LADY KILLER
Beginning with a scene of domestic bliss, our hero Ethan Winters (returning from Resident Evil 7) and his wife Mia prepare dinner and look after their newborn baby, Rosemary. Then something bad happens—I won’t say what, because it’s pretty shocking—and soon Ethan finds himself lost in an isolated village in a snowstorm, searching for his kidnapped child. It’s a sharp, sudden intro, but an effective one, immediately setting the stakes high and establishing Resident Evil Village’s brutal, sadistic tone.
It’s never explicitly stated where the village the game takes its name from is located, but a few clues point towards it being nestled somewhere in the wintry mountains of Romania. The village itself is a scrappy, ramshackle scattering of wood and brick houses, farmer’s fields, and the occasional church. Over it looms a gothic castle with immense spires, and there are also traces of ancient ruins, suggesting a long and strange history. It’s a magnificent setting, dripping with atmosphere, menace, and mystery. I wanted to explore every dingy corner of it.
DEAD SET
Ethan is a boring guy who always seems confused about what’s going on, and never has anything interesting to say. This makes him a slightly unremarkable protagonist, but his extreme normality does heighten the eccentricity of the village’s residents. The previous game’s Baker family were a relatively grounded bunch of ghouls, but here Capcom has seriously ramped up the monstrousness of its antagonists. As Ethan hunts for Rose, he goes up against an impossibly tall and glamorous vampire, a weird mutant fish-man,
