Will Resident Evil: Village be Spectral Crown: The Game?

“Hey, I’ve seen this one!”

Show of hands: who heard about the newest Resident Evil: Village trailer not because of the trailer itself or the technical marvel of the astonishing visuals, but because their twitter feed was suddenly inundated with stories and memes about the game’s super-tall, uncomfortably-hot vampire mom and all the thirsting the internet has been doing?  Because that’s how I heard about it.  I’d seen brief clips from the game before but this, all of a sudden, sparked my interest.  For, uh, reasons.  But then I watched that third trailer (the one in the first link up there), and I thought to myself, huh, this looks kind of familiar.  Sexy vampires, spooky castle, monsters in the basement, some weird hunter guy.  Where have I seen that before?  Well, lots of places, yes, but to me, it hits really close to home with Spectral Crown.  My immediate thought when I saw that new trailer was, “wait a minute, that’s my idea!”  My next thought was, of course, “Eh, it’s a pretty generic setting anyway.  And RE:Village doesn’t have ravens.”  Except… maybe they do?  One of the trailers seemed to have giant, feathered beasties.

So this is clearly only a thing that occurs to me, because, you know, I’m the one who wrote Spectral Crown, it’s unpublished, vampires in castles is a pretty common trope, and I haven’t even posted the entire novel here yet.  And it’s not like I think Capcom stole my idea or something; not only would them finding my blog and yanking the first ten or so chapters of my novel as inspiration be utterly ridiculous and statistically unlikely, it would be pretty conceited of me to assume that’s what happened instead of some board room being like, hey, wouldn’t it be neat to fight monsters in an old giant castle with a sexy mommy vampire running the show?  Plus, some of the similarities I noticed are ones that I haven’t even posted to this blog yet, so it would be literally impossible for them to have copied me.  But at least to my credit, I have proof that I didn’t copy them; I finished my second draft of Spectral Crown in 2018 and got a copyright of the text filed that same year.  At that time, Capcom was still working on their remake of Resident Evil 2 or something, and the announcement for RE:Village didn’t even make it out officially until 2020.  So, hey, I did it first.  After, of course, everyone else did the same thing.  But Capcom can’t sue me over it.

But let’s talk about the newest trailers for Resident Evil: Village, and in doing so, let’s talk about the process behind the writing of Spectral Crown, shall we?  For me, it’s a bit for posterity’s sake, in the event that my book ever gets published and someone asks “was this inspired by RE:Village?” and also because when I first saw that new trailer, it was deeply weird, because I’ve always dreamed of having Spectral Crown be successful enough as a novel to warrant a video game adaptation. So seeing the third trailer was uncomfortable in a way that’s maybe akin to having someone read your mind. Except they botched it a little and had to fill in the blanks for some things. Like substituting wolves for ravens, or Victorian telekinetic hammer man for murderous raven-vampire.

So, being up front about it, Spectral Crown was inspired as much by Bloodborne was it was by actual gothic horror tradition. If you’ve both played Bloodborne and read the book (as I have), the comparisons are clear. I’m aware the overlap between people who have played Bloodborne and people who have read my novel is exactly one. Me. The similarities are there, though; giant, gothic buildings, spooky monsters and a feeling of powerlessness, giant black birds, and some other things. But the real point is, Spectral Crown already bears striking (and mostly accidental) resemblance to Cainhurst Castle, one of my favorite areas in the base game. Hell, I even used one of the same names for queens. But that’s mostly subconscious, actually. The idea for Spectral Crown came from a dream I had in which myself and a bunch of my family had to sneak into a castle, fight a giant pig, and smash some green crystal goblets. Unfortunately, smashing those goblets released anthropomorphized Death. In this dream, Death happened to be my dad in night gown. Obviously, some things changed between the dream and the actual novel. But the general trend of things? Largely based off of that dream, and then drawing inspirations from things like Bloodborne, Dracula, Castlevania, Jeff Vandermeer’s Annihilation for some reason, et cetera, et cetera. There’s a lot of gothic horror out there.

