Resident Evil Glitch Lets Ethan Winters' Hands Fight Back
"Resident Evil Village" sometimes feels like a checklist that runs down of all the ways the game's many baddies can ruin protagonist Ethan Winters' day. Hung from the ceiling by hand-hooks? Check. Bitten into by frenzied lycans? Check. Drained of blood by a tall vampire lady? Check, check, check. To add insult to injury, it's his hands — the tools with which players themselves engage with the first-person game — that seem to take the majority of the punishment.
That's precisely why a recent glitch, which shows Ethan's hands fighting back against some of the most terrifying monsters in "Resident Evil Village," is the revenge sequence gamers have been waiting for. In a clip shared by a Reddit user, Ethan can be seen seemingly shooting magic, invisible bullets out of his fingers — much like that awesome action scene from that Jeffrey Dean Morgan movie nobody saw.
The hilarious action starts around 19 seconds in, as the lumbering Sturm — that's the dude with the propeller for a torso — convulses in a corner as Ethan delivers devastating blasts from his digits. As one commenter stated, the whole thing would have been even funnier if the gun's sound effect changed to "Ethan clicking his tongue against his teeth every time he pulled the 'trigger.'"
Kotaku reached out to the player who uploaded the hilarious clip, and they were not sure how the glitch had been triggered. One theory is that the player may have attempted to reload their grenade launcher at the wrong time, giving Mr. Winters explode-y hands.
A brief and tragic history of Ethan Winters' hands
The glitch is a silly and satisfying coincidence when you consider all the crap that Ethan's hands have been through, dating back to 2017's "Resident Evil 7: Biohazard."
Warning: Major story spoilers ahead, as well as graphic descriptions of digital hand dismemberment.
"Resident Evil Village" is a horror game, and, as such, it plays host to no shortage of mutilation, dismemberment, and an all-around gory good times. And while most of — if not all of — the denizens of the game's titular village suffer a grisly fate at the hands of Mother Miranda's lords and their respective henchmen, savvy gamers know that the real victim of "Village" is Ethan Winters and his poor, poor, no good, very bad hands.
After "Resident Evil 7" saw him lose one of his hands early on, only to then promptly re-attach it courtesy of the Mold and, uhh, staples, Ethan would go on to get his hands — and their digits — repeatedly decimated in "Village." This included losing fingers to a lycan bite, having hooks shoved through his palms (and nearly tearing them in half to escape), and then having one hand lobbed right the heck off by the village's resident sexy vampire, Lady Dimitrescu.
Sure, thanks to Ethan's status as a Molded, something revealed near the end of the game, he was never in any real danger of permanently losing his hand. Still, now that Ethan has activated his preternatural finger gun powers, nothing is stopping him from getting the revenge he deserves.