Resident Evil Village gameplay video shows how upgrading works

A new Resident Evil Village gameplay video has been released, and it shows off how you can hunt animals and use the materials you harvest from them to upgrade your gear.

A new video from the folks at Game Informer has revealed how players will be able to use the various items and materials in Resident Evil Village to upgrade protagonist, Ethan Winters.

Canny hunters will be able to track down and kill mammals, fish, and birds in order to gather materials that can be cooked up into meals in The Duke's Kitchen. Depending on the animal, you're liable to encounter some resistance – go in to kill a ram and expect to be headbutted, for instance.

These meals can confer permanent upgrades on Ethan, allowing him to soak up more damage or survive longer in certain conditions in the game's hostile world. Check out the video below.

If you're more interested in upgrading your weapons in order to make yourself more deadly, you're going to need to use Lei: Village's in-game currency.

As you'd expect, enemies you kill will drop small amounts of Lei, and you can also pilfer items from them that can be sold for more money. Hidden crystal caches and other valuable items are tucked away around the world, too – plunder these locations and share your loot with The Duke for more cash, and upgrade your weapons to increase firepower, rate of fire, reload speed, ammo capacity, and so on.

Expect to hear more about the game soon. “A new Resident Evil Showcase will be dropping this April,” Capcom has announced in an official blog. “We don’t want to spoil any surprises, so we’ll leave it to all of you to speculate on what this upcoming presentation might contain.” It stands to reason we're going to hear more information about the recently-leaked bonus difficulty that randomises items and enemies, though.

Resident Evil Village is out May 7 on PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.