Reviewing Monsters: Resident Evil Village

Resident Evil VIII: Village [2021]

(I have drafts of the Revelations games basically done, but I'll post this one first since it's more timely) 

So Resident Evil had a new game this year! Officially simply called 'Resident Evil: Village', but formatted with 'Vill' as the Roman numerals 'VIII', Village is the eighth numbered installment in Capcom's Resident Evil game, picking up with the protagonist of the critically-acclaimed Resident Evil VII. (I did a bit of a stealth revision to my Resident Evil VII monster review article)

And I wasn't actually hyped at all by this game at first, leading up to its release. When the trailers dropped and it all focused on the Victorian-era giant vampire goth lady, I sort of rolled my eyes at it. Like many other video game franchises, Resident Evil had seemed to somewhat join the 'let's be a bit more serious' train with VII. And that's fine! VII is one of, if not the, best-executed story among all the Resident Evil games by a far, far shot. It took the franchise in a good direction, the storytelling beats are great, and the execution is definitely spectacular. It's just that it doesn't really feel that much like a Resident Evil game, though, if not for the fact that the enemies are fungus based creatures. I felt like I had the same experience with the months leading up to the release of Village. The trailers came out and... vampires are cool. Werewolves are neat. Don't get me wrong. Vampires and werewolves and all that gothic stuff are very, very cool! I love them, and I would play video games where it's all about vampires and stuff. It's just that they don't feel particularly creative, and for Resident Evil in particular I was worried that we're straying away from the over-the-top body horror mutation in favour of just swapping one horror trope for another. Oh, we had the swamp beasts in VII, let's go for vampires in VIII.

I was so, so wrong. This game is pretty damn good! Or, at least, from what I can tell by watching people play it. But this is a monster review, not a video game review, so monsters are definitely what we're going to talk about! And since the game is relatively recent, I'm not going to describe the story too much either, unless it pertains to the monsters. The hook is that Ethan Winters, the protagonist of Resident Evil VII, wakes up in an enigmatic mountain village after an unexplained attack on his house that left his wife dead and his daughter kidnapped, where the panicked villagers are besieged by strange creatures and worship an enigmatic cult. Obviously, things get pretty horror-y as Ethan has to fend himself against the mysterious overlords of the region as he infiltrates their castles to get his daughter back, learning many, many things not just about the Resident Evil universe, but about the backstory of what happened in VII.  Without further ado...

Common Enemies:

Lycan

And these are the first enemies of the game, the lycans. Obviously, based on lycanthropes/werewolves of European folklore. In practice, they're basically just stronger, faster and more bestial zombies, leaping and jumping and generally being far more agile than the shamblers that this franchise is normally associated with. A lot of the zombification process in popular culture do resemble a lot with what's originally associated with vampires or werewolves in traditional folklore -- if you get bitten, you get transformed into one of them. The Resident Evil games mostly stray away from this and have the zombie virus be airborne or waterborne, but the Lycans play this particular trope straight. A particularly pivotal moment of our protagonist discovering the true nature of the Lycans was when one of the villagers who had been bitter transformed and essentially went feral, attacking and slaughtering the rest of the villagers. Later on, we discover that the Lycans actually 'reproduce' with the Cadou, a form of parasitic nematode modified by the Mold from Resident Evil VII, making this a more hard-sci-fi form of the Las Plagas from Resident Evil 4. The Cadou are a lot more choosy with their hosts, though, and the berserk Lycans are the result of the parasite and host rejecting each other, leading to mostly just bestial instincts. 

The Lycans are pretty great designs for what they are, though admittedly a good part of it is thanks to the next-gen video game graphics capabilities. Very angry, animal-like humans that still unmistakably look human. And the graphics team truly made me appreciate a type of monster design that I'll normally brush over -- they did a very, very good job at making those Lycan faces look simultaneously intelligent but also feral. And while we don't get much of them, they are able to wield not just hatchets, but also able to use bows and arrows, ride horses, and are clearly intelligent enough (or have a good enough pack mentality) to serve the Four Lords, the primary antagonists of the game. The 'Large Lycan' seen on the right are smart enough to cobble together a makeshift set of armour and two arm-mounted... how do you describe those? Masses of planks of wood and jagged scrap metal? 

