I played through Resident Evil 8 Village for the first time and here is a few of my favorite moments.

While I enjoyed my blind playthrough of Resident Evil Village, I was most excited to experience the hardest difficulty, Village of Shadows. Unfortunately, this mode seems balanced around using bonus items obtained from completing challenges. Previous Resident Evil titles had similar bonus items, but I’ve never liked using them as they tend to make the game too easy. A big part of the Resident Evil experience is the scarcity of resources like ammo and health. In previous titles, I could complete the games without relying on infinite ammo or bonus items. However, in this game, there's not enough ammo to fight enemies at the start on the hardest difficulty. The game expects you to use bonus items, making zombies overly resilient against starting gear like the knife, pistol, and shotgun. One enemy, which usually appears halfway through the game on hardcore mode, is encountered early on in Village of Shadows, requiring excessive ammo and a mine hit to defeat. Even with all that, it's still not enough to kill even one of them—and there are two! Plus, there are three more lycans to defeat after that. I'm sure you can get through this part by running past the enemies, but I don't want to cheese the game. I want enough ammo to defeat all the enemies, like in Resident Evil 7: Biohazard. The scarcity of ammo should force you to use your resources wisely, which I like. What I don't like is running out of ammo completely, even when I've been careful. The only way to progress is by spending forever trying to defeat individual enemies with a crappy knife that does extremely low damage and takes forever or just running past enemies, which is lame. The enemy I spend the most time fighting in the video doesn't appear until halfway through the game on hardcore mode when you have upgraded weapons and access to new guns and buffs. I wouldn’t mind fighting this enemy early on if I had enough ammo. To make matters worse, there are two of these enemies in the same area blocking your critical path, and just one of them can tank all your bullets and a mine hit and still not die. I was really looking forward to playing through Village of Shadows difficulty, but now I'm not sure I want to. There is a chance that things might get better later in the game, but the start is clearly not balanced for playing without bonus items and infinite ammo. I only briefly showcase it in the video, but at the start of the game, you get swarmed by zombies and are meant to die to progress. This part is similar to the start of Elden Ring, where you're faced with a challenge you aren't supposed to beat initially. I don't hate this idea, but it needs to be implemented correctly, and it definitely wasn't for Resident Evil Village. I spent over an hour trying to get past this horde because the enemy onslaught is too ridiculous with no ammunition. I completed this horde on my first try on hardcore mode, but I read online that people struggled even on that difficulty. It’s unreasonable to survive the horde on Village of Shadows because there are too many enemies and too little ammo. I showcased briefly in the video how I exploited a door to get through this part just to continue the game. I imagine this part would be difficult even with infinite ammo if you weren’t using a very powerful weapon, but without bonuses, it’s a nightmare. The game forces you to survive for around 4 minutes after triggering a certain point in the map. To make matters worse, the game won’t progress towards the 4 minutes unless you leave certain areas. I tried ladder stalling for over 10 minutes, but it didn't help my progress. If you die before reaching the 4-minute mark, you just reset to the last checkpoint.