Games With Grey

Resident Evil Village’s core narrative is a flawed if promising construction. Greatest flaws stem from narrative delivery, while greatest narrative strengths lie within content; in this regard, the narrative is characterized by sharp division. The opening is an impactful and immersive one, introducing many of the core players – the player character Ethan Winters among them. His wife and their shared daughter, Rose, receive similar inclusion in a sequence which lasts no more than ten or fifteen minutes, but a sequence which is instantly gripping, owing to an overflow of emotions, tragedy chief among them; bliss and optimism are totally spurned in Village, as evinced even here, as evinced even before setting and gameplay emerge and develop. Reflecting this pervasive bleakness, Mia, Ethan’s wife, is cut down in a hail of gunfire by another returning character, one seemingly central to the Resident Evil mythos – Chris Redfield. And so she is slaughtered for initially unexplained reasons, her death prompting sorrow and fragmentation – Ethan is literally torn asunder. Complicating his despair further is another occurrence – Rose is kidnapped, snatched away, the motives for this snatching left similarly ambiguous. Indeed, ambiguity abounds, directly enhancing the overall sense of intrigue. It is difficult, then, to overpraise this opening, so grounded in emotion and pathos, as Ethan tends to his daughter, cradling the youth to her bed, then promptly supping with his wife, their dinner culminating with murder and devastation. One minute gaiety thrives; the next, sorrow reigns supreme.

A compelling investigative tone is adopted from the first. Ethan awakens from a slumber of fair length, arriving in an isolated and strangely beautiful Eastern European village, now essentially uninhabited, deserted in a seemingly hasty fashion. Arrived therein, he is gradually provided with more and more information – Rose survives, even as her body was subject to violent and literal division, limbs situated at this point, torso at that. Divided or no, her body is still compatible with reassembly – Ethan must act, and this motivation, his daughter’s restoration, is essentially what drives the narrative as it winds ever onwards. After arriving in the titular village, Ethan discourses with a few of the remaining inhabitants, who supply him with early inklings of Rose’s fate, though this collective fast meets with a disastrous death, the collective consumed by a raging inferno, a blaze Ethan but narrowly escapes. All is loneliness now, and this loneliness contributes greatly to atmosphere – and also to the narrative, decidedly mournful; the narrative has not yet lost its way. Shortly after this occurrence, however, the narrative collapse occurs, and the game becomes a constant sequence of highs and lows. Such erratic, unpredictable vacillation is a failure in its own right; instability is repelling (if intriguing). But these failures are exacerbated by the slowness in narrative development. Consider again delivery. The narrative’s opening ten or fifteen percent is unquestionably masterful – this cannot be argued against. But immediately succeeding this masterfulness comes failure, and more substantial narrative developments are essentially confined to the narrative’s concluding twenty or so percent – see Rose’s abduction and the falsified nature of Mia’s murder. In the interval between opening and closing, though, very little narrative heft arises; player interest is challenged, prone to destruction. Therein, then, is the narrative’s greatest flaw, this occasional sense of motionlessness and directionlessness. True, the player grapples with a quartet of bosses, a family, and in the act of grappling learns of their existences and what makes them them – see Mother Miranda, leader and terrible manipulator. Gaining insight into their various oppressions and exploitations does stimulate the emotions, all the while increasing Miranda’s villainy. Gaining such insight into those selfsame oppressions also staves off total player disinterest, and these characters – the towering Lady Dimitrescu; the mutated, animalistic, aquatic Moreau; the unstable doll-like Beneviento; and the frustrated master-of-metal Heisenberg – prevent total derailment. Content compensates for the characteristic failures in delivery. The collective’s characterizations are traditionally very excellent – if occasionally inconsistent. True awareness of their sufferings is not obtainable until the player navigates Miranda’s documented-littered lab in the narrative’s concluding moments – the player is overloaded. By this point, however, the player has interacted with these individuals and accordingly forged some bond with them, even if that bond is wholly negative owing to their antagonisms. Still, impressively Capcom have managed to make antagonists sympathetic, and for all their barbarities and general coldness, a certain humanity and relatability define, say, the subhuman Karl Heisenberg or Lady Dimitrescu.   

