I don't think I really like it. The narrative residue of RE7 hangs over it to an extreme degree in all the bad ways I figured it would, and it just doubles down on those same issues: let's have a graphically brutal killing of a woman to open the game with, but also absolve the murderer later on of all wrongdoing and accountability because the victim was an Evil Fake--protect the moral sanctity of our boy Chris at all costs, so all that you're left with is the visual imprint and shock of that plot-jumpstarting "death." Let's fake kill and secretly imprison the other returning character from the last game, and make her infant daughter the new kidnapped motivating token in her former role--but also let's literally kill and dismember a baby offscreen so her body parts can be jammed up into flasks for the villains of the hour to hold onto and won back like collectibles by her father (fucking astonishing this is what the game is about). The baby's, by expected contrivance, fine by the end of it, but that doesn't erase the central premise the entire rest of the game hangs together by.
It's just a miserable, entirely unearned and clumsily sentimental tribute to a player avatar who is so devoid of character that the writing falls over itself in having every other person constantly address him by name in full just so an artificial level of import is bestowed upon who "Ethan Winters" is even supposed to be and that he has an interiority to speak of. The politics are bad and the structural construction of the writing isn't any better as characters make "self-aware" asides or written files show up later to rationalize or walk the audience through events that couldn't justify themselves on their own. The attempt at drama comes at the cost of all the women in the story and it doesn't reach for anything beyond the veneration of fatherly duties and the demonization of "crazy" mothers. Count how many times a woman is called a "bitch" to get a sense of the writing voice here; I cannot make the effort. All the camp in the world suggested by the rogues' gallery in their lineup can't salvage the tonal jumble that's arrived at by the end of it, nor make the gross self-importance any more palatable to endure.
I wish I could say that other aspects fared better but this is a troubled, scattershot game in how it fashions itself. The overwhelming model is RE4 as is pretty clear for anyone to see, as the concepts, singular moments and larger structure follow the lead of that game so reverentially that it aches. At the same time, there's a tremendous debt owed to other works of influence in the medium--Bloodborne hangs heavily over the sense of aesthetics in how the root folklore is expressed here; the infamous and cancelled Silent Hills is almost certainly the inspiration for a particular standout sequence that is at odds with everything else the game does. In looking to genre peers and its own predecessors for ideas the sense of identity Village has isn't particularly of its own making, and is probably even worse off on the front than the also highly referential RE7 was, where the callbacks were more generalized toward a realignment of central series tenets that had been forgotten. This game tries a bit of everything at all times, and the disparate amusement park rides don't stylistically gel with each other, and the individual high points that exist are lopsided: if this game has a "peak", it's somewhere early to the middle of it, with the latter half taken up by the ramping up of monotonous action, less interesting level design and conceptually less ambitious setpieces and environmental focus.
The things that work best here--the loose hub space to poke around in and take exploratory intermissions as downtime; the scrounging for treasures and materials to upgrade armaments with; the ostensibly supernatural elements (that are naturally made "plausible" eventually by magical science)--speak to ideas that could have shined if given more emphasis or focus, and in fact have been better served, as the very concept of Action Horror as a genre has been in other works like The Evil Within 2, a game I love despite it superficially sharing so many of the potential pitfalls as Village does, yet the takeaway differs entirely between them. For a game so concerned with parentage in its haphazard thematics, Village feels like the child of many such caretakers in conflict with all those differing viewpoints it's inherited in the process. Too long and too pre-determinedly constructed to be an iterative, routing-focused optimization machine; too choreographed and simplistic to be high action justifying itself by its mechanics; too enamored with aspirations to be affecting in it storytelling to ever actually come across as heartfelt. It's a bigger game, as promised, but that's about its only undeniable quality in the overall estimation. I might prefer it to 7, but understand the bar was set personally low to begin with.
