So many games that I’ve loved have come out in 2022, all of which I should have written about. That new Kirby? Might be the best Kirby of all time. Elden Ring? I’ve never been able to get into a Soulslike but that one actually held my attention. Xenoblade Chronicles 3? One of the best JRPGs I’ve ever played. But none of those were able to get my lazy ass to sit down and actually write about them. Maybe I will some day. But you know what did? Capcom put out a demo for Resident Evil Village. It’s the same demo they put out before, but now you can play in third person. Let’s talk about it.

In like a week from now, Resident Evil Village Gold Edition will be out, bringing with it a number of enhancements. The most prominent of those, in my opinion, is the ability to now play the game from a third person perspective. I’ve been a little skeptical of this since it was announced. Village was designed as a first person game. Could simply moving the game to third person even work?

For the most part, I’d say yes. If you’ve played either of the two recent Resident Evil remakes, you’ll feel right at home. The controls are more or less the same, allowing you to aim and move at the same time which was a big deal back when they made that change. It’s also the same controls that were used in first person mode, which really drives home how similar the two styles really are.

It’s not all great though. By default, the game has aim assist turned on, and I found it to be way more obnoxious than helpful. When I held down the left trigger to aim, it would lock onto the middle of the nearest enemy and wouldn’t allow me to adjust where I was aiming, which effectively made headshots impossible. Was I doing something wrong? I don’t remember that ever being an issue in any of the recent Resident Evil games. But whatever, going into the menus and turning it off solved that. Not a big deal, but with it as the default it was annoying. I also found the dungeon-like part of the demo to be way easier to get lost in this time around, which was annoying. But that might be a me thing.

Speaking of the demo itself, this is literally the castle demo that they put out before the release of the main game. And yes, that’s the castle, not the village demo. Remember when they put out the demo, and you could do the village on certain days and the castle in other days and then both on some more days? Well, this is just the castle demo. And it still has a one hour time limit. Pretty dumb.

So, overall, if you haven’t played Village yet and the reason for that is that you were hung up on it being first person, this third person mode seems totally fine. And Village is a great game, so you should play it!

Since this post is pretty short, I thought I’d also include a little housekeeping. So, the way I’ve always gotten screenshots off of my Xbox was to upload them to my Onedrive and then download them to my PC. For whatever reason, Series X screenshots always show up super dark when I do this, see my RE:verse impressions post to see what I mean. But I’ve found a new way to get my screenshots, using the Xbox app on my phone, so that shouldn’t be an issue any more! And maybe that’ll help me actually write some stuff. Ugly Xbox screenshots were a frustration that made it harder to write about games on the system.

And hey, I think I might try doing this again. Turns out, I just like talking about video games, so why am I not doing this all the time? I’m not going to make any promises, considering how much I’ve failed to keep up on this blog recently, but it’s definitely something I want to try to get back to.

And that’s it! If you’re still around, thanks for sticking with me. Hopefully I’ll have more stuff in the near future.