This trend of sympathetic villains continues with Mother Miranda, herself, a character animated by sorrow – a relatable sorrow, which tempers her villainy. In a similar vein to Ethan, Miranda seeks what was lost, what she was stripped of – her daughter. In a perpetually mournful state, a state of mourning which has endured unabated for a full century, Miranda thirsts for her daughter’s resurrection and subsequent recovery – she thirsts for her daughter’s return to reality. A selfish act – the dead should lie dead; fate should not be meddled with – this selfishness is easily understood. And so Miranda snatches Rose, a figure uniquely compatible with and attuned to Miranda’s daughter – Rose is the perfect vessel, and Miranda resorts to brutal, unflinching violence to claim her, in the process losing the few remaining vestiges of her morality. Her actions are barbaric, but the sentiment is steeped in humanity – and something approaching logic; it is easy to identify with this maternal plight, maternal suffering. But consider also the family mentioned above, Miranda’s quartet of underlings. In efforts to find the perfect vessel, Miranda engaged in ample experimentation, toying with these figures’ genetics and disposition, all for the sake of Eva, Miranda’s daughter; villainy again erupts; Mother Miranda alienates.  

Some of this narrative information is communicated gradually – when fighting Lady Dimitrescu, the player learns of her plight, while something similar could be said of Heisenberg’s interactions, and so on. But reflecting pervasive flaws with delivery, the concluding hours are lazy exposition dumps, as a massive amount of information is thrust upon the player’s shoulders, intimidating them in the process. Were the narrative delivery more consistent – had it not been terminated with this barrage of context and unveiled character motivations – the entire experience, the entire narrative would soar – unutilized potential abounds here; the narrative falters, even as it terminates with an engaging concluding cutscene of fair emotional and cerebral heft, as the villain is vanquished, but at the hero’s expense. But these poignant final moments cannot fully negate the agonizingly slow hours of narrative ennui, hours generally defined by a dearth of greater player engagement or investment. The high / low / high / low pattern again presents itself. But the highs are of such intensity as to make continued engagement justified, and ultimately justly rewarded; ample profoundness rests just below the narrative’s surface. It is unfortunate and tragic that literal bogs must be waded through to reach said profoundness.  

Village’s world-building and environment design are major triumphs; the game is brimming with atmosphere; a wonderful, grounded sense of place is captured. See only the village, itself, a place whose isolation contributes its charm, its atmosphere. Structures are many, suggestive of a once-bustling society, resting at the foot of both towering mountains and Lady Dimitrescu’s castle, a place also aspiring for the heavens. Heavy snows have their presence here, and slight flakes fall downwards periodically, a tangible reminder of that environment’s frigidity; the village is oftentimes dazzlingly beautiful, if characteristically mournful and melancholic. Crucially, the gameworld is far larger than the village proper, and the game is brimming with environmental diversity, a diversity which directly heightens the joys of exploration, a major asset. Consider only Lady Dimitrescu’s castle, a location navigated in the game’s earlier portions, Lady D being the first of the family combatted and vanquished. Architecturally, the structure is massive – and consequently very intimidating, especially when regarded from outside, the façade alternately majestic and frightfully imposing. This massiveness is preserved while in the castle proper, to be sure, but the more distressing attributes are actually minimized, as the player explores a location brimming with rococo design flourishes – see ample engravings and sculptural work, both of which situate the location in space and time, suggesting the castle and its inhabitants were once prosperous and powerful nobles of a sort. It is a masterful environment, disarmingly beautiful, and its relatively earlier emergence seizes the player, sustains them as the narrative begins to falter with its escalating, intensifying slowness. But the player is in time presented with newer, different environments – wonderful diversity again abounds. See Beneviento’s domain, a structure not too dissimilar to Lady Dimitrescu’s castle, though that former structure possesses a certain claustrophobia which clashes with the castle’s cavernousness. This environment – presumably a once-cozy manor – is similarly atmospheric; it is not necessarily oppressive, but it is decidedly brooding in design and conception. Indeed, each of these core locations has claim to a distinct identity, reflective of the villains’ distinct identities; it is impossible to confuse Lady Dimitrescu’s domain with Beneviento’s domain. Each individual location is reflective of its ruler’s deportment, and massive are the successes here; exploration is a perpetual delight. The diversity is, again, monumental, and Heisenberg’s factory is drastically removed from the castle, or from Moreau’s watery, windmill-filled domain.  

