. With some exceptions, which for heaven’s sake there are, we go from zero to one hundred in a few sequences. It also happens in Resident Evil Village, the last chapter of one of the most important and well-known horror sagas of the Japanese school that began in the “distant” 1996. The protagonist, Ethan, is trying to build a life with his family after going through a bad adventure (Resident Evil 7) which left deep marks on him and on his wife. But something happens and the protagonist finds himself again in a nightmare forced to face a race of monsters while trying to get his kidnapped daughter back. Thus begins, immediately, a gallery of horrors in which Ethan is not doing badly at all, after having succumbed to some signs of amazement and having lost two fingers due to a bite.
The setting, a village lost in the Transylvanian valleys which owes so much to the various cinematographic representations of Bram Stoker’s gothic imaginary, is a micro universe in which one flees, fights, solves puzzles, trades, hunts, above all one kills and we witness the death of the defenseless inhabitants at the hands of a demonic sect that comes out in waves from the spire castle that dominates the valley. The vein is that of Resident Evil 4, perhaps one of the best chapters of this epic signed by Capcom which over the years has sold over 100 million copies in about 27 different episodes. It was 2005 and in that game the zombies were replaced by a sect of possessed in a remote area of Spain. Shinji Mikami, author also and above all of the first Resident Evil, thus managed to give a new face to the series.
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Sixteen years later, that face again has very little. Ethan, yet another “hero of a thousand faces” to quote the essayist and historian of religions Joseph Campbell, crosses hell finding on his way evil and grotesque characters, gang leaders of different races of mutants who however respond to the orders of a single entity, and curious creatures like the old shaman who occasionally arrives between a slaughter and the other to give some indication of nature and the logic that reigns in the village.
Morimasa Sato, the “director” of Resident Evil Village, it seems he was also inspired by the Adams Family and the Great Depression. The result is a genre videogame, with discreet graphics, with a fast pace and mechanics that are not always impeccable. There is nothing really new, but it flows and entertains. So dark and bloodthirsty from the start that it turned into a sort of fairground horror gallery in a contemporary version for consoles. It is not necessarily a defect, it depends on the palate of the player.
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