“Resident Evil Village: A Showcase of Horror in PlayStation’s New VR Glasses, but Flaws Remain”

Resident Evil Village shows that PlayStation’s new VR glasses may be the future of horror, but not of the gaming world.

In a rickety wooden hut, somewhere in Eastern Europe, I look around anxiously. Ethan, my character Resident Evil Village, has been searching for his kidnapped daughter for less than an hour, which has led him to a decrepit village in an unspecified country. Soon supernatural things started to happen. (Of course.) Soon he had to flee to this seedy shed. (Great idea.) I just barricaded the door with a cupboard. With both hands I hold my 9mm pistol in front of me, aimed at the windows, waiting for the growling monsters to break in.

When I hear the grunt in my neck, it dawns on me that PlayStation may have solved the rear view problem. I peer carefully over my shoulder.

I don’t notice the glass shattering behind me at first. There is a reason for this: with the previous generation of VR glasses you could, for technical reasons, only look in front of and next to you, which meant that the enemy could never sneak up on you from behind. It’s only when I hear the grunt in my neck – the 3D audio has also improved – that it dawns on me that PlayStation may have solved that rear view problem. I peer carefully over my shoulder. Slowly my gaze slides upwards. Behind me stands a mutated werewolf, two heads taller than me.

Such.

I want to shoot, but notice that I forgot to reload. With my left hand I hurriedly grab a new magazine of bullets in my virtual waist bag and insert it into the loader of the gun in my right hand. In all my haste, I press the wrong button. As in, instead of changing the charger, I drop my gun on the floor. When I look up, I can just see the werewolf sinking its fangs and claws into me and spewing blood from my chest at 60 to 120 frames per second. “You’re dead.”

Dying ingloriously in virtual reality: it just got even more realistic.

Resident Evil Village is a showcase of what the next generation of VR has to offer.

It was with great enthusiasm that the PSVR2, the second generation of VR glasses from PlayStation, was received a good month ago. There was therefore a lot to be excited about – apart from the price (600 euros). The tangle of cables of the PSVR1, which was a thorn in the side of every gamer, was gone: from now on you only had to plug exactly one cable into your PlayStation 5. Finally, Sony had also provided motion controllers worthy of the name for its VR glasses, a huge improvement over the previous generation. The brand new eye tracking, where the glasses register what you are looking at, was an amazing piece of technology. And the frame rate and resolution had also increased significantly, potentially increasing the realism of virtual reality. The only thing missing was a big blockbuster game to answer the question: would all those new specifications also lead to full-fledged games, the biggest problem that the first generation of VR had to deal with?

The answer was not long in coming. Almost simultaneously with the PSVR2, the Resident Evilfranchise, always at the forefront of game innovation, released a VR version of Resident Evil Village, which already appeared in a normal version two years ago. With a month delay, we can say with certainty: the new generation of virtual reality is impressive. And not just because the mutated werewolves can now also stand behind you.

It proves that horror is the genre par excellence that lends itself to the VR experience Resident Evil Village already in the first minutes, when Ethan walks along a dark forest path towards the werewolf village. What was a forgettable scene in the normal version of the game two years ago, turns out to be an experience in VR. The dead crows hanging from the trees are suddenly carcasses that you walk around with a scared heart. The clouds of mist hanging over the path feel claustrophobic – hard to describe, easy to experience. It has something of the opening scene of say Evil Dead, only you are not looking, but physically experiencing. Immersion in VR: it remains something special.

Helps in that regard: the new motion controllers. You enter aim Resident Evil Village with your arm. (Or with two arms, for extra stability.) Sniping is done by looking through the virtual scope with one eye and closing the other. To reload you have to physically take bullets, put them in your gun and cock the cock. That’s more than a gimmick: it puts you even more in the space. Only when you shuffle through a dark room with your flashlight in your left hand and a gun in your right hand for the first time, going around every corner with your arms outstretched, do you realize again how darkness can be a primal fear.

You only really understand that vampire Countess Lady Dimitrescu is three meters tall when you have to physically look up at her with VR glasses on your head, neck back.

