Village Diaries #2: Hands-on Parenting

(Note: This is a game play diary of The Village: Resident Evil VIII. These are rough and casual thoughts and analysis as I play through for the first time. Much of what follows can be considered spoilers.)

Realism and Crucifixes

“Your right hand comes off?” - Leon S. Kennedy, Resident Evil IV

I didn’t expect this whole blog to be about Ethan Winters’ hands, but here we are. After having two fingers bitten off by a wolf-man in my first diary entry, it became apparent that the next step in the journey was to complete the weird picture lock on the castle gate in classic Resident Evil fashion. For a little while, Ethan’s hands were alright, unharmed they helped him find a group of fearful villagers, escape their burning stronghold by ramming a truck through a wall (driving indoors is another one of Ethan’s things), and gain entry into Castle Dimitrescu – The Village’s first big level.

Even in the castle, when things started to get uncomfortably familiar with a family of (presumably immortal) sadists fighting over how Ethan should be ritualistically dispatched, the hands remained unscathed for a short time. The first organized attempt at slaughtering Ethan was a Jigsaw-style death maze, which – though filled with sharp spikes and crushing ceilings – was primarily focused on a more complete death, rather than digital dismemberment. I thought the hands were safe, after that one nod to the previous game. But I was so wrong. After I escaped the labyrinth, a bunch of lady bug-vampires got me, and that’s when the real hand shit started.

A 10 foot tall goth influencer named Lady Dimitrescu and her three “children” strung Ethan up on chains, piercing both hands with metal hooks. To escape, Ethan ripped through the rest of his hand, finding freedom by tearing the hook from his palm through the gap between his finger bones. Having been raised in the Catholic school system, the math on this  checked out for me. My religion teachers, in their constant quest to keep their rubrics in line with concurrent science curriculum, would sometimes point to a crucifix and tell me and my class that you can’t crucify a person through their hands because of the potential of rippage. “Jesus couldn’t have died that way,” they’d say. “He’d slip right out.”

This is some other poor soul’s hand. Buddy, I get it.

The Hand-First Experience

I’ve started laughing at the hand trauma. It’s become playful, if grotesque. I cringe at it, for sure, given my interaction with Ethan’s nightmare world is a hand-first experience. My directions enter his world via button presses and trigger pulls using my own fingers, and his subsequent suffering comes back to me through vibrations in my handheld controller. Ethan and I have a tactile relationship, and so when I see bad things happen to his hands, that’s the most immediate way for me to understand he’s in trouble. After all, I’m sure if I could see his entire body – which at this point has been swarmed by flesh eating bugs, drenched in anonymous pools of blood, mauled by lycans, snacked on by vampires, and multiple times whacked with a hammers the size of distillery barrels – I would have other things to laugh at, but they wouldn’t feel so immediately relatable.

The apex (so far) of Ethan’s hand-based passion play came during his first playable confrontation with Lady Dimitrescu, who attempted to extract revenge in the castle catacombs with a hyperbolic Freddy-Kruger glove. In my attempt to escape her advances, she severed Ethan’s right hand, itemizing the dismembered appendage (just like last time), and making it impossible to use any weapons in self-defense.

Again, you just have to laugh at the poor guy.

Ethan miraculously reattached his hand Astar style, and it became usable immediately. He just pressed stump to stump during a small cut scene, poured some herbal medicine on it, and it reattached, fully functional. Cartoonish? Sure. Miraculous? Yes. But it seems to reference Baker-style regenerative powers form the black mold bioweapons our hero was exposed to in Resident Evil VII. Even in this cold creature feature set in unspecific video game Europe, Ethan can’t escape the Bayou. And he realizes it too, punching a wall at one point and moaning, “Why the fuck is this happening again?”

It’s hard to tell, form this angle, but this woman is gargantuan.

Daddy Horror Versus Mommy Horror

So far, that’s definitely what Resident Evil VIII is all about: the terrible cycle of trauma resurfacing. All the details are new, but the important stuff is the same. It’s snowy this time instead of swampy, and the zombies are werewolves, but Ethan is still trying to protect what remains of his family from scary monsters and super freaks.

That’s not to say the small details don’t matter. Dimitrescu Castle and the Baker Estate represent vastly different types of horror, even if Ethan’s torture follows the same rhythms. Those differences are embodied by the respective family heads. Jack Baker is a Texas Chainsaw distillation of male rage and brutality, while Lady Dimitrescu is a more precise, razor sharp (literally), empathetic monster. They both infantilize Ethan, the daddy and mommy of their little Umbrella fiefdoms, but their methods of bad parenting set the tonal differences for their respective games.

In Resident Evil VII I was terrified to step foot in new spaces, dreading I would encounter Jack and some kind of garden tool variant or chainsaw scissor, partially because his supernatural aspect was undefined, his temperament was unpredictable, and his influence was localized. He would break through the walls of his own living space to bludgeon Ethan to death with a shovel, but only if he noticed my trespassing. In The Village though, the horror is easier to accept because the supernatural elements are all right our in the open and they are everywhere. From Lady D’s towering highest, to the spectral abilities of her daughters. The angry, stomping domestic daddy horror has been swapped for the omnipresent, spooky awareness of mommy horror.

For Ethan, those differences in tone probably don’t mean too much. But for me, they are doing an amazing job at keeping this specific ride on the trauma-coaster fresh and fun.

How it started: Drove a truck through some walls to break out of a burning building
How it’s going: Hand chopped off (again) then reattached (again)