Capcom didn't make things simple with the new Resident Evil Village demo that can only be played for a certain amount of time on certain days and certain platforms. It's enough to justify an explainer.
I'm not here to recap all of that nonsense again, but after playing the first slice of the demo on Saturday on my PS5 — a quick 30 minutes in the village area — I wanted to talk about the rollout. Will Capcom try this stunt again with another game, or is this a one-off experiment? Either way, it needs tweaks.
The whole "8 Hours in Village" branding only makes the demo schedule more confusing at a glance.
A bit of background. If you were in the right time and place on April 17, you could've spent half an hour with Resident Evil Village on a PS4 or PS5 during an early-access phase that lasted only eight hours.
I happened to be around, and I'm stoked for Village, so I pre-loaded the demo and was ready to go. Except when 5:00 p.m. Pacific rolled around, I didn't immediately start playing — instead, I began watching someone else's playthrough in a YouTube live stream. I wasn't going to waste my demo!
As silly as that sounds, it felt warranted. By watching another playthrough, I knew to turn off ray tracing in the main menu (not in the pause menu!) so the game would run at 60 frames per second. I also learned the demo was cutscene-heavy, and that the timer didn't stop during cutscenes. You can skip them to save time, and for several minor scenes, once I got the gist, I totally did. It felt bad.