Also, I will freely admit that seeing brief glimpses of the demos of the game which just showed Ethan fighting the lycanthropes in the village did initially turn me off, since it seemed like the game just devolved into replacing zombies with lycanthropes and a vampire lord at the end... which sounds cool for a Ravenloft campaign, but not what 'Resident Evil' is to me. But the way these lycanthropes are executed in-game both as video game enemies and as a horror monster presence early in the game before our protagonist got a kitted-out shotgun is pretty damn well done. 

Vârcolac

Next up we have the Vârcolaci, drawing from the Romanian word for 'werewolf'. Or, well, 'wolf demon', but it's essentially used as 'werewolf' as well. These are a bit more literal werewolves, since these are the results of human experimentation in splicing wolf DNA into their spine. This is still a Resident Evil game, and I am happy that even though the setting of the game is still in a Gothic vampire castle with a witch-cult worshipping village, we still have insanely impractical experiments happening in the background. I really don't have much to say here beyond praising the graphics, that really is a feral-looking monster with a lot of very creepy fur and a nasty ghoul-mouth with terrifying glowing eyes. The more I look at the Vârcolac render's face the more creeped out I am, and concept art shows an even more grotesque mouth with a mouth that just looks delightfully wrong. 

The Vârcolac are feral and are essentially used by the Lycans as attack dogs. They tend to run around on all fours, which actually seems to be intentionally made to look awkward since even with longer arms, the human leg structure really isn't meant to allow one to run on all fours. These guys are basically rarer enemies and only a few are found throughout the game in Lycan-infested areas. The red, more flesh-coloured variant on the right, the Vârcolac Alfa, is a secret mini-boss that you find if you backtrack into a certain area but is essentially the same thing. 

Moroaică

Resident Evil Village has a lot more combat compared to its atmosphere-heavy predecessor, but its focus is still on the story and the primary antagonists -- which we'll cover at the end when we cover the bosses. But after clearing the village, Ethan finds himself in Castle Dimitrescu, who are the vampire equivalents of the setting. The vampires have a long, long history of kidnapping women and killing them to drain their blood, and the corpses of their victims are infected by Mold and raised as the Moroaice, drawing their name from a Romanian folklore ghost or vampire. Their backstory is neat and I do like that they're basically just vampire thralls while using Resident Evil's internal themes as an explanation to how they exist. They sure are well-animated and stuff, but they're the zombies of this particular installment. They're sword zombos! I don't think we've ever had sword zombies. 

Samcă

Far, far more interesting is around halfway through the castle, where we find the Samce, who draws their name from a Romanian folkloric demon that takes the place of a hideous old woman that attacks young children or pregnant women. The Samcă are basically Moroaică with wings instead of arms, but that's kind of oversimplifying things. These undead ladies perch and patrol the rooftops of Castle Dimitrescu, acting as fantasy horror gargoyles in all but name. They're also kind of vampires, because those long, tentacle-like tongues lash out to drink blood. Again, I really appreciate this effort of essentially keeping everything in this game consistent with the previously established flesh-mutant monsters, but having so many of them fit into the European penny-dreadful horror monster theme. I didn't quite catch it until I saw the Samcă render without moving, but they really don't have regular arms anymore -- what used to be human arms have exploded out into giant bat wings... and bat wings are, in essence, modified mammalian arms. Except in the Samcă, you can see the origins of what clearly used to be regular human finger anatomy. Nasty!

Hauler

So despite me mentioning the 'Four Lords', two of them really don't get particularly dedicated minions, which is... I understand it thanks to the pacing of the game, and it certainly works, but man, I secretly mourn the loss of the nonexistent puppet and fish-man enemies. Instead we jump from lycanthropes and vampire underlings to the fourth of the Lords, who, spoiler alert, has steampunk cyborg zombies. Yes, turns out that all this kind of ties back into the recurring antagonist organization Umbrella in ways that I will not spoil beyond that, and Heisenberg quickly rose into becoming my favourite bad guy from this game because he has what's basically a version of the secret lab that's quintessential to most Resident Evil games. Only instead of the high-tech basements or underground research stations of previous games, Heisenberg's factory is a mixture of gothic and steampunk.  

