Resident Evil Village

Capcom's eighth mainline Resident Evil trades the plantation of Resident Evil 7 for a snowbound European valley, and in doing so pulls the series somewhere it had not been before: closer to folk horror than to the biohazard thrillers that named it. Ethan Winters arrives looking for his abducted daughter and finds a settlement ruled by four lords, each built around a different idea of what a monster can be — a towering aristocrat, a doll-maker, a flooded reservoir, a factory. The first-person view carries over from Village's predecessor, but the pacing does not. Ammunition is looser, enemy counts are higher, and a merchant called the Duke sells upgrades between chapters, which nudges the whole game toward the rhythm of Resident Evil 4 rather than the tight scarcity of 7.

That structure is also why the game has had such a long tail. Capcom shipped a Winters' Expansion with a third-person camera and a separate Rose campaign in October 2022, then a free PlayStation VR2 mode in February 2023 that puts the entire main campaign in a headset with motion-controlled reloading. Three very different ways to play the same story now sit on one storefront page.