As part of Sony’s PlayStation 5 livestream event last week, Resident Evil 8 Village was officially revealed. We’ve had some news about Resident Evil 8 before, though that was all rumour until now. However, all of the speculation and rumour is true! The thing is, that doesn’t help us understand what the heck this game is.
There is so much to unpack in this trailer, honestly it’s a little ridiculous, but I want to focus on the stuff that we knew about beforehand to give us a half decent chance at getting our heads around it. First, the game is set in a village, probably in Europe, but everyone has an American accent so I’m not sure what’s up with that. Not only that, but the village is plagued by werewolf-like enemies, though they retain enough of their human appearance that they could simply be victims of a new kind of virus.
This village has a couple of familiar faces. We all knew that Chris Redfield was going to return, but he gets in there right at the end killing the protagonist’s partner. The protagonist could be Ethan from Resident Evil 7, but we only get one clue that this is the case. In the middle of the trailer, in one of the scenes inside the mansion/castle, with the scary well-dressed women, one of them is seen licking the protagonist’s left hand. The problem is that there’s no hand there, and she’s licking the stump where the hand should be. This is the same hand that Ethan has chopped off in Resident Evil 7, and while it’s simple to draw this comparison and say that it’s Ethan, that had was meant to be healed wasn’t it? Maybe the hand doesn’t take, and he actually has a fake one.
The whole Village environment is really different to Resident Evil 7, but I think all of it is in line with the game being more of a psychological horror experience than a physical one full of zombies. If Ethan is plagued with issues because of the mould from Resident Evil 7, it’s possible that he’s been put somewhere where all victims of Umbrella are relocated to after incidents. It would make sense if Chris Redfield is popping in because everything is going wrong and someone needs to sort it out, because he’s the mighty man build to sort it all out.
I’m sure that the Resident Evil YouTuber community will dive much deeper into everything in the trailer than I have. Really, my only point is that everything we knew is true, but a trailer makes it no less confusing. The one thing I think we can safely say is that this game will launch in early 2021, in the release window Capcom has now firmly picked as theirs, and theirs alone.