These guys, the Haulers, are the lowest of the low, shambling around with a set of steampunk VR goggles that are apparently used to stabilize their neural activity. In keeping with the theme, they have a fucking gear-axe that looks like a weapon from Warhammer 40K, which I found fucking ridiculous until I realized that, no, this is basically what I want Resident Evil to be. I want them to be as over-the-top with their concepts.

Soldat: Eins & Zwei

But the Haulers are failed prototypes who can't fight, and these guys are the real triumph of Heisenberg's madness. The Soldats! Steampunk cyborg zombies! Which really isn't as far-fetched even in the Resident Evil universe, because I remember the T.A.L.O.S. And, uh... I actually can't think of any right now, but I bet that there are a bunch of other cyborg zombie monsters in the many Resident Evil games. The most basic one here is Soldat Eins ('soldier one' in German) on the left, where Heisenberg took a corpse, implanted a Cadou parasite in the center (it's the glowing weak spot core on his chest) and animated everything with electricity. The Soldats are, essentially, mass-produced, weaponized Frankenstein's Monsters. Oh, and they have a giant fucking mean-looking industrial drill grafted onto their arms. Because that's what you do, you graft a giant motherfucking drill onto your soldiers. 

The Soldat Zwei does feel like an upgrade, because of the very simple fact that both his arms are replaced with drills. What's better than one drill arm? Two fucking drill arms. I love how ridiculous this is, and yet it also feels so in-character for a lunatic like Heisenberg to pick the most nasty-looking drill to replace the amputated arms of his little toy soldiers. The Zwei's weak point is on his back, and he's also swapped the VR goggles for a cool gas mask. 

Soldat: Jet & Panzer

Acting more like minibosses, these two guys are even more powerful versions of Soldat Zwei. Soldier Jet has a jetpack! Or, well, a jet... head? Jet-upper-torso? I love that I can't really tell how much of this guy is a corpse, or if it's just a mass of random junk parts covering his upper body like an Iron Man armour. And I love that this somehow works. This guy's hammerhead-shark-like head looks like it's grafted out of broken metal pieces, but somehow it allows the Soldat Jet to fly around and charge at you with its drills. 

Soldat Panzer, meanwhile, foregoes speed for just even more fucking drills, because this Heisenberg fellow seem to be pretty one-minded. I love just how over-the-top this thing is, it's just layers upon layers of scrap metal, and this guy's arms just ends in drills. He's slower, but you have to shoot off all his armour before his reactor core is exposed. 

Ultimately they're not my favourite monster type. I will always like the J'avo and the Las Plagas more, and even the Molded from RE7 are nearer and dearer to my heart. But these are fucking drill-cyborg zombies, and I love the absurdity of them conceptually, and how the game still manages to actually work them into the story in a way that makes sense. 

_________________________________

Bosses:

Dimitrescu Daughters

Playing not only on the 'vampire' trope but also the 'witch' trope are the Dimitrescu family, the first of Four Houses that rule over the unnamed village that this game takes place in. They're called Bela, Cassandra and Daniela, and they basically play the role of a recurring antagonist that keep pursuing and attacking Ethan as he runs around that particular large level of the game, the Dimitrescu castle. They're crazy, and they're apparently based on the Brides of Dracula except they're the children of the main vampire character. Neat and thematic, but they're kind of boring...

...wait, instead of turning into smoke or a swarm of bats, they turn into a swarm of flies? Okay, okay, that's actually kind of neat. I like my bugs, but a lot of species of flies are actually blood-sucking. That is a nice bit of detail. But then come the revelation that the three daughters weren't exactly human, or reanimated corpses, but rather, well... a literal mass of Cadou parasites that take the form of hundreds of blowflies, and, when combined with the Mold, ends up re-merging together into the form of their humanoid hosts. It's left ambiguous whether the 'personalities' of the three daughters are leftovers of the dead women that got turned into these walking fly-swarms, or if they developed new personalities after 'rising', but man, okay, they just went into being a variant of a common horror monster trope into a monster that ticked every single column in features that I like in a monster.  

