Skip to main content
If you click on a link and make a purchase we may receive a small commission. Read our editorial policy.

You can preload Resident Evil Village's demo now

Before it opens on the weekend

Capcom, bless their hearts, have some funny ideas. They're releasing a demo for Resident Evil Village this weekend, but it'll only be playable for a week and will have a hard time limit of 60 minutes total. Heaven forbid people freely play a demo. But I'm still up for it because I'm well up for Village, so how handy that we can now preload the demo and be ready to get stuck right into our... limited fun?

Resident Evil Village's demo will give players an hour to poke around village and castle sections of the game (are there others? I have no idea). Capcom have previously released village and castle demos separately for PlayStationeers, available for a single day and 30 minutes of play, but this is the PC (and Xbox) debut.

Watch on YouTube

The demo is due to be playable between midnight UTC on Sunday the 2nd of May (that's 1am for us in the UK, and 5pm on Saturday for Pacificians) and midnight UTC on Monday the 10th (etc). Originally it was only due to be available for one day, but Capcom extended it. And yes, it really is limited to 60 minutes. That's not 60 minutes at a time, like some old demos, it's 60 cumulative minutes. I assume people will quickly figure out how to bypass this limit by fiddling with files or memory or new accounts or something?

As of this morning, you can preload the demo on Steam. It's an 8.5GB download. The demo won't be playable just yet but hey, you'll be ready.

Resident Evil Village is due to launch on May 7th. I will be very disappointed if Lady Dimitrescu turns out to only be in the first ten minutes before the real villain is revealed to be a clone of Albert Wesker or something. Oh I'm annoyed just thinking about that. Capcom don't you dare make this Resident Evil game a, uh, Resident Evil game.

Capcom recently announced that Re:Verse, the six-player deathmatch mode thrown into Village for no good reason, will launch this summer.

Read this next