In many ways, this world design is evocative of the far earlier Ocarina of Time, in that both of these titles share a connecting landscape of sorts, a landscape which branches off in multiple directions. In that acclaimed Zelda title, Hyrule Field served as the unifier. In this title, though, the titular village serves as binding agent. This comparison seemingly suggests a dearth of originality in world design, that Village’s world design is founded on mimicry. This could not be further removed from the truth, and this relative derivativeness must not be reckoned a failure – if any game is worthy of imitation, it is Ocarina of Time. In that game, the player pursues one branching pathway, meeting with a dungeon at that pathway’s ending. Once the dungeon has been cleared, a boss is faced, and some crucial item is acquired. This formula is fiercely replicated in Village, as the player explores the village and then explores one of the family’s domains, with the player’s odyssey terminating with an item’s acquisition – see a portion of Rose’s fragmented corpse. This blueprint’s adoption must not be vilified or dismissed. Indeed, added emphasis is placed upon exploration, which is frequently richly rewarded, even more so than in OOT. A map is consultable always, and while it is brimming with information, providing explicit insight into, say, a treasure’s location, it is far more enjoyable and rewarding to play through Village organically, to stumble upon some items, to naturally miss others. This potential organicness is engaging, and the game is no mere, lazy checklist, as so many titles of the present moment are – consider a sprawling contemporary open-world game, where the player jumps from location to location, in pursuit of this collectable or that. Failings like poor texture quality do exist – sometimes textures do not load properly at all – but environment design and the incentivized exploration cannot be praised enough; atmosphere is wonderfully overwhelming.  

The gameplay is similarly impressive, characterized both by breaks from generic convention and total adherence to generic convention. The game adopts the traditional survival-horror blueprint, absolutely. Here, though, outright horror is minimized, meaning added emphasis is placed upon survival – namely resource management and the like. It would be unfair and inaccurate to state that horror’s comparative absence equates to tension’s absence. Indeed,Village is brimming with tension, even and especially in the realm of gameplay, which complements the environments proper. Essentially every bullet has immense value, owing to considerable resource scarcity. This scarcity provokes active excitement – stumbling upon a bullet or two for the pistol, a shell or two for the shotgun, is a uniquely cathartic and rewarding affair. Here, then, are further inklings of exploration’s incentivization. Speaking even more dramatically, exploration is not simply incentivized, but is instead made mandatory, especially on higher difficulty levels, where even one or two bullets decides one’s ultimate fate, life or death. Defying odds, the balancing is almost masterful, and while frustrations inevitably overflow owing to rigid resource distribution, with a bit of patience and time – and admittedly a fair degree of skill – essentially any obstacle or opponent can be vanquished in time.

When such vanquishments do indeed transpire, even intenser cathartic sensations erupt than those accompanying exploration; it is difficult to express the delights and relief which accompany, say, victory over Lady Dimitrescu or Heisenberg, that former figure literally adopting a dragon-like state, that latter becoming a bizarre and unnatural amalgamation of metal, hulking, massive, and terribly threatening, impervious to much damage. The player is constantly tasked in this fashion, and while these boss fights against the family and Miranda herself are obvious and natural illustration, this tension extends into almost any encounter; shambling grunts or aggressive lycans are not without dangerous capabilities; shambling grunts and lycans both can easily destroy fragile Ethan Winters, no matter how skillfully and cautiously the player plays; the player is almost constantly challenged and taxed in some fashion. This relative constancy actually makes the quieter, less intense moments of exploration all the more enjoyable, for they serve as a vital reprieve from the bombasticness thriving elsewhere in the gameplay.  

