I wanted to play the Resident Evil Village demo that launched on PlayStation on Sunday evening. I even pre-downloaded it! But I couldn’t – I have a wife and two young children and Sundays are my only family day. After we put the kids to bed, the few precious hours my wife and I had to ourselves before we collapsed in sleep were spent watching something inane on telly while having a chat. My wife is learning Russian. It seems to be going well.
No bother! I’ll play the demo tomorrow, I thought. At some point, anyway. So this morning, before the kids woke up for school and nursery, I turned my PlayStation 5 on, pressed X on Resident Evil Village, and…
“Countdown until next demo: six days…”
Shit.
I’d had a vague understanding that Capcom was rolling out the Resident Evil Village demo in time-limited chunks – something I thought was an idiotic idea at the time – but I did not realise just how time-limited it would be. (Matt’s Resident Evil Village demo rollout guide is super useful!) Last night’s demo went live in the UK at 6pm and ended just eight hours later, at 2am. There was an eight hour window to play the demo for half-an-hour only. Let’s say you have the time to play the demo. Restricting it to 30 minutes of game time is at best stingey, at worst needlessly anxiety-inducing.