Why Resident Evil Village's Factory Level Is So Long
For the most part, Resident Evil: Village is the definition of a short but sweet gaming experience. It's clearly designed for multiple playthroughs, as the player can easily complete the game in under 5 hours if they know what they're doing. However, there is one section of the game that is far, far too long: the final factory area.
Heisenberg's Factory has been poorly received by many, and while its faults are certainly numerous, its bloated length seems like an especially egregious problem when compared to Village's other areas. Castle Dimitrescu is the game's second longest level, but still feels relatively snappy thanks to its simple objective of finding four masks to escape. All the other areas in the game outside of the main village hub can easily be completed in about an hour or two of gameplay, and that's if the player is taking their time. So why is Heisenberg's Factory so long and bloated by comparison? There are a couple possible explanations at play, but it seems like the biggest culprits are a confusing level design and a probably desire from Capcom to make the game's last level feel epic and huge in scale.
Heisenberg's Factory is naturally the game's longest area already, but it's also very probable that for many fans' playthroughs its length is artificially inflated by confusing level design. The factory has multiple areas, and outside of some impressive set pieces, many of its rooms and corridors look very similar, which makes it quite easy for the player to get lost. It's also poorly lit in many places, and it repeatedly forces the player to backtrack to one certain room. While some of this is certainly by design (the poor lighting effectively adds to the tension at a few points, and provides some of Village's scarier moments), it also creates a frustrating final level that forces the player to spend more time in it than necessary thanks to its maze-like structure.
Perhaps the maze-like features in Resident Evil Village's factory part is by design, since it seems like Capcom wanted players to spend an adequate amount of time in the factory to make it feel like a satisfyingly epic conclusion to the adventure. Village has some truly bombastic moments, and the adventure goes out with a bang.
The ridiculously over-the-top boss battle with Heisenberg is the most obvious example of this, and while it might work to an extent in that regard, the formula lands much less effectively with the factory level itself. The factory is huge, and while it's not necessarily a bad thing to make a game's final area its longest and most challenging, it doesn't quite land here. The factory feels artificially padded in many ways, and the rest of the game's slim nature makes it seem like Capcom went out of its way to make this area the longest and most laborious to get through, even to its detriment.
Resident Evil: Village is a fantastic game, but it loses so much steam in its last act that it feels like it's great in spite of its last area, not because of it. Heisenberg's Factory is flawed in more ways than one, but certainly one of its most obvious and egregious flaws is its unnecessarily long runtime.