Ethan Winters is a sad ghost who cannot persist in any state other than abject pain and agony. He can die a million times and he will still get up to find his family. We watch as Ethan dies, we squirm, and when Ethan returns from the grave all he knows is that his family is gone. We remember every death that Ethan does not — we learn from the mistakes Ethan makes so that we can guide him to his next death somewhere else. Where failure in other videogames is understood to be a potential but not actual outcome of the game storyline, death as a projected vision, it really feels as though Ethan is the same undead body across plays, with the same undead life force animating him to find the ones he loves.

There is an element of cosmic tragedy to him: to live is to search for his family, and so to locate his family is to die. Ethan can only exist within this lack. He has an infinity of undeath at his disposal, but he can never find life. Every time we start our system pieces move and electrical currents send that message to Ethan's body that his family is missing and he must go look for them. Ethan can only find peace when there is no Ethan; when no game system resurrects him and tells him maybe this time we can make good on his promise to keep them safe. This is the logic of the game system: every objective signifies a lack, and to fulfil that objective is to kill the game. Ethan is split across Biohazard and Village, roaming the halls and woods and grounds in his maddening pursuit of the impossible, which is filling the hole created and maintained by the game.

The afterlife is rarely conceived as anything other than an extension of corporeal life. That is, the body is never left behind. From the clearly delineated stages of Dante's Inferno to those Greek tragedies that in their repetition seem so much like games, the body persists to be tortured, and the subject persists to endure their tortured body eternally. Characters throughout Village remark on Ethan's body, 'oh this is a special one', and players remark on it too, 'how do his hands withstand so much?'. The first person perspective of Biohazard and Village do not remove the avatar but locate it entirely in the expressivity of the hands. The hands suffer, the hands recoil, sending a sympathetic agony to the player's connection to Ethan — our hands. We touch Ethan through our hands, and we touch the world through Ethan's hands. The stubborn corporeality of Ethan is too much because of the environment that is touched and that touches back.

The last generation of action games worked to minimise the distance between the player and game world through the player avatar witnessing and recording their environmental percepts. The Last of Us and the Tomb Raider reboots placed a great physical and verbal emphasis on this. In these games to move to a wall is to see the hand move up and hold it, and even to comment on its texture, or the temperature of rivers, or the slipperiness of the muddy ground, or the chill in the wind. Biohazard and Village take this further in pursuit of immediate 'tactisigns', or 'a touching which is specific to the gaze'. The mise en scene is given directly to the player through the touch of the hands, and this works as an intensive sensation rather than a third person dramatic record. It is not that Ethan touches and we witness, but that we too sense the qualities of the world that arise from that interaction. Of that being there.

A list I encountered recently encourages players to think about games that smell. Village stinks. The objects and environments glow with intensive dust and decay that the player frantically encounters just to absorb. It is a big game, but it is filled with properties eager to penetrate the player's ears and nose and tongue through the hands. Where Biohazard worked in the tradition of strange puzzles, or preset holes waiting to be filled by the player, Village pushes back against the satisfactions given by a pliable environment. Our hands touch the environment, study its objects, but they are cut and bruised and mauled by what they find there. It sets a more cognitive engagement with the world aside for a more immediate one where we are subjected to the myriad affects of Village that come fast and come from out of nowhere. It's an easy game to finish, but a difficult game to withstand moment by moment. It does fantastic work bringing genres of horror together through a naturalistic hub model, but its approach to space and audience bewilderment is still firmly indebted to Tobe Hooper. Like Hooper's films it has a sense of physical humour that only makes it more brutal. It is linear, and brisk, but exhausting. Its artifice is vital, and etches itself in your soul.

What improves most in Village over Biohazard is the way the sudden acceleration of the final act works to minimise the player's efforts to emotionally resonant ends. Where Biohazard shifts everything along geographically and in terms of play-style, Village confronts us with the exact space we had grown used to as much as we feared it, but with all its fearful substance removed. Ultimately this place is nothing; none of it matters. There was a plan, there always was a plan, but we were never in that plan. The thing is that Ethan stinks. To return to the notion that he is undead, alive because he is dead, I am reminded of the fact that Lazarus of Bethany stunk because he had been dead four days. The afterlife can never escape the hideous physicality of life, which is pain and decay. Chris does not stink, but Ethan rises like Lazarus, putrid and deformed, to torture himself before the impossible. As he ambles forward toward his child, we know he will do it again. Forever if he has to. Ethan finds peace when there is no Ethan; when no one plays or even thinks about him. And in that black nothingness, there is death without afterlife.