Turning into a swarm of flies doesn't only explain the vampire tropes associated with the daughters -- drinking blood, passing through walls and turning into a swarm of flying creatures -- but also the weaknesses! Ethan finds out that the only way to actually make the daughters vulnerable is to expose them into the cold, frigid air of the mountainous region outside. Which, visually, really resembles how vampires are traditionally weak to sunlight since Ethan is stalked by the "vampires" within the castle, and he ends up killing the three daughters one by one in places where he has the opportunity to trap them where they are exposed to the light -- which also brings in the cold air with them. Very, very cool and very creative. I actually do like that in the RE-universe, it's the existence of these Lords that most likely inspired the classic folktales of vampires, werewolves and the like instead of the other way around. 

Countess Dimitrescu

The internet essentially exploded with fan art of Lady Dimitrescu here, who is very heavily featured in the promotional material of this game, because she is... how does the kids these days put it? "Big tiddy goth GF" or something like that? The picture doesn't really indicate it, but Countess Alcina Dimitrescu is not just a pale, well-dressed woman, but she is a big woman. Which apparently a lot of people found super attractive. It's not my thing, but I do admit that she's got a pretty neat dress style. Without spoiling too much, Lady Dimitrescu is a gigantic woman and she's also a vampire! Like her daughters, she's transformed into her current state with a Cadou parasite, essentially giving her longevity if not outright immortality... but also causes her to develop a need to consume fresh blood regularly, which she has been doing for more than sixty years by luring maidens into her castle and then turning them into part of her 'wine stock'. She and Heinsenberg are the two most vocal and confrontational of the Four Lords, having the most dialogue and scenes among the five primary antagonists of the games. Very interestingly, while they're all nasty people who did a very terrible thing to Ethan, I also did like the little plotline of how Dimitrescu gets increasingly unhinged and furious as Ethan picks off and kills her daughters one by one, and she gets even more frustrated that her master, Mother Miranda, might see her as a failure. 

This image doesn't show it, but in addition to being a giant that's easily twice the size of Ethan, she's also able to extend her fingers into massive, tapering claws like Marvel's Lady Deathstrike. Sharp enough to very demonstratably amputate limbs. Lady D essentially serves as the equivalent to the famous 'Mr. X' in the Resident Evil 2 remake, an 'intelligent' super-powerful enemy that stalks you across a large map as you try to complete puzzles and shit, and can't be truly killed until a specific story point. 

She is a cool giant vampire, and making her a giant vampire instead of just a regular-sized goth countess is a very smart decision. Yet I actively eye-rolled when I saw her hyped up as the primary antagonist. I really should've had more faith in Capcom, though, because:

Countess Dimitrescu, Monster Form

Yeah! Hell yeah! With the new direction that RE7 was taking the franchise, I actually wasn't sure that Lady D was going to get a proper, monsterified zombie-monster form, but she has and what a glorious one she has. The designers specifically confirmed that all of this is a pun on "Dracula", which literally means "son of the dragon", so Lady Dimitrescu, based on the vampiric dracula, turns into a giant zombie dragon! And what a fucking nasty dragon she is, made entirely of mutated zombie white flesh, with giant bat wings, tentacles growing out of her dragon legs, and that mouth! That mouth that's just like seven different sets of overlapping jaws ending with a tongue that has a lamprey mouth. And Lady Dimitrescu's humanoid form is still there, bursting out of the dragon's back, albeit with a mass of white tentacles growing out of her humanoid spine and head. The end result, especially when seen from afar, gives the impression of a woman riding a dragon, which is a very cool visual for such a fucked-up monster up close. 

I really don't have much else to say here other than to just really comment on how cool this is, and how I genuinely didn't expect this particular set of enemies to mutate and transform into giant Resident Evil monsters. Thank goodness I was proven wrong! The fight against Lady Dimitrescu happens on top of a castle tower for extra fantasy-RPG goodness, and, frankly, I actually thought that it was an interesting subversion because while Dimitrescu does have one of the most major and memorable roles, she's also the first one of the antagonists to be taken out, which isn't what I was expecting from the viral marketing. 

The Baby

Good fucking lord, this thing. So after the long, classic-action-dungeon Dimitrescu castle that's straight out of Resident Evil 4, we switch genres not just to horror, but to some Silent Hill style psychological horror with House Beneviento. Which barely even features any enemies, and is mostly just psychological creepiness and a lot of creepy moments of a fucked-up hallucination causing Ethan Winters to get even more mentally screwed-up. One of the themes of this game is Ethan's infant child being taken away from him, and I won't say more beyond that. 

