Resident Evil Village – Full Preview Details on Characters and Story For PS5 and Xbox Series X

written by Jih-Wei Peng

The Resident Evil: Village (hereby referred to as REV) trailer is out, and it’s a heck of a doozy. A long-running series like Resident Evil has a rich bevy of traditions and lore to draw upon, and Capcom has not been at all shy about including nods, winks, and nudges for the observant fan. Let’s go over some of those, then, shall we?

To start with, one of the obvious points is that Ethan Winters and his first-person perspective is returning as the game’s protagonist. Almost uniquely amongst Resident Evil protagonists, Ethan is a civilian, not a combat-trained cop or soldier, and someone who doesn’t want to be there and is utterly terrified by many of the things he’s forced to see. After the events of RE7, Ethan is ready to settle back down into domestic bliss with his rescued wife Mia when Chris Redfield bursts onto the scene in the most dramatic way possible to turn his life upside down, once again.

Yes, Chris is back, and there are significant hints that he might not be quite a hero. Leaving aside his darker and more brooding character art featured on the REV website, he also makes an explosive entrance in the reveal trailer by emptying an entire pistol clip into a bloodied woman lying on the ground in front of Ethan, possibly Mia, to Ethan’s anguished cry of “WHY?!” While it may well be that there’s more going on to the story, it’s clear that Capcom is enjoying the ambiguity of Chris’s role and will likely carry that on in the game itself, leaving players guessing as to whether Chris has finally cracked under the strain of spending almost his entire adult life fighting the undead and other bio-weapons.

Those looking for a more positive spin on shooting a helpless woman multiple times might be able to find it in one puzzling piece of key art that the devs teased as being so important that they debated whether to show it in the announcement trailer or not. One of the repeated motifs in the trailer is a symbol first seen hung above a prominent gate, then seen elsewhere painted in white across various surfaces. Consisting of what looks like a mutated fetus ringed in wood, crossed by a pair of raven wings and wreathed with dead twigs, it’s been noted that the final symbol has a more than passing resemblance to the Umbrella Corp logo of Resident Evil notoriety. Not only that, but the focus on the mutated fetus is intriguing – given RE7’s use of child experimentation, Ethan and Mia both having been infected by the Mold in the previous game, and the trailer’s repeated focus on a mother cradling a baby, it’s not unlikely that the plot of REV might somehow feature Ethan and Mia’s child being infected by bio-weaponry – and Chris’s actions might potentially make more sense in that light.

The creepy cult Umbrella symbol has other implications, however – the fetus featured in the symbol has a particularly elongated tail, and while fetuses do indeed commonly have some kind of tail this takes on extra significance given that the trailer features a werewolf, or at least Resident Evil’s take on a werewolf – a furred former human being with great sharp teeth and violent, feral behavior. Along with the fact that the game is set in Romania and that the trailer also features a posh-looking lady sucking blood from Ethan’s wrist and another one exploding into a swarm of insects or possibly bats, it seems like REV is going back to some old classic horror settings to change things up from the usual zombies.

Hang on, Romania? Where was this mentioned? Well, the dev commentary video on the trailer at one point brought up the new inventory screen that noted that the game’s currency was denoted in lei – Romania’s currency. Romania, let it be noted, is the modern form of what was once the Principality of Moldavia and Wallachia – and as most horror buffs are likely to recognize Wallachia was the home of Vlad the Impaler, commonly known as the inspiration for Count Dracula, again practically confirming that Capcom wants to play around with vampires and werewolves.

The inventory screen reveals also brought up something interesting, though – while they still use a similar slot-based inventory system to more recent RE games, it’s been noted that the inventory screen is now part of a larger briefcase and that items have more nuanced sizes (such a pistol taking up 3×2 slots of space) as opposed to almost all items taking up one or two slots. Fans are noting the potential callback to RE4’s inventory system with its Tetris juggling, and indeed the inventory isn’t the only callback to RE4. With its focus on a quaint, fearful village overlooked by a castle with scheming nobility, it’s hard not to think of Los Illuminados and the castellan Ramon Salazar – and while reactions to this tidbit might be more mixed, the devs have noted that they intend to “up the ante on the action a bit,” which may have parallels in how RE4 started a trend towards a more action-focused take on the series.

Whatever you might think about the series taking a step back towards action, the titular village is liable to keep your attention. While RE7 was a dark parody of isolated, rural America, REV seems to look more at the insular, suspicious atmosphere of an isolated European village – the paranoia and hostility displayed towards strangers have shades of Transylvanian villagers warning outsiders not to go near the castle and locking up at sunset. From the look of things, though, where RE4’s approach to village life was to descend immediately into gunplay it seems like REV is going to be taking the more measured pace of RE7 as its guiding principle, hopefully giving you plenty of time to explore the dilapidated environs.

And what is it you’re exploring for? Why, emblems, of course! The Capcom knows what fans want and the trailer prominently notes obvious places to hunt for emblems to unlock doors with, proving once again that nobody in the Resident Evil universe seriously believes in keys or bog-standard locks. One of these emblems reveals prominently features the actual old red Umbrella logo, however, strongly hinting at the source of the shenanigans going on in the village.

On the whole, there’s a lot to like and a lot to look forward to in the REV trailer. There’s no release date other than 2021 yet, but we know it’s coming out on the PS5, the Xbox Series X, and Steam, and Capcom is promising further updates in August to whet your appetite until then. For now, all that’s left to do is for fans to exhaustively comb the trailer frame by frame and reference various rumors, leaks, and lore to lay out the entire plot of the game ahead of time.

Hopefully, they’ll leave us with at least some suspense once the game gets released, though!