With the release of Resident Evil Village right around the corner, Capcom has been teasing fans of the franchise with short, playable demos of the game that is to come. One of these short demos allows for players to briefly explore the game’s main location, Castle Dimitrescu, home to this entry’s new and deadly antagonists.
With the demo, unfortunately, being only 30 minutes long, it’s likely that many players will have rushed past a lot of features that the demo has to offer in order to complete it. Though upon first glance, many of these features may appear useless or simply decorative, many of them actually reveal more about the upcoming title than expected.
10 Treasures
A new feature that comes with this entry of the Resident Evil franchise appears to be treasures, a type of collectible that is scattered across the castle for the player to collect. These treasures also appear to be tradable with the Duke, a merchant who resides in the castle and offers a variety of goods.
Players get to find a couple of these treasures during the demo, such as a crimson glass that can be found in the spawn room. It’s suggested that to collect all of these treasures, however, players will need to use their brain and solve some basic puzzles to collect them, as demonstrated by the crystal fragment which requires the player to shoot it off of a painting frame in order to collect it.
9 Imagery Of Children
Across all of the demos released so far, many of them have contained some intense imagery of children, and the castle demo is certainly no exception. As the player makes their way around the castle, some may notice that a lot of the paintings or carvings scattered around often depict a mother with her child.
Though this may first appear as a decorative choice, it is likely that this detail is intentional and gives fans of the franchise a hint as to what the story of the game may entail. A connection that can be made between this and the plot of the game could be how the protagonist, Ethan, is searching for his abducted daughter or how the antagonists in the game often refer to each other as ‘mother’ or ‘daughter’.
8 Safe Zones
A staple feature of the franchise that looks as though it’ll be making a reappearance in Resident Evil Village are safe zones. For those who don’t know what they are, safe zones are areas in the game where enemies aren’t able to follow the player into and gamers can let their guard down for a brief moment.
Though this isn’t directly confirmed in the demo, the lack of enemies along with the notorious peaceful music playing in the background strongly indicates that the safe zones will be making a very welcome comeback.
7 Weapon Upgrades
It looks like with the new Resident Evil entry comes a new and improved weapons system, with this one appearing to contain a weapon modifying system, something that the franchise has lacked in earlier entries. To access and unlock the weapon upgrades, the player must find the Duke and pay for the upgrades using a currency called Lei.
This weapon upgrade system should finally give players the reasoning to hold onto all of their weapons instead of disposing of them to save up on the limited inventory space.
6 The Four Wives
If the player searches around the safe zone containing the Duke, they should find a pile of letters laying on the table next to the miniature castle. In the letters, titled the Noshteyn’s Labyrinths, it is revealed that the original owner of the castle unexpectedly took his own life upon the complete construction of the castle.
Further into the letter, the player is informed that the castle contains four labyrinths each home to a crystallized corpse of one of the owner’s four wives. For the players who haven’t yet pieced it together, this will likely be the main objective of the game, to enter each labyrinth and obtain something that resides there. This idea is further cemented by a puzzle that resides in the main lobby of the castle, which contains four statues with each missing a crucial piece.
5 Schedule
While exploring around the castle, players can find a schedule on a side table next to the painting of the three daughters. On the schedule, there are three entries, the first about a ‘delivery’ of one male and three females, another about a meeting between Mother Miranda and Lady Dimitrescu, and the final about a business discussion with the Duke.
Though the schedule may not contain a lot of information, there is still a lot that players can learn from the brief text. First of all, the schedules informs the player that shipments of people are being brought into the castle, perhaps this could indicate the presence of an ally in the game, or something far more sinister. It also informs us of the names of what appears to be some future antagonists, one being the infamous fan-favorite Lady Dimitrescu.
4 Diary Entries
After being chased by one of the ladies of the castle, Players will find themselves in an all too familiar-looking basement. Once here, Players will find some crumpled pages that appear to be diary entries on the top of a barrel. In the diary, players read from the perspective of a servant who worked at the castle’.
In the diary, the servant mentions how she was fearing for her life after she angered the ladies of the castle by opening a set of curtains. Judging from the surroundings that the diary is found in, it doesn’t look like they took too fondly to her actions. From this diary, players can determine more than just the servant’s fate but also a potential weakness to the antagonists.
3 Bloody Messages
While running around the basement of the castle, observant players may notice bloody messages that have been written on the walls. Though many of them seem to only act as the final messages of those who wrote them, a few entail more information than that.
In one of the rooms, there is a message written on the wall that says ’trust in light’. This message, in fact, turns out to be more than a mere warning and instead acts as a clue for a puzzle that resides in the same room. It may be important for players to look out for these messages when the full game is released as they may correlate to other puzzles later down the line just like this one.
2 Candidates And Rejects
Towards the end of the basement, players may notice a rusted cart littered with needles and various viles. On that same cart, is a piece of paper with the words ‘candidates’ and ‘rejects’ along with the names of multiple women. Of the 16 names written on the sheet of paper, only four are listed as candidates while the rest are rejects.
This could likely tie together the shipments of people listed in the schedule to the presence of the women of the castle. It is possible that those who become candidates are destined to also become women of the castle, while those who are rejects are left to a fate yet unknown. A similar sheet could be found in Resident Evil Biohazard, which could foreshadow the gruesome fate of the rejects.
1 New Enemies
As players draw closer to the end of the demo, they will encounter what appears to be the new, mindless monster of this entry. Yet to receive an official name, these creatures resemble shriveled shells of what used to be humans, likely the ‘rejects’ that were listed on the sheet in the basement.
During the demo, players can attempt to attack the creatures using the few weapons that they have. It appears to be possible to kill these creatures, however for the number of bullets that they consume it may be worthwhile to find alternate methods to get around them.
NEXT: All Resident Evil Village Villians Have Been Revealed
