Resident Evil Village on the iPhone could be a preview of Apple’s gaming future

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By Jay Peters, a news editor who writes about technology, video games, and virtual worlds. He’s submitted several accepted emoji proposals to the Unicode Consortium.

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It’s incredible that Resident Evil Village plays as well as it does on the iPhone. The game is every bit as captivating as when I first played it on the PS5, and I was blown away by how well it translated to the tinier screen. But the game’s graphics aren’t the most interesting thing going on with this release — I’m much more excited for what it might be teasing for Apple gaming in the future.

Let’s start by talking aboutVillage first. I’ve only played for a little over an hour on a prerelease version of the game on an iPhone 15 Pro Max — long enough to survive the attack by the Lycans in the snowy village. One area the port doesn’t translate well is to the iPhone’s touchscreen. I tried to use the game’s touch controls, but they were awful; they were a challenge to use even in the game’s initial sequence, where all you have to do is carry a baby to a crib. But the iPhone itself holds up as a console. Once I broke down and connected my DualSense controller, things felt pretty much just like I remembered they did on my PS5, and the controls came back to me right away. (That familiarity, unfortunately, didn’t make the Lycan attack any less stressful.)

Even though that part played great, I’ve already run into a few small annoyances with the iPhone port. Like some other mobile games, I had to download Village in chunks. I understand why — Village is a different animal than something like Words With Friends — but I still wasn’t a fan of waiting through the initial