You can tell a lot about someone from their hands. This is as true of videogame characters as anyone: what could be more Doom than Doomguy’s spiked knuckles, or more Dishonored than Emily Kaldwin’s aristocratic fingers? Resident Evil Village –a glamorous but underwhelming instalment with shades of Resident Evil 4, tossed with chunks of Dracula – stretches this idea to its limit. Save for the odd tangent about prophecies and bioweapons, it’s a cautionary tale about the terrible things that can happen to a pair of hands.

It starts with a nick from a barbed-wire fence, as the previous game’s protagonist Ethan Winters bumbles into the village of the title, searching for his abducted daughter. Shortly after, you lose a couple of digits to a werewolf’s maw. An hour later, Winters is hung up by skewered palms in a castle bedchamber, tearing himself free only to have one mitt lopped clean off, which he miraculously glues back on with a glug of herbal medicine. All of which has strangely little impact on the tense but unremarkable combat, in which you aim pistols, shotguns and rifles at joints and heads while backing away in circles. On the contrary: however much they’re mauled, Winters’ hands and forearms are nighunbreachable defences. On normal difficulty, at least, they can block power drills and meat hammers the size of cars with just a pinch of lost health. This is useful, given that there’s no dodge button and Winters has all the agility of a sack barrow dipped in treacle.

The rest of Winters’ body puts in an appearance now and then: he’s run through the torso, showered in acid and even takes an arrow to the knee, paving the way for a second career in another series entirely. Everything above his neck remains a mystery, however: mirrors reveal only darkness, and the closing thirdperson cutscenes refuse to film him from the front. A dread suspicion forms, confirmed by unlocking the character model for inspection after completion: he doesn’t have a face. His head is a black hollow with ears and a wig, a ‘blank tablet’ avatar with a touch of Junji Ito. Small wonder his hands bear the brunt of the characterisation.