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.