Want to feel zombies and degenerate villagers attacking you? You’ll need a strong heart to don your virtual reality headset and launch two of the latest productions for Sony’s PSVR 2, Resident Evil Village and The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners chapter 2 Retribution. We managed to achieve moments of pure fear, a little bit of nausea, but also frustration from a still imperfect game mechanic.
Posted at 4:27pm
We often have the impression that we are dealing with prototypes and unfinished experiments in virtual reality. The games there tend to be shorter, the concepts vying for ingenuity, but finished works are rarely offered. This is not the case at all with Resident Evil Village in PSVR2, which takes up the whole scenario of Capcom’s great game released in May 2021 and which we gave 4.5 stars out of 5.
We’re not going to claim to have remade the entire game we completed back then at 9pm in virtual reality. The rhythm to tame such a format is much slower, you can’t spend three or four hours in a row there without getting a serious headache.
No wonder, since the original game triggered this feeling of claustrophobia and danger at every turn. We passed the first three tables of Resident Evil Village PSVR2, where we have no choice to play in first person. It embodies Ethan Winters, who wants to find his baby Rose in a cursed village in Eastern Europe.
Get used to the horror
From the first minutes we are immersed in the horror of dozens of possessed villagers pouncing on us from all sides. With both our hands clearly visible, one of which is mangled, we have to play fast to get our weapons out of our chests. The knife is always at hand, a revolver is accessible on the left side and you can draw your long gun by pulling your arm to your right shoulder. These two weapons, like in any Resident Evil game, are sometimes completely useless when you run out of ammo, which is inevitable.
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The first few moments of being glued to these bloodthirsty villagers are just traumatic. Their face is getting closer to you, they bite you and you have to fight to escape. After a few struggles, however, you get used to the proposal, which is so over the top that it becomes unreal. An unexpected benefit of the PSVR 2, whose image isn’t as well defined as it is on a TV, is that the note has been forced to emphasize the clues that will help you solve the puzzles. Keys, documents and tools that could easily be overlooked in the classic version are more visible here.
Bloody variants
The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners – Chapter 2: Retribution continues in over-the-top and very hypocritical horror. However, the story, which can be completed in about fifteen hours, is more tenuous. We embody a tourist who got lost in the city of New Orleans, post-apocalyptic version. We’re stuck between the dead and groups of people at war, with a first-person perspective again, pursued by a man with an ax that nothing seems to stop.
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A flashlight is always slung from your jacket, a backpack slung over your left shoulder, and a long gun slung over your right shoulder.
Here we had fun offering gory variants to overwhelm our enemies with an axe, a chainsaw or with big hits when we have no choice. We go from the streets of New Orleans to infamous corners, abandoned bars or ruined buildings from which the zombies are rising. And while sometimes you’ll have to rack your brains to get out of trouble, more often it’s about using your ammo and weapons properly. A long tutorial of almost half an hour will prepare you for it.
Here, too, the horror is so rough that it quickly loses its traumatic character.
fascination and reservations
Whether it’s Resident Evil Village or The Walking Dead, we’re dealing with finely crafted games here, with a very nice design, especially for the first game, but the mechanics are very frustrating in both cases: when we manage to use his weapons quickly summarize the classic version, through a few key combinations on the joystick, the exercise in virtual reality is much more complicated. You have to simulate the gesture of getting the gun, which encourages immersion but requires dexterity. Not easy when armies of villains surround you.
The same applies to melee combat: make sure you have enough space because you will constantly bump into the furniture in your room. Make sure no one sees you. Guaranteed to look ridiculous.
Once again we have the demonstration of a prediction losing feathers: no, virtual reality will not replace the screen, at least not with current technology. It’s a perfectly tasty spice that’s impressive to experiment with, but doesn’t make for long hours of adventure. Unless you have an inhuman tolerance for virtual reality.
Tested on PSVR 2 with copies from Capcom and Skydance Interactive