Crafting occupies a similarly integral position in gameplay. It is wonderfully streamlined and intuitive, with crafting materials confined to only five distinct categories. As was the case with tangible ammunition, such resources are frequently very scarce – their individual value is consequently immense, and while stumbling upon, say, an herb or chem fluid does not flood the endorphins in the same way a shotgun shell’s discovery does, still even these most mundane of objects have their place. Intense decision-making abounds, in that resource overlaps exist. Chem fluid is a vital component of both medkits and certain bullet categories, meaning the player must choose which object to craft, a health restorative or an object which can pacify threats before they have the chance to make such restoratives necessary. All of this is seamless – the crafting menu can be consulted at any moment, while the crafting process itself is instantaneous; it is wonderfully unintrusive; the menuing does not damage the game’s immersive nature. And so the gameplay is best defined by that one key word – tension. A rather scattershot and trivialized inventory system does have its place, admittedly – Ethan can carry only a finite amount of objects at any one moment. While presumably this mechanic of inventory management would only escalate that ubiquitous and defining tension, in actuality this inventory system has little practical purpose, in that the inventory size is forgivingly large; more involved inventory management and item manipulation occurred only once or twice in the entire playthrough.

Further trivializing this system is the inventory’s upgradeability – assuming sufficient sums are possessed, the player can expand upon inventory size by discoursing with the so-called, obese Duke, who serves the role of merchant. The mercantile systems are expertly executed – money matters, just as ammunition and crafting materials matter. Essentially every weapon discoverable in the environment can be upgraded in some fashion – one can increase a shotgun’s fire-rate, for instance, or can increase that selfsame shotgun’s overall damage output or magazine size. Careful decision-making again emerges, becomes necessary. Necessity is directly connected to money’s finiteness; it is rarely overflowing. When money actually is overflowing, excitement swells. See for instance the bosses and minibosses, each of whom drop valuable resources which can be sold for considerable sums. Having these objects in hand, awaiting the chance to sell them – it is immensely exciting, for their selling means a vital new weapon upgrade – or in some rarer instances an entirely new, perhaps even more powerful firearm. The Duke sells basic medkits and ammunition, too, alongside empowering recipes which enable the crafting of different ammunition types. Rather than being implemented halfheartedly, these mercantile systems are masterfully and thoughtfully implemented, and they lend an air of constant progression to the entire experience – they lend an air of perpetual excitement and gameplay complexity, even as moment-to-moment gameplay sometimes lacks complexity: see the very basic gunplay.     

Resident Evil Village must be reckoned as Capcom’s masterpiece; the narrative stands alone as sole consequential blemish, though even this is an inconsistent construction rather than a disastrous, alienating construction. Even here moments of brightness shine through, as villainous figures – see Miranda proper and the family who exist beneath her, who suffer exploitation owing to their subservient status, Miranda’s ever-swelling strength – evoke player sympathy; the narrative, their narrative, is brimming with sorrow; pathos is consistently stimulated, and this frequent stimulation often serves an exhausting function. Indeed, Village is a taxing game to play, draining upon the emotions and upon the psyche. With so many titles, hours can pass by on the instant; joy is constantly dispensed; the player is perpetually engaged. Here, the player is perpetually engaged, but gameplay sessions have the tendency to drag onwards seemingly endlessly, even if the session is in actuality brief, lasting but an hour or two; an hour spent in Village, then, is a laborious, challenging hour – albeit a stimulating one. Taken to its worst extent, then, one could certainly say that this title is outright unenjoyable to play, and that it should not be played or should be played by a select few (for some players see enjoyability as essential to an excellent title). Such a statement is not without merit – consider the game’s exhausting nature, which potentially imparts a niche status. So intense is the distress, I found myself approaching the title in chunks, typically navigating one of the domains proper, and then challenging and besting that domain’s master, one member of the family. This approach inevitably results in fragmentation and a bizarre and disjointed gameplay experience and pacing, almost mobile-like in nature, but it was the only method I could rely upon to slog through the game’s entirety, its constant and oppressive demoralization. Difficulty matters, absolutely, and should one play on an easier difficulty level – I played on the “hardcore” setting – the overall experience should no doubt be fundamentally altered, fundamentally worsened. While frustration frequently arose alongside exhaustion, especially when the core bosses were fought, I have no regrets regarding difficulty; I feel as though I played the game in the manner it was intended to be played; lower difficulty settings would only streamline and trivialize the affair, deprive it of its value and engaging capabilities. But Village is an experience, an experience of tension and uneasiness, rarely enjoyable yet frequently and singularly rewarding. It is a major achievement, memorable and affecting.