But as Ethan wanders around trying to solve a morbid puzzle around a mannequin of his dead wife in an oddly immaculate and modern hospital-morgue location, suddenly everything goes dark, the sounds of a baby crying starts up and this thing starts stalking Ethan all over the place. Man, if solving puzzles while being stalked by Mr. X or Nemesis or Lady Dimitrescu was stressful enough, imagine having this thing stalk you while making creepy baby gurgling noises. What the fuck, man. To make things extra worse, Ethan can't even defend himself against this thing, which makes this maybe one of the few Resident Evil enemies that you can't even harm. 

And just look at this thing. It's obviously meant to be some sort of nasty miscarried fetus of some sort, but with its head stretched so long and have it yawn so large so grotesquely. In fact, the animation for the Baby killing Ethan is by eating him feet-first! While happily going "DADA YUMMY!" And the Baby crawls around on those nasty, blood-coloured deformed arms, but the lower half of the baby's body is twisted a full 180 degrees so that the legs are oriented the wrong way, and the end result is an absolutely nasty slug-monster that... my god, I really can't do this design justice. I normally don't like these sort of gory stuff and tend to find them juvenile, but this one? This one was sufficiently disturbing. A giant baby slug nightmare thing! And the most interesting part is? The Baby doesn't even exist, not really -- turns out almost the entirety of the House Beneviento level is a hallucination, so it's likely that the Baby is just a figment of Ethan's imagination, a symbol of Ethan's subconscious fear of losing his child and the true nature of that child, like the good Silent Hill game. One of the biggest "what the fuck" moments, and while I tend to roll my eyes at these sort of things, it's well-executed enough and fits with the Beneviento House theme and I really don't mind. 

Donna Beneviento & Angie

I must kind of confess that I expected more of Donna Beneviento? She barely has a role in the actual story of the game proper, although her role in the backstory is pretty neat. She's the one responsible for creating hallucinations with the fungus that she cultivates. And if nothing else, I always really abhor the idea of haunted dolls and shit, I find them pretty fucking scary! Donna Beneviento's whole segment is essentially themed around a combination of ghosts, poltergeists and haunted dolls, and in addition to the aforementioned Baby level, her 'boss fight' also involves you navigating her haunted house of murderous dolls while chasing her main puppet-doll that she speaks from, Angie. Angie does most of the speaking for her because she's shy, and implied to be suffering from some form of dissociative identity disorder or something equivalent to that.

Again, while the puppet dolls actually do move around even outside of hallucinations, turns out that Donna is mentally controlling them because she put parts of her Cadou parasite within them. When Ethan "fights" Angie, the puppet head shatters to reveal the writhing, tentacled fleshy parasite within... though when the hallucination clears turns out that Ethan is stabbing the face of the real Donna? It's a weird and different level, and I'm honestly kind of sad that we never got a fight against a mutated Donna and/or Angie. The opening cinematic identifies House Beneviento as the 'Weaver', a very cool spider-themed scarecrow puppet figure, and while what we got is pretty cool, I kind of wished Donna mutated into a giant spider scarecrow puppet ghost ventriloquist lady, you know? 

Salvatore Moreau

The third of the Four Lords is Salvatore Moreau, a hunchbacked simpleton that seemed to draw on the trope of horror villains like Igor, though his name also is a nod on the classic story Island of Doctor Moreau, which features animal-human hybrids. Turns out that he's a bit more involved than I thought he would be, especially when his cloak comes off and we see what's under it. It's not a hunchback, Moreau is just a mass of pretty nasty-looking cysts, pustules and tumours. And in classic Resident Evil fashion, there's obviously an eyeball stuck in there, and when he gets angry tentacles sprout out and wiggle around from his back-cysts. I thought that Moreau is a representation of something like the Creature from the Black Lagoon or a Kappa, but turns out he's based on Lovecraftian monsters! And you know what? Between the aquatic theme and being a deformed fish-man, I can kind of see it. And he is a fish-man, because he actually zips around pretty quickly in the water, which is where you finally see his uncloaked form. 