But I guess what really shocked me about RE:Village was the sheer volume of similarities packed into one trailer, right after the other. For those of you who don’t play video games, Resident Evil is a series of survival horror/action games that’s usually about soldiers shooting zombies. Most of the time, ammo is scarce, and the tensions are high because it’s damn near impossible to kill the zombies and you’ll run out of bullets if you try. Sometimes dogs attack you. Sometimes you jet ski while you save the president’s daughter. Usually it’s all because of an evil pharmaceuticals company that tried to create a bioweapon and it went haywire. They’re almost always set in modern cities, or police stations, or swamp houses, or rarely a spanish island, and you fight with guns and knives and suplexing the hell out of zombies. So imagine my surprise and delight when I learned that the series is going a very different route with this new game. Then imagine my surprise when it looked like my daydreams for Spectral Crown.

Let me explain the similarities, at any rate. That third trailer opens with Ethan Winters and his wife Mia, from RE:7, arguing about something. So far, so Resident Evil. Then there’s a frost-bitten winter landscape with mountains and castles. Very central-to-eastern European. Oh, cool, that’s like where Spectral Crown takes place, along with like every castle-themed horror game! Cue voice-over by old lady. Standard stuff. “They’re coming again!” Vague enough to be meaningless. If this were Spectral Crown, that could totally refer to the Blestemats. Jump to castle interior: really fancy, really empty gothic castle with black-and-white design choices. Hmm. That’s… a little closer to home than I expected. Then there’s the sexy vampire lady talking to some unseen figure named Mother Miranda about Ethan escaping, followed by a reference to a ceremony. A wedding ceremony, perhaps? Then more scenes of castle interiors, some tall, ratty vampire ladies, spooky murals, a hidden basement full of old mysteries, some actual zombies finally, a pair of enormous birds in the distance, and the title card. Then there’s a little scene of some wacky-looking guy with a giant hammer and floating stones trying to hunt Ethan down in the basement. That’s what got me, actually, because that exact scene happens in Spectral Crown, just with a crow-man instead of Sir Hammerton.

Maybe I’m overthinking things, and the similarities are just visual design and the general sense of European castles full of monsters, but this trailer, at least to me, could be a total stand-in for a Spectral Crown video game. Ethan Winters is Saelac, Tall Lady (whose real name is Lady Dimitrescu, by the way) could be Sorina Blestemat, Mother Miranda could be the deposed Blestemat queen. Sneaking around a haunted old castle is like Saelac’s whole thing, though I haven’t quite posted those chapters yet. The other ratty vampires could be the servants, there’s those scenes in the basement with both the hunter and the zombies (though in Spectral Crown, the zombies appear outside), and that brief glimpse of raven-men in the sky. The more I talk about it, the more ridiculous I feel, but in the moment I first saw the trailer, I was bamboozled. It felt so familiar.

I mean, obviously there are some differences. The first two trailers show off some hairy werewolf men, which are absent in Spectral Crown, but very Bloodborne-esque. And there’s the village itself, which is also largely absent from Spectral Crown. And the fact that RE:Village will be taking place in modern day and the main character will have guns. Saelac doesn’t use guns. The most he ever gets is a knife. So there’s that, too. And maybe that’s a key difference in medium, too; Spectral Crown is a novel while RE:Village is a video game, which, while obvious, will make a huge difference in how the stories are experienced. I’m sure a lot of RE:Village will be scouring corners of rooms for loot to pick up in order to kill some shuffling abominations, interspersed with obtuse puzzles and chase sequences and maybe several unkillable baddies. As a story, Spectral Crown has some of this, but I think that I’m probably working myself into a frenzy, worrying about first impressions because, for all I know, the actual story and gameplay could be way different than the straws I’m grasping at now.

Anyway, I don’t know why I’m so worried. Again, it isn’t like I believe RE:Village stole my ideas. That’s absurd. It’s all coincidence, because we’re both walking well-tread ground. But at least I know I’m in good company, at any rate. It looks like RE:Village is going to be a great game, and I’m definitely going to be playing it, even if it’s only to make sure that my fears that Spectral Crown is now entirely irrelevant, and the fear that its publication is a lost cause, are unfounded. And besides, if I was going to make a Spectral Crown videogame, it would be a survival-horror metroidvania, a cross between Castlevania and, uh, Resident Evil. Hm. I might need to take a new look at that one now. But, at the very least, I can briefly pretend that, when I’m playing RE:Village, I’m actually playing a big-budget AAA videogame adaptation of my novel, and that’s really all I want out of life. Is millions of dollars of support too much to ask?