Resident Evil 8 Village Final Demo Analysis

Following last week’s playthrough and analysis of the castle demo of Resident Evil 8 Village, Capcom have shared the love and put out the combination of the Castle and Village Demos now for all platforms, and not just on Playstation.

Available for PS4, PS5, Xbox Series X/S, One, Steam and Stadia I’ve played through the demo on Xbox, PS4 and Stadia for the purposes of this test. To quickly cover the differences noticed between these versions, the Xbox gave the best experience, where as the PS4 felt slightly slower on loading and Stadia was a tiny bit laggy, but still overall a very good experience.

On the front of Stadia, if I hadn’t just played it on other platforms I wouldn’t have noticed any difference, so this officially me praising the Stadia which I have barely touched since getting one during the Black Friday deals last year. The downside of the Stadia is that I found that I couldn’t screen record from that version with the Elgato Game Capture HD as I didn’t have an HDMI splitter that could bypass the HDCP. This was a bummer, but such is life.

In terms of the actual demo I much preferred the Village demo to that of the Castle Demo. Where as that demo felt like exploring an empty castle with only a couple of moments of action midway and towards the end of its approximately 6 minute run time, the Village demo felt like it had more to offer…at least at first.

You begin the demo speaking with a creepy old woman whom Snow White would be warned not to accept an apple from, and just this early interaction gives you a bit more sense of objective then just waking up in a room alone as you did in the castle level.

From here you explore a few areas of the village with buildings to explore and signs of where you will need keys and crests to progress. After this you find an area of long grass and it’s here you are confronted by the game’s much hyped werewolves! Seeing werewolves and witches in a Resident Evil game almost feels wrong, but I’m sure there will be some in universe explanation that these are the result of a virus and not just completely supernatural.

The werewolves look great and as this game’s equivalent to a standard villager from Resident Evil 4 or zombie from the earlier games these really do seem more dangerous. They are much faster than either a zombie or villager and are visibly more intimidating with larger more powerful frames. They are faster than the Crimson Head zombies from Resident Evil remake and also wield weapons just as the villagers from RE4 did. All this said, it does feel a shame if by the time the game is over you’ll have mowed down hundreds of these things as a single werewolf could carry enough threat to be the main villain of any horror movie or game.

After this run in with the werewolves you meet a young woman and her father who is injured and you help them safely reach their neighbours where a small cluster of survivors are hiding out. This was interesting as it’s not common in a Resident Evil game to meet many if any survivors like this, although any thoughts you have that this may end up as a group effort to survive are short lived, as fairly predicably the injured father begins to transform into a wolf. He takes out everyone except his daughter who blasts him with a shotgun and the two of you attempt to escape.

Once again this being a Resi game, the teamwork ends swiftly as her father returns and says her name which shows that these werewolf creatures do have the potential to be cured, or at least it would indicate as much. He was admittedly nowhere near fully transformed when he started killing everyone. His return results in both his own and his daughter’s death, so any hopes you had for Ethan getting a post Mia romance here were much too soon.

You grab a couple of crests in true Resident Evil form and after another meeting with the Evil Queen from Snow White you exit the main village area to head to the castle and the demo ends.

That is essentially what happens in this demo, and unlike last week where I only had 30 minutes with the PS4 version of the Castle demo, I this time had an hour to split my time across both the Castle and Village stages…and got an hour on each of the platforms I tested the game on. I didn’t use all the available hours that I could, but maybe put in two hours across all the platforms just to explore every nook and cranny, and also challenge myself to speed run the demos.

Whilst I don’t think my times will shock the speed running world I found that after two practices I was able to complete each demo stage in about 3 minutes. This is obviously not how Capcom would want you to experience Resident Evil Village, but this is somewhat Capcom’s fault for this being the way I experienced the demos as the time limits made me feel I had to rush through it in the first instance and this made me aware how quickly they could be finished.

I’m super excited about this game which will be available on all systems in just a few days, but as a long term fan of the series there is one more thing I have noticed that is a pattern in the Resident Evil games historically which I have once again noticed here.

Capcom have a real issue sticking with the games being horror based and always panic and make the games more action based. With complaints that from Resident Evil 4 onwards the series was much more about action number 7 was a much more horror based and scarier game. But where as 7 had clear influences form the first games in the series, this one has a lot more in common with Resident Evil 4 with the return of a merchant to buy upgrades from and that killing the werewolves would yield rewards such as cash and ammo. All of this encourages you to do more combat where as the more horror based games puts the emphasis on avoiding combat to save ammunition.

Resident Evil 8 Village will see it’s long awaited release on May 7^th and we’ll have an in depth review of it up shortly after that.

Until next time make sure you subscribe to the Extreme Improv Xstreamed YouTube Channel for lots more gaming content and also check out our weekly Geek Battle comedy panel show! And also check out the Gaming Section of the site on XStreamed.tv