Great PC gaming moments are bite-sized celebrations of some of our favorite gaming memories.
Year: 2021
Developer: Capcom
Honestly, I don’t know why I play Resident Evil games. They often require a combination of skill and speed: two things I struggle with in isolation, let alone at the same time. The most recent example is the baptism of fire, Resident Evil Village’s “survive the attack” sequence, which bears more than a few similarities to a series classic that came before it.
Both Resident Evil 4 and Village begin in a similar fashion: a slow, suspense-building opening with plenty of fiends prowling the undergrowth before the chainsaws and werewolves really pound the fan. With few enemies to fight before those combat-heavy moments, the shock of the impending attack feels all the stronger.
Shortly after the stunning mountaintop of Castle Dimitrescu and its environs, you’re taught how to shoot a werewolf with a gun and it feels like an entire clip has to hit his hairy flesh before it’s felled. That makes the prospect of fighting a few at once intimidating. An army? Insurmountable. Then the tidal wave hits.
Village veterans will know that you only have to “survive” the attack for about four minutes. If you get into it with the mechanics it teaches you – barricade doors with shelves, shoot bags of flour to stun lycans, and so on – it’s pretty easy. First time through, especially if like me you panic quickly, it’s not.
Like the Village Assault in Resi 4, the encounter is essentially a puzzle, but with a starved horde acting as a timer. You’ll need to balance finding gear and supplies with managing your ammo and making sure you’re heading in a sensible direction. You make several micro-decisions on the fly, and I inevitably make most of them wrong as I thrash about. In Village, it’s flour sacks, moveable furniture, and red barrels. In Resi 4 it’s ladders, grenades and a rather persistent man with power tools.
For the duration you are on the brink of death. A dispatched villain is replaced by three more. Then four, then five. It feels impossible because it is: both sections end with the enemy effectively overpowering you, leaving you pondering the horror of the journey ahead. When I finally survived the attack in Resident Evil Village, the mechanics the tutorial had taught me were indelibly etched in my memory. I’ve never been happier to see an interactive closet in my life.
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