Chilling rustle in the bushes: impressions from the demo Resident Evil Village

Rustling grass

The episode for the demo is taken somewhere from the beginning of the game: the main character Ethan Winters has already ended up in an unnamed village and has managed to face its horrors, but has not yet acquired a rich arsenal and useful things. He also knows almost nothing about the settlement, except that his kidnapped daughter is hiding somewhere here. The locals are almost invisible, but something unkind is clearly lurking in the tall grass.

This is how the player is greeted by the first Village demo dedicated to the village. Ethan did not come here empty-handed: he already has a pistol with a spare clip and a knife in his inventory, making him feel a little safer. The key, of course, is “a little”: skirmishes with monsters, even on normal difficulty, are unlikely to be painless, and a well-aimed headshot is not a panacea. As a result, with opponents (most often we are talking about werewolves) it is much easier not to fight, but to run away, shooting at the legs so that they fall behind.

On PS5, DualSense chips are actively used: when firing a pistol, for example, you can feel the resistance of the trigger, and during battles through a gamepad you can feel where the danger comes from. But the work done with the sound is much more important: various rustles, clinking of chains, crackling of branches under your feet and other little things here sound as if you were physically in a damned village. The picture is complemented by the confused breathing of the hero (who, by the way, learned to speak after the previous game). The developers did not lie: Tempest 3D audio technology, one of the PS5’s killer features, is really great for horror and creates suspense by the simplest means. As soon as you enter the tall grass with a reduced visibility zone and hear rustles somewhere nearby, you immediately automatically tense up, not even knowing if there is really a danger.

Beam in the eye

Like Maiden, Village provides an opportunity to assess the level of graphics. And again, the result is ambiguous: on the one hand, individual details are striking in their realism and elaboration, and the facial animation of some characters seems to be reaching a new level. On the other hand, low quality textures and frank joints on the models have not gone anywhere. Alongside the Capcom and RE Engine logos, the logo of Quixel Megascans, the company responsible for high-quality scanning of real-world objects, is proudly displayed. Indeed, individual models look photorealistic – and the weirder a low-poly brew looks in a highly detailed pan.

The same problem was in the first demo: there walls with the smallest potholes in the stones were adjacent to gutted corpses with extremely low detail and “angular” guts. Most likely, not everyone will pay attention to this, but it is still unpleasant to see such a neighborhood. Especially on a new generation of consoles that seemingly aims to showcase new heights in terms of graphics. What cannot be taken away from this is the download speed. For the experiment, I installed the demo on PS4 and PS5: in the first case, the level loading took almost a minute, in the second – a little longer than a second.

Everyday life of the damned village

From a plot point of view, the Village sheds some light on the events: Ethan meets the locals, whose village suddenly becomes a dangerous place full of monsters. From the first trailers with vampires and werewolves, many thought that the episode about the virus would take a turn towards mysticism. But judging by the demo, this is not worth worrying about – attentive players can notice important details about the appearance of the monsters. Although the developers tried to do without spoilers, some little things still allow us to draw conclusions about the global plot of the game. Another question is how true they will remain in the final version. No, the scenes are unlikely to be changed, but their meaning in the general context can radically change – it’s worth remembering the same Bakers in Resident Evil 7.

But the new demo allows you to look not only at the presentation of the plot and the combat component, but also at the mysteries and the general approach to exploring the world. So, for example, on the territory of the village there are wells, for interaction with which you need to find a gate handle. You can safely ignore them, but hidden cartridges, first aid kits and other useful little things make it easier to walk through. As you explore the map, the player will find a lot of interesting and useful things, without which, in principle, it is quite possible to do.

All key plot items are located so that they are almost impossible to miss: the main mystery of the demo involves the use of two stone discs, and both literally lie on the player’s mandatory path. At the same time, to find one of them, you have to use an object, which can only be obtained by solving a simple inventory puzzle. A trifle, but nice.

Do not forget about the crafting system, which has undergone minor changes in comparison with RE7. So, for example, they decided to replace epoxy with a reagent: now first-aid kits are not created from synthetic resin, grass and some kind of mysterious magic, but a little more logically. This time the craft is placed in a separate menu: in the demo you can create cartridges and first-aid kits, in the release version, I would like to think there will be more recipes.