Especially in its first hours Resident Evil Village therefore a feast of those kinds of small, unexpected discoveries. The first time you cock a shotgun with your left hand, fire it and feel the recoil against your head, courtesy of the haptic feedback in the goggles, you realize a new world for shooters has just opened up. The fact that Lady Dimitrescu, the vampire countess you first encounter after just under two hours of play, is three meters tall was already clear two years ago when the game appeared on the PS5. But you don’t understand exactly how big three meters is until you have to physically look up at her with VR glasses on your head, neck back.

To be clear: none of this is entirely new. Games like Resident Evil 7 in Until Dawn also bet on that intense, frightening horror experience on the PSVR1. The difference is mainly that that horror experience, with a higher frame rate and resolution and smoother hardware, is now even more intense and even more frightening. One example: when you have to play hide and seek halfway through the game in House Beneviento, surrounded by puppets and baby noises and with only a flashlight in your possession that keeps going out, you start to wonder about the legal framework on psychological terror. It’s scary, too scary at times, but afterwards you don’t understand why you Resident Evil ever wanted to play on a flat screen again. Survival horror is made for virtual reality.

But indirectly, the game also exposes the medium’s problems. Problems that will not be solved immediately.

As impressive as those first hours in an Eastern European village are, there is also that other observation: Resident Evil Village VR It’s been out for a month now and I still haven’t finished it. Not because I’m too scared to play it. (Okay, okay, also because I’m too scared to play it.) But mainly because Resident Evil Village in its VR version clearly suffers from a number of problems.

If VR game is Resident Evil Village a major step forward, but as a game all round it is just a step back in many areas. The gameplay, for example, catapults you back to the clumsy nineties at many times. Running around, ducking and shooting at the same time is theoretically possible, but impossible in practice, which means that the action in Resident Evil Village remains rather static – and soon unchallenging. It’s an amusing detail the first time you drop your gun in all the excitement. But when you reach for the virtual shotgun behind your back for the fifth time and mistakenly pull up your virtual map, only to be torn apart yet again by a pack of mutated werewolves, the frustration mounts.

There are also some flaws in terms of story and game design – something true Horizon: Call of the Mountain, the PSVR2’s other showcase game, didn’t escape. Immersive cutscenes are not yet ready. One time you’re looking around the room and you miss the crucial explanation about why exactly mutated werewolves are walking around the village. The other time your virtual body is dragged across the ground, while your head floats around at a weird angle. The technology is good. She’s just not good enough yet.

And then there’s the biggest problem: you love Resident Evil Village maximum of one hour at a time. Motion sickness, the VR equivalent of motion sickness, is a problem that plagues just about every virtual reality action game. (And which, according to research, affects 60 percent of gamers to a greater or lesser extent.) But even when you start to get used to it, VR games remain physically tiring. When you return to normal reality after an hour, a strange blur always lingers in your head. VR glasses are still not something you put on to relax. (In that regard: it also doesn’t help that you have to shut your cat out before you dare to put on your VR goggles. VR technology suffers from a lot of specific practical problems.)

It’s scary, too scary at times, but afterwards you don’t understand why you would ever want to play Resident Evil on a flat screen again.

As much as a showcase of what the PSVR2 is capable of, late Resident Evil Village also see what the technology cannot yet do. And it’s hard to imagine how those problems, from motion sickness to the stiff gameplay, can be solved quickly. A VR version of The Last of Us of Call of Duty, the kind of games that capture the imagination of the general public and can take the technology to the mainstream are not yet in the pipeline.

That doesn’t mean the PSVR2 has no future. For horror games, in which an immersive experience weighs more than smooth gameplay, VR is an interesting addition. Developers of racing sims like Gran Turismo 7, which also received a nice VR update in the meantime, will continue to look at the technology. (The first time you speed through a corner in a Toyota Aqua S and have to squint at the sun in your rearview mirror, you’ll be sold.) Soothing platform games like Moss: Book II, that put you in space, but don’t let you move, turn out to work surprisingly well. But those are not the games that the casual gamer wants to buy 600 euros glasses for. (After the disappointing number of preorders, Sony has already halved its expectations for the number of PSVR2 goggles sold in the coming year.)