Poor Moreau was definitely the one that got the shortest end of the stick as far as Cadou mutations go, since the other three members of the Four Lords at least looked reasonably normal, even if Lady D is a giant and has a hunger for blood. It honestly makes one feel bad for Moreau -- the dude's clearly a simpleton and is so desperate for validation, for his 'mother's' approval and to not be mocked by his 'siblings'... of course, he also participated in the nasty things done to Ethan's daughter and is trying to murder him. Moreau has a true form that makes the Lovecraftian-genre theme a bit more prominent:

Salvatore Moreau, Mutated Form

In his actual boss fight, Ethan has to run around a whole large area of a half-sunken village with boards and metal planks littering the place, while a massive, gigantic fish-like creature bursts out of the water periodically and attacks you. Unlike his siblings, Moreau can actually choose to mutate back and forth between this giant form and his humanoid form, and... and once you really get a good look at him when you drive him onto land, what a fucking nasty monster this giant fish is. A massive petal-like mouth, with Moreau's human form poking out of it? Some semblance of a hunchback, only now it's filled with nothing but eyeballs? And a bunch of errant tentacles? A bunch of tiny, humanoid impractical arms, and then two massive larger ones that he uses to slowly drag himself around on land? The rest of his body tapers off into a fishy tail not very apparent here -- here is a concept art with the 'mouth' closed, and yeah, that does look like something from the Lovecraft genre. 

The battle with Moreau takes place in two phases -- the first one is a combination of platforming and solving puzzles, where Ethan needs to get out of the massive lake with a sunken village in it while a giant fish tries its best to murder him. And then later on Ethan drains the water, stranding Moreau in a swampy area and he has to duck in and out while a still-gigantic fish-fungus-zombie-monster tries to squish him and create massive acid rains. Honestly, pretty fucking cool for someone set up as the loser of the bunch. 

Conceptually, I don't think anything in this page is ever going to beat the fly swarm vampire, but visually, Moreau is probably one of the straight-up coolest of the many flesh-beast mutations that we've had in Resident Evil. I think one of the ones that I really felt could've been more interesting are the humans that just turn into mere giant animals, which we had a bunch of in Resident Evil 6. Moreau here is clearly so much more fucked up than a fish even though he's got fishy anatomy, but I love that from a distance he still has the silhouette of some sort of a giant swamp fish with arms. 

Uriaș/Uriaș Străjer/Uriaș Drac

Sort of a recurring miniboss, Uriaș (Romanian for 'giant') is... a gigantic Lycan with a badass mass of beard and a big-ass spiky hammer. The wiki lists Uriaș as a single character, but I'm pretty sure you kill him twice, most notably in the Stronghold level. He sure is a huge guy! Uriaș Străjer ("Sentinel Giant") has a big fuck-off mace with pretty cool spikes, he wears a wolf mask and has more prominent parasite tentacles growing out of him. Apparently Străjer is the brother of regular Uriaș, and is fought by Chris Redfield. Another variant that appears multiple times is called Uriaș Drac ("Devil Giant"), and he doesn't have a beard. Or a coat. And he has a relatively mundane-looking axe. He's just a tall, wounded muscleman, and basically acts as optional minibosses.

The first Uriaș is actually kind of cool, and it's neat to have a 'boss' for the Lycanthropes. But I actually found it surprising that Uriaș isn't actually a member of the Four Lords, and is just a non-speaking boss that essentially gets degraded into a miniboss with his two variants. It's basically a Lycan-flavoured version of El Gigante or Ndesu or Ogroman from previous installations. A giant zombie man! This one has a pretty cool weapon and a pretty cool beard, but otherwise he's honestly just kind of there. A neat one to add just a bit of variation to this game, though. 

Sturm

It's hard to realize what's going on here, but Heisenberg has replaced Sturm ("storm" in German) entire upper half of this Soldat's body with a motherfucking airplane engine, complete with a spinning rotor. Because, uh, that's clearly where you go from 'graft drill arms onto zombies'. Clearly there is some tactical advantage to replacing everything above the diaphragm with a fucking airplane engine. If nothing else it does make for a 'fuck, don't get close' because this guy runs around with spinning airplane rotors slicing up everything in its way. I actually feel sorry for Sturm here, who actually amputated his own arms with his own propeller. He's got a spinning fan of death instead of a face, I'd feel sorry for him if the sight of him wasn't such a huge 'run away from this motherfucker' red warning sign for you. 

