Introduction

Resident Evil Village is described by its makers as “a theme-park of horrors.” A sequel to RE 7: Biohazard, it sees a return our protagonist Ethan Winters, who finds himself in a European styled village of horrors in Transylvania, the de facto capital of western horror fiction. An arch-enemy has murdered his wife in cold blood, and abducted his infant daughter. In a bid to rescue her, Winters must now traverse the mysterious village ruled by four mutant lords–a vampire ruling over a large castle that calls back to the Count Dracula lore; an abandoned factory with werewolf-like creatures; a swamp with mermen; and a horror-house with dolls and puppets.

Resident Evil Village is played in a first-person RPG format, with gameplay mechanics similar to RE 7: Biohazard; but with the inventory system carried over from RE 4–a briefcase that can store weapons and loot, you can get more items from an in-game merchant called The Duke. You can also craft various buffs by exchanging ingredients here. The Village is a large open-world spread across the four zones, which rewards exploration with a secret area of the map.

Capcom developed Resident Evil Village on the latest iteration of its in-house RE Engine that also powers popular titles such as Devil May Cry 5, and the upcoming Monster Hunter Rise. The Resident Evil franchise owes much of its popularity to consoles, mainly PlayStations, and the developer appears to have built the game for consoles, porting it to the PC with certain quality tweaks. The engine supports real-time raytracing, variable-rate shading, and AMD FidelityFX. In this article we explore how the game plays on the PC, and whether there’s enough eye-candy to be had with raytracing turned on. We test performance and hardware requirements of Resident Evil Village on 18 graphics cards, at three resolutions, with raytracing on and off.