The Resident Evil Village Demo Makes Me Feel a Certain Type of Way

Some gamers may be old enough to remember when PC Gamer magazine came with a CD-ROM full of demos. They would never run on my crummy hand-me-down PC, but sometimes I would take the CD over to my friend’s house and we’d excitedly check out all the upcoming or recently released titles. It used to be that many major releases had demo versions you could try before you bought the game. These demos were frequently an hour or more of actual content from the game rather than just a teeny sample or specially crafted demo level.

Of course, that all went away once publishers began to realize you could make a lot more money in the short term if you just released unfinished garbage that people pre-ordered to get an exclusive skin and a shiny metal box. So when I heard that the new Resident Evil had a demo, I was pleasantly surprised. It was less pleasant, although also somewhat less surprising, to learn that for some reason the demo had a 1-hour time limit on it. Still, worth checking out, I figured.

You can start the demo from either the village or the castle, so I chose the village — it’s the name of the game, after all. After a brief first-person cinematic conversation with a little old witch lady who my character inexplicably allowed to lock the gate behind him, I was off! Then, just as quickly, I was watching a first-person cinematic again. Then I got to play the game for a few more minutes, and the controls would once again be snatched away for another few minutes of “action” I wasn’t allowed to participate in. It was like playing games with that one friend who’d already played and just had to “show you how to do this one part”. In the most egregious instance of this, I was given control of the game as a monster charged towards me. I fired a few shots, and then another first-person cutscene began and the monster was hit by falling beams, demonstrating that in the three seconds of game time I was given, I wasn’t actually supposed to be able to change anything.

While I always appreciate attempts to tell a story through the medium of games, it’s important to remember that it’s still a game. If you don’t let the player control the action, you aren’t making a game anymore, you’re making a movie. Half-Life nailed storytelling without cutscenes in 1998, and other studios are still struggling to strike that balance two decades later.

Still, I couldn’t be too upset, since it was a free demo after all. The puzzles in the village section were simple and brief, but there wasn’t much time for exploration given all the cutscenes. The brief combat section was decent: zombies have maintained their bullet-sponge nature of the previous RE games, and ammo felt scarce enough that it made me feel like every shot counted. The one hour time limit also seemed strange when I discovered it had taken me exactly thirty minutes to complete the first half of the demo.

I went on to the castle section of the demo, and was pleased to discover that I was allowed to actually play most of this part myself. The puzzles were disappointing, however. I’m not sure when this first starting happening, but every developer needs to be told that rotating an object to find another object hidden inside doesn’t count as a puzzle — it’s just busy work. That being said, the dungeon sections of the castle were suitably scary, and I even jumped at one point as an enemy crept out of the darkness. There was also one halfway decent environmental puzzle that made me feel just a little bit clever when I solved it.

I managed to finish the demo just under the hour time limit, which once again made me wonder what it was even for. Were they worried that if players spent too long poking around the environments, they’d find all the cut corners? Did they think cheap players would get their Resident Evil fill playing the same hour of gameplay over and over? We may never know, and whatever their fears were, they can’t have been worse than the reality of what players have already done with their demo.

More and more games have started offering gameplay demos, though Resident Evil Village is one of the few triple A games I know of that has done so. Searching for “Demo” on steam currently gives over 6,000 results, so it’s heartening to see that the “try before you buy” is possibly making a comeback. It suggests that developers and publishers are once again becoming confident that they’ve created a quality product, rather than simply trying to make a quick buck from hype and pre-orders. Ironically, the Resident Evil Village demo made certain I wouldn’t buy the game. I wonder if that’s why so many studios stopped releasing demos…