Assassin's Creed: Valhalla offers many sidequests, distractions, and battles to keep its protagonist Eivor busy. But only its cairn challenges can match the sheer maddening mundanity of the everyday.
Resident Evil Village.]
is not, on the whole, a scary game. That’s not a dig: By leaning back into the action side of the franchise’s long-running heritage, director Morimasa Sato and his team may have sacrificed some of the visceral, stalking horror of 2017’s
Resident Evil 7, but they’ve replaced it with an endlessly tense, frequently thrilling shooting experience. The point still stands, though: When he’s not busy having his delicate hand-meat sliced, diced, and chomped by the residents of its titular backwoods setting,
Village protagonist Ethan Winters resembles a one-man arsenal, gunning down werewolves, zombies, mutant fishmen, and worse with a tally of ammunition expended that belies any real effort, past the game’s opening hour or so, to sell the element of disempowerment so vital to proper horror.
P.T., and a few other spooky gaming mainstays,
Village operates (and operates quite well, I should be clear) on a “Screw it, throw it in” set of design principles, comfortable slapping down one of the most effective haunted house sequences in recent memory right in between fights with the Large Vampire Woman and a guy who’s basically Magneto doing a bad Nic Cage impression. In some ways, it’s a dedicated attempt to be all
RE games to all people: Want to play
Village as an action-powered arcade minigame (complete with a return of the venerable
Mercenaries mode, shockingly well-adapted to the game’s first-person combat)? It’s there. Want to treat the entire game as a treasure-hunting scavenger hunt? Knock yourself out. Fishing? Dear reader, of