"Weaponless" level on Resident Evil Village is a welcome one

Resident Evil games hold a special place in my heart because even though it was I guess 30 years ago, I will never forget the night that I bought the first one for PS1 and me and a friend sat up all night in my gaming room working our way through almost all of the game on the day it came out. My friend was rubbish on the controls but he was more than happy to just serve as an advisor and a navigator and my roomates at the time thought we were nuts for staying up all night playing a video game when we "could have been out partying." Thanks, but my version of a good time doesn't come with a hangover.

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The franchise has come a long ways since 1996 or whatever year it was, and although I haven't played all of them and finished even fewer of them, the games have mostly been pretty solid. These are some of the few games that I will play from start to finish and normally enjoy myself all throughout.

In Village you find yourself in the 2nd act stuck in a giant manor where you all of a sudden have all of your inventory taken away and at first I was thinking "what a load of crap!"

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When you first encounter it, House Beneviento seems as though it is just going to be like the castle you were in previously, but just more difficult as is common not just with RE games, but with all games.

Things take a turn for the strange when you go downstairs and all of a sudden the lights flash and inexplicably all of your weapons are gone.

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you can't get out of the basement and there is a spooky mannequin on the table in front of you that you have to inspect. All the while scary sounds keep happening around you and you will see things moving through the windows to the point where you question whether or not that actually happened, or if you were just caught up in the moment and imagined it.

There are no enemies at all, but you are constantly in fear that there will be seeing as how you are not defenseless should it come to a firefight. When you do eventually get all the things that you need in order to get out of the basement, things take a very dark turn as this incredibly scary creature that sounds like a baby is pursuing you through the hallways.

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It laughs and makes baby sounds as it pursues you relentlessly as it wants to play with you. By "play" we mean swallow you whole.

This was annoying a few times because I took a wrong turn and couldn't get around it because it fills the entire hallway but I gotta hand it to the programmers, the load time to your "last save" which thankfully is an autosave right before this monster appears, was really fast.

This isn't difficult at all but it is really scary since your character moves as though he was wearing boots made of rock. It is designed so that the creature is always quite close to you but it doesn't really matter how efficient you are at the corners and how the game will take your run to a walk if you so much as touch a wall... The creature's design is to be just behind you and I am sure that they use some Mariocart levels of teleportation for it to ensure this is the case.

Although not a single shot is fired with weapons that you do not have, this is one of the most tense moments in the entire game up to this point. I think it was quite risky on Capcom's part to take a shooting game and then eliminate all of your offense, but somehow it simply works. No longer do you need to concern yourself with whether or not you have the most efficient weapon in hand or on a quick swap, because you have literally zero weapons.

When you do finally get out of the basement you will likely feel like I did in that you are just waiting for that monster to figure out how to get out of the basement and appear at the level above inside of the rather close-quartered and quite claustrophobic hallways and rooms.

Instead we face a completely new sort of enemy that once again, you have to face with no weapons.

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The spooky dolls that you almost certainly noticed all over the place on your way to the basement are now partially coming to life, with some sort of ominous specter controlling them. They talk to you, and I don't remember the dialogue, but I know it was chilling.

I don't think you are actually allowed to fail here, it is just a question of playing hide and seek and winning. I am playing the game on normal so perhaps this changes on higher difficulty settings.

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I thought this was brilliantly executed by Capcom because the combat portions of the game were actually starting to get a bit stale at this point. Unfortunately all Resident Evil games kind of suffer from combat fatigue because that is not the point of this, or any other survival horror game that I have ever played. It can be downright frustrating how difficult aiming, moving, and dodging (you can't) is in this and almost all other RE games I have ever played. I think that Capcom has done a good job though by embracing the lack of mobility and instead going for seriously eerie settings that are downright haunting. They are extremely good at this and since I never really got into Silent Hill (I have it on deck) I think they are the best at it.

Did they invent survival horror? Well people would say technically no. But they were the first to take it truly mainstream and seeing as how they have repackaged the Umbrella corps concept many many times over the past 30 years, I would say that they are a tough act to follow.

I love this game and since it is free for PS-Plus players right now, I see no reason to not get involved.

By the way, I am playing this on my brand new controller, which doesn't have stick drift, so therefore, I am enjoying it a great deal more than previously.