Operation Backlog Completion 2026

Celebrating All Things Spooky: Resident Evil Village

 Celebrating All Things Spooky, Reviews, Video games  4 Responses »  Tagged with: , ,
Oct 222021
 

I don’t understand Capcom sometimes. I really don’t.

Last year, one of our spooky October games was Resident Evil 7, so it’s only fitting that we take a look at Resident Evil Village this year.

Village picks up after the events of Resident Evil 7. Ethan Winters returns as the protagonist, trapped in an isolated village full of monsters as he searches for his kidnapped daughter. Like its predecessor, it has a tone that feels very unusual for Resident Evil at first, this time leaning into supernatural horror with vampires, werewolves, and similar creatures.

It attempts to explain all of this, of course, and I didn’t especially mind that shift in direction in the first place.

No, my major concern ahead of Village’s launch was that it might focus too much on action, and the demo together with the reviews left me with mixed feelings. But I saw enough encouragement from other survival horror fans that I took the plunge and bought Resident Evil Village (shortly after launch, in fact; I just ended up taking a long break partway through it).

Now that I’ve finished it, I have more mixed feelings than ever.

There are a lot of great things in Village. I loved the exploration in the village and the first major area. Searching for keys, backtracking, unlocking new areas – the classic gameplay loop was there. For me, the merchant dragged it down a bit, since finding treasure to sell to a merchant so I can buy items and upgrades isn’t the sort of thing I look for in a survival horror game (and I wasn’t crazy about enemies dropping resources, either).

The system wasn’t terrible, but my initial satisfaction of returning to a previous area with a new key item that let me unlock more areas and find more items faded into emptiness when I realized most of the new items would be treasures to sell.

You also can upgrade your physical attributes by killing animals for meat and bringing it back to the merchant. I actually liked that, since it made sense and didn’t make me feel too overpowered. In general, this whole aspect of the game was something I would have preferred to do without, but could accept because of the rest of the gameplay.

One section of the game was also so terrifying, I’d rank it up there as one of the scariest moments in any horror game I’ve played. I loved it.

But then, in the latter part of the game, it shifted toward action. It kept some basic aspects of the structure but had a bigger emphasis on shooting things. Then it veered even harder into action from there. Honestly, it went so far, I might have found it endearing if I wasn’t worried about Capcom’s direction for the series.

Can they just not help themselves? Are they still trying to appeal to two different audiences with the same game? Do they really want to make an action game and used this to test the waters?

If you’d asked me in the first half of the game, maybe even the first 3/4, I would have recommended Resident Evil Village in a heartbeat. It had action trappings that didn’t take away from the survival horror gameplay, and it followed in the footsteps of Resident Evil 7. But if you asked me during the final sections, I would have said no, they’ve gone back to action horror, it’s not like the old games at all.

Remember when Capcom went through a period of claiming each new Resident Evil game had both action sections and classic survival horror sections? That’s what this is. This is the game they claimed to have made so many times, but coming off of the success of Resident Evil 7 and the Resident Evil 2 remake’s return to horror, I’m not sure why they decided to do it.

I don’t know how I feel about Resident Evil Village, and I don’t know where the series is going. Resident Evil 9 could be an incredible horror game, or it could be a return to action. It all depends on what lessons Capcom takes from Resident Evil Village.

Celebrating All Things Spooky: Echo Night

 Celebrating All Things Spooky, Reviews, Video games  2 Responses »  Tagged with: , ,
Oct 152021
 

I guess this is ghost week for Celebrating All Things Spooky, because today’s review will once again see us quelling restless spirits as we discuss Echo Night.

I picked up Echo Night from the PlayStation Store during the shutdown concerns since it sounded like the sort of game I’d enjoy.

You play a man named Richard Osmond, who goes to his father’s house in response to a police report and from there is transported to a train, where he witnesses a strange encounter, and then to a ship haunted by ghosts of the people who died on board when the ship disappeared.