Sturm stalks Ethan around Heisenberg's factory, serving as the miniboss as Ethan fights other Soldats and generally runs away from the sound of biplane rotor engines before finally fighting him at the end. The poor guy even explodes into flames as he dies! Honestly, if this doesn't cement Heisenberg as the mad scientist of the batch, I don't know what would. Speaking of which:

Karl Heisenberg

Yeah, Heisenberg is, I believe, the member of the Four Lords you first meet. And what a stylish way of introducing himself, because -- and you can't tell here from still images -- Heisenberg has Magneto powers. As in, his first introduction has him levitate a mass of scrap metal and encase Ethan in it, and later on he casually just uses magnetism superpowers to create ladders that float in the air and create a massive steampunk hammer with gears and rusty engine parts he has lying around. And it's... it's bizarre. The Resident Evil universe has had a lot of unrealistic mutations, but most of those tend to involve the creation of flesh or organs. Heisenberg just straight-up has X-Men superpowers, and the game handwaves it by saying that apparently, his Mold-Cadou mutation gave him powers equivalent to an electric stingray. Which, uh, really doesn't make sense since electric rays have electricity instead of magnet powers, and electromagnetism doesn't quite translate into Magneto powers. But this is a universe where Chris Redfield can punch a man-sized boulder into smithereens inside a volcano, so I really shouldn't be questioning logic here. 

I still find Heisenberg really weird conceptually, though I will admit that making the mad scientist archetype into a crass mechanic is kind of an interesting direction. Heisenberg is probably one of the more vocal characters, too, actually at one point trying to recruit Ethan to be his ally. Of course, he eventually fuses himself to his mass of mechanical spare parts, essentially transforming himself into a giant junkyard Transformer Gundam Evangelion Doom-bot straight out of Warhammer 40K. You know what? I ain't even complaining. It doesn't quite fit the gothic setting of everything else, but giant mechanical monsters is a horror trope, and at least Heisenber doesn't look too modern?

While the game doesn't really point it out -- and the actual in-game fight is pretty chaotic -- looking at a still of the model shows that it's not just Heisenberg encased within a massive mecha or whatever. No, in typical Resident Evil fashion, Heisenberg has mutated into a massive flesh-thing that fused with the 'torso' of his mecha, which at least makes him count as a giant zombie monster. His face is actually stretched into a Cronenberg-esque screaming flesh-bulb at the end of the mutated form's... well, it's still his head, isn't it? Mutant Heisenberg ends up becoming a giant head-torso of flesh and metal with two giant construction vehicle buzzsaw arms, but honestly? I... I don't mind him all that much? He's visually the one that's the biggest oddity compared to all of the other more gothic villains, but at the same time I felt like it's also appropriate for the character. 

Mother Miranda

The cult-like leader and main antagonist of the game, Mother Miranda is worshipped as a god-like deity not only by the villagers, but by the Four Lords -- who act like scared children at the prospect of betraying or disobeying Miranda. Thanks to some revelations at the end, it's also revealed that Miranda is tied into the greater Resident Evil universe at large, finally tying in VII and VIII into the greater storyline beyond the presence of Chris Redfield. Again, I won't be spoiling too much about Miranda's backstory, only that she's really ancient, she's trying to experiment with immortality (the Four Lords are her attempts at doing so, and in one way or another, are deemed failures by her), and her source of mutation is the original 'Mould' that led to all the monsters in VII and VIII. Without spoiling too much, it's actually an interesting way to take the storyline from VII and both expand it forwards while also simultaneously building up a backstory for it. 

Miranda's 'base' form is a masked woman with a clergy-like outfit, but with ten black angelic wings. There's definitely a 'witch' theme going on with how Miranda is first presented, but things quickly go towards 'fallen angel' or 'devil'. And since the villagers basically built a cult worshipping her, it kind of makes sense that she looks kind of angelic even if all my anime senses are tingling on how she's very obviously a video game boss. I love that the fallen-angel-priestess lady is a fungus monster. 

