Resident Evil Village // Reese's Fast Break

As a chocolate & peanut butter devotee, Fast Break has always confounded me. It has all the right pieces: the same delectable milk chocolate from Reese's cups, a thick center of creamy peanut butter, and a dense nougat base. You can't fault any single component, but the configuration feels off. Too much peanut butter? Should the nougat be on top? Maybe squash the whole thing and make it narrower? Shove a pretzel in and make it a Take 5? (Not even going there. I'll save that for another post.)

Like the Fast Break, I couldn't help but twist and rearrange Resident Evil Village as I played it. The pieces are all there. From the jump, it balances B-movie schlock with genuine frights and disgusting settings you can practically smell. The creatures are vicious and relentless, the ensemble cast of humans charismatic. The gameplay rides that line between retro survival-horror and the action-oriented turn the series took with RE4. Something for everyone! But by the end, the crumpled candy wrapper sitting before me, I still wasn't satisfied. There's nothing missing per se. The jigsaw puzzle was complete, but I felt like I was looking at it upside-down.

I must tip my hat to one of the game's feats though. Village continues a trick Capcom also pulled for the last game, which is to take a non-zombified horror subgenre (a Texas Chainsaw-style cannibal family in RE7, and now what appear to be supernatural werewolves and vampires in Village) and manages to fit it into the existing lore of the Umbrella Corporation and their ongoing quest to pump out trendy new monsters, like a veteran designer at New York Fashion Week reinventing their brand. Your mileage may vary with each horror take, but you have to admit it's a clever and not entirely safe approach to reinventing a franchise 25 years in.

Without spoiling specific reveals, the game is split into four big levels in addition to the titular village. These range from wide "guns blazing" combat arenas to quieter, claustrophobic hallways that build suspense over time—all with plenty of callbacks to mechanics introduced in earlier Resident Evil games. For narrative reasons you learn early on, each chapter needs to have a distinct flavor, which they all succeed in creating. But the overall package is missing a through line to make us care why we're lost in these eastern European mountains in the first place.

This is partly due to our bland protagonist Ethan Winters. I almost appreciate how unlikable and forgetful he is as it lets the much more interesting cast of villains really shine. Unfortunately, they're not enough to make me as attached to this journey as, say, the original mansion incident, or Leon & Claire's misadventures in the police station. Even Resident Evil 7, which introduced us to Ethan, made my participation feel necessary to the story. Each family member in that hell house got their moment but still propelled the player through a single, cohesive adventure. Village is moreso like watching a play where each actor shouts their monologue, unaware of the others—and frankly, not even aware if I'm still in the audience or if I got up to leave.

I wish I could better explain why a game that consistently kept my attention and left me with a couple truly memorable moments still had me wanting more. As a horror fan, I'll play it again at some point, shuffling the levels in my head like cards to figure out what could've been a stronger poker hand. Fortunately for you, reader, I seem to be in the minority! Everyone I've asked loves a Fast Break, and Resident Evil Village will end up in GOTY talks. And that's what's beautiful about candy: we can all eat the same chocolate bar and have wildly different tastes.

I leave you with my favorite moment: learning what the game counts as a "key item":