It plays a lot like a survival horror game or an adventure game, as a good portion of your time will be spent exploring, searching for items, and solving puzzles to access new areas.

There is no combat, but dangerous ghosts can appear in the dark and hurt you. This means the first thing you’ll want to do in any room is find the light switch and turn on the lights. Of course, sometimes you’ll find yourself in a place where the lights can’t be turned on, putting you in danger until you can find a way to get them working.

A major focus of the game is helping out the spirits you meet so that they can finally rest, which frequently involves being transported to a different time and place, while learning more about the mystery of the Red Stone that has caused so much trouble.

I enjoyed it, aside from the blackjack mini-game I spent too much time on in order to get the best ending.

Now, Echo Night is the first game in a trilogy. Echo Night 2 was only released in Japan, but Echo Night: Beyond for the PlayStation 2 was localized. Unfortunately, it was never ported to anything and is hard to find nowadays. If only the developer of these games was still around and a big deal nowadays, oh wait.

I’d be thrilled to see an Echo Night collection or ports, just saying. Until then, at least the first Echo Night is available on PSN if you want to resolve the mysteries of the vanished ghost ship.

Celebrating All Things Spooky: Sense: A Cyberpunk Ghost Story

 Celebrating All Things Spooky, Reviews, Video games  2 Responses »  Tagged with: , ,
Oct 112021
 

During the eShop sale, I picked up Sense: A Cyberpunk Ghost Story, a game which caught my eye back when it was announced and then again when it ran into controversy for no reason that actually make sense.

(I got it for the Switch, but it’s available for other platforms too.)

Although it’s side-scrolling, it’s a survival horror game inspired by the classics, with Fatal Frame being the easiest comparison.

You play a woman named Mei who finds herself trapped in an abandoned apartment building haunted by restless spirits. As you search for a way out, you’ll need to put these spirits to rest through rituals, while finding notes that reveal details about their lives and the tragedy that took place there.

I appreciate that Sense uses inventory-based puzzles for its progression like classic survival horror, but it’s made unfortunately tedious because you often can’t pick up an item until you know you need it.

Instead of finding a key item to backtrack and unlock an area you previously couldn’t access, you’ll find an item you can’t pick up, then eventually find an area you can’t access, backtrack to get the item, and then return to unlock the area. It’s a small difference, but one that makes the experience more tedious. Fortunately, it stops being as common later in the game.

The puzzles themselves are good, aside from one that has its clue in a seemingly-unrelated note that I never would have associated with it if I hadn’t looked it up. A handful of areas also have instant-death situations if you do the wrong thing, which can be frustrating.

Enemies will kill you pretty easily, except that you find bangles that protect you from supernatural power. You can only carry a couple at a time, but having one means an enemy attack will shatter it instead of killing you.

It’s a good system that adds a lot of tension without feeling unfair. After a certain point, the game also introduces combat… but it’s really not designed for combat. Combat comes down to interact with an enemy to either stun it or swing your weapon in a rather awkward-feeling system, and it’s infrequent enough that the game probably would have been better off without it.

Saves are limited through use of tapes you can play at TVs. However, your first playthrough also gives you a quick save option and auto-saves. Subsequent playthroughs remove those to restrict you to the limited manual saves. There are some secrets and bonuses only found on later playthroughs, as well.

One more thing I probably should mention is the setting. As the name suggests, this game takes place in a cyberpunk future. However, that doesn’t matter as much as you might expect. I enjoyed exploring the apartments and learning more about the story, but the cyberpunk setting affected very little. Come for the ghosts, not for the cyberpunk.

Despite its flaws, Sense: A Cyberpunk Ghost Story is a solid take on the survival horror formula. As soon as I finished, I found myself hoping the developers would continue with the genre.

And what do you know? They actually already announced SENSE/s, an anthology series of shorter horror games, with the first one being a 3D survival horror game called SENSE/s: Midnight, due out this year. I’ll be keeping my eye on that for sure!

 Older Entries  Newer Entries