Resident Evil VR review: how to shatter immersion and break a cardinal rule

I’m not the kind of person who places much value on awards ceremonies. Any voting methodology has its limitations and drawbacks, so one takes them all with a grain of salt. Nevertheless, I admit to being a little taken aback when I read that Resident Evil Village had snagged the “Best VR/AR Game” gong at the 2023 Games Awards. For starters, it’s not a VR game per se: rather, a port of a blockbuster title released for consoles in 2021 (the developers at Capcom added a “VR mode” in 2023). Can a conversion of a pre-existing production really be fairly compared to others—such as the also-nominated Horizon Call of the Wild and Synapse—that were built from the ground up for VR?

If you’re after a straight-up review of Resident Evil Village, head elsewhere. If you’re open to a rant about how this port commits some cardinal VR sins, keep reading. My intention isn’t to discredit all ports, which have their place as new ways to experience old content; in fact I enjoyed several aspects of Village, including its beautifully dark and rich production design. But complications invariably come into play when a game is grafted onto the VR medium after the fact. The way these complications are addressed—or not addressed—helps us get a handle on what we can, or should, expect from satisfying VR experiences.

It’s a pet peeve of mine when VR games lock you in one spot and prevent you from moving. This is an easy way to stop a player from missing narratively significant moments, but it comes at a big cost: that loss of control breaking immersion and shattering our sense of agency. Many experiences do this, but Resident Evil Village takes it to the next level—not just locking us into place but moving our virtual bodies for us, tossing us around like salad ingredients. As scholar Marie-Laure Ryan once put it: in VR, as in real-life, all action passes through the body. Village’s VR mode is a striking example of what happens when that action is taken away from us.

The game begins with an emotional prologue set at the home of the protagonist we embody, Ethan Winters, with his wife and six-month-old baby girl, during which we’re required to take the bub upstairs to progress the narrative. Instead of reaching out and picking her up, using our actual hands, the game outstretches our hands for us, creating a weird disconnect between our physical and virtual selves. They’re our hands…but they’re not. And there’s many more jarring moments where this came from.

The narrative follows Winters as he attempts to rescue the baby after men burst into the house, murder his wife, and snatch the littlun. This quest involves visiting a range of locations in and around the titular monster-strewn village, including the spectacular Castle Dimitrescu—home of the gigantically tall and menacing Lady Dimitrescu. Before we arrive at this ravishingly gothic building, there’s a scene that takes place (spoiler alert) in a creaky old home, beginning with a standoffish rifle-wielding man emerging from the building.

We raise our hands as if to say “we mean no harm.” Or rather, the game raises our hands up for us; we have no choice and no control over our actions. Inside the building, a tense scene transpires during which characters form a circle around a table and pray. We hold hands with people on our left and right—or rather, again, the game holds their hands for us. When one of the group transforms into a zombie and starts munching on his family, the game yanks our entire body away, pulling us outside the room and down a hallway. Soon later, we attempt to save a woman named Helena by outstretching our hand—or rather…you guessed it: the game does that for us.

Anybody familiar with the original console versions of Resident Evil Village will know that the above moments are essentially cutscenes that don’t cut: moments when control is taken away from the player and a predetermined scene plays out. On a flat screen this isn’t a big deal, because we never inhabited the playing space—a two-dimensional field of representation. But in a virtual world, where we’ve embodied a character and in effect look out of their eyes, it’s a very big deal. Our body is not our body; our presence within the world is destroyed.

The academic Mel Slater identified two essential illusions that make up virtual presence: Place Illusion and Plausibility Illusion. The former concerns how one perceives the virtual world, the latter how “events in the virtual environment over which you have no direct control refer directly to you.” In the above examples in Resident Evil: Village, it’s not just events we cannot control, it’s ourselves.

VR experiences work far better when the space around us is used to tell a story. Take, for instance, moments in the under-rated games The 7th Guest VR and Wraith: The Oblivion – Afterlife, in which ghosts appear before us, in volumetric spaces we can walk through or around, reenacting events from the past. These are the equivalent of movie flashbacks, but they maintain the spatial consistency of the environment, thus aren’t jarring or immersion-breaking.

In the wake of Village’s VR conversion, the developers at Capcom also created a VR mode for Resident Evil 4. This port is even more jarring. It has the same problem—regularly stripping away control of our virtual selves—but also, when it does so, switching from first to third person (the game’s original perspective). This constantly rips us out of the game world for short out-of-body experiences, like a bad drug that kicks in when you don’t want it to. An experience built from the ground up for virtual reality would never do such a thing. In a funny way, this is one of the benefits of problematic ports: they remind us how VR games should look and feel. In that sense their role is important…but certainly not award-worthy.