Two years ago I’ve completed Resident Evil Village and while my first playthrough of it was very entertaining, it turned out to be the least replayable RE game for me. I got bored on my third playthrough, while trying to unlock more stuff as I usually do, and found myself so utterly bored with the game that I stopped and haven’t looked at it since then. That is, until Winters’ Expansion, a new DLC, got released and I’ve finally decided to play it. At worst I expected this to be more of the same and, following this logic, at least fun on the first playthrough. But no. It wasn’t fun even the first time around.
So what is this DLC? The main meat of it is a new story-driven mini-campaign Shadows of Rose, which takes place somewhere before the epilogue of the main game and is played from third person perspective. Said perspective is also added to the main game. And the ever-present Mercenaries mode got some new stuff for those interested (I’m not one of them). And to get it out of the way – the third person perspective, either in the main game or in the new story doesn’t really feel that great. Unlike the new RE2 or RE3 (2020), this game wasn’t designed around it and while it’s certainly playable, it just doesn’t quite feel right anyway.
Shadows of Rose is… frustrating. The story of Village was bad either way so the fact that this barely adds anything and shoehorns even more previous game elements for no reason isn’t surprising. Neither is the reuse of existing locations – it would’ve been interesting to see something new, but things are recontextualized enough to not be a problem on its own. What is frustrating is that the basics, just as with the main game, are still very bland and poor but when the game tries to fix this with genuinely cool ideas it does it very poorly. For example – it basically repeats the extended puzzle-focused sequence from Village, but tries to add some cool interesting mechanics to it, in contrast to how in the original that whole thing is a carnival ride that works exactly the same every time. And the mechanics are cool in concept. But the execution is so poor it almost makes you wish it was just a linear sequence of scares again.
An attempt was made here, I will acknowledge this, but Shadows of Rose is not fun to play even once. And unless you’re a die-hard fan of the Mercenaries mode in Village, I don’t know what you can even get out of this. For how scattershot the DLCs to RE7 were, at least they were creative and Not a Hero and End of Zoe were really fun. Here though? You should love playing Village a lot to wish to get the Winters’ Expansion and even then you might be disappointed.