When the fight begins, thogh, Miranda gets wrapped up by massive fungal tendrils and transforms into this form, identified by the wiki as Miranda's "Mutated Form". It's essentially the same design if we boil it down to basic descriptions, but without any of the more heroic or holy trappings. All her priestess-like clothing has been ripped off, her halo is cracked and shattered, her claws are elongated in a pretty nasty way and her wings and skirt are masses of raggedy mould. Her face is a bit hard to see here, but the upper half is basically covered with a small carpet of mould, with a single eyeball at its center. I still love that one of the more badass enemies in this franchise is just sentient, nasty mould, and this particular character is a mould angel. Or rather, a mold devil, at this point, isn't she? Very neat, and probably my favourite Miranda form? She spends the first phase of her fight in this form. I like everything going on here, and the buildup and the battlefield Ethan confronts Miranda in just really adds to the cool factor of this boss fight. 

Miranda alternates between her reular form and two others that the Wiki call, respectively, her "Winged Form" and her "Spider Form". Very cool! The Winged form is basically the same design as her default one, just with larger, more bird-like wings, and she can somehow conjure fireballs. Are they mould fireballs? I mean, I know that puffballs and cannonball fungi can discharge their spores with force. Is that what Mother Miranda is doing to conjure her fireballs? Or am I just thinking too hard about the giant scary heretic fallen angel? A different attack animation has her summon streams of what looks to be chemical fluid to create explosive balls, so it might just be that but faster?

Miranda's next phase is her "Spider Form", where her wings have tapered off but solidified into giant jointed spider legs. I am always a sucker for these sort of back-mounted spider legs, a la Doctor Octopus from Marvel comics. This one has her scuttle around the ground and try to physically skewer and run you down. Actually kind of a dynamic one! It's pretty awesome, and I wouldn't think that such an otherwise humanoid mutant monster ends up becoming so cool, and I'm someone who tends to be ambivalent at this sort of monster design aesthetic. 

The Mutamycete/Megamycete

This is less of a boss fight but more of the plot device. After Miranda's defeat, she merges with the Megamycete ("Fungal Root" in the original Japanese), which is this huge, glowing mass of... well, just fungi. This is the source of the Mold that causes the whole storyline in VII and VIII, and this is essentially the equivalent for the 'devil' or the 'sealed elder god' in the horror story theme, being worshipped as the "Black God" by villagers as part of Mother Miranda's religion. Miranda's whole plan involves the property of the mutamycete colony that allows minds and personalities to still exist within the fungal network, which is such an interesting spin on the fact that fungi like mould are arguably simultaneously a single growing organism but also a colony.

Anyway, withot spoiling the story too much, Miranda-mycete is a gigantic building-sized fungus flower with a bunch of glowing polyps at the center. I haven't had a chance to mention it, but during the fight against Miranda, the fungal network running underneath the village essentially goes wild, creating gigantic hyphae that are able to easily slap helicopters out of the sky, and these hyphae look like gnarled, knobbly trees, which form the 'haunted forest' for the final showdown with the witches. They really commit into trying to spin the mould monsters to fit the horror aesthetic, and it's pretty amazing. I kind of actually wished we had maybe a couple of levels with the Mould enemies from Resident Evil VII to further tie it in together, but I guess Mother Miranda's experiments in creating the Cadou means that the fungal monsters in the village are all just that much more advanced?

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And that does it for the bestiary of Resident Evil Village. It's a lot more comprehensive than VII, and... and while I do like that VII basically took the idea of 'fungus monster' and based every single one of its monsters on that, VII also felt very, very lacking in terms of monster variety and creativity. They did amazing work with the little they showed us, but a wide selection of weird monster variations is why I fell in love with this franchise in the first place. There are some weird ones here because of the need to homage certain tropes of classic horror monsters, but honestly? Honestly, I actually end up really liking the monster selection here. Good show, Village. Do more of these, please! And if VII and Village are anything to go by, they finally are starting to characterize the bad guys, which is definitely a huge plpus point for me. We have way too many generic 'shoot zombies and slightly mutated zombies' games in the market, what sets Resident Evil apart is how creative they can get with their monster design.