Resident Evil Village releasing on new iPhone 15 Pro in October, with free trial

It was a bit of a surprise when Apple announced that its new iPhone 15 Pro would contain hardware capable of running console-quality games. During the reveal event for the phone, the company showcased titles like Resident Evil Village, Resident Evil 4, Death Stranding, and Assassin’s Creed Mirage running with advanced graphical features, like real-time ray tracing. Now, the first of these titles to be released, Resident Evil Village, has a release date of 30 October 2023.

Resident Evil Village will be playable on the new iPhone 15 Pro, the iPhone 15 Pro Max, as well as iPad Air and iPad Pro devices with the Apple silicon M1 chip or later.

The date was announced during a Capcom presentation during Tokyo Game Show 2023, where the developer and publisher also confirmed the price: JPY ¥4,990 for the base game, and JPY ¥2000 for the Winters Expansion DLC.

This will convert to USD $39.99 for the base game, and USD $19.99 for the expansion. Apple has confirmed that Resident Evil Village will support universal purchase and cross-progression, meaning one purchase will give you access to both the Mac and iOS versions, and progression will sync across both via iCloud.

Additionally, during the Tokyo Game Show, it was announced that the opening moments of the game will be included in a free trial version – presumably serving as a tech demo to showcase both the game, and the ability of the iPhone 15 Pro.

Capcom also announced that the iOS version of Resident Evil 4, as well as its expansion pack Separate Ways are still slated for release sometime in 2023. They will retail for JPY ¥7,990 and JPY ¥1,000 respectively. Resident Evil 4 will also support universal purchase and cross-progression.

The Resident Evil publisher also recently made comments about its desire to port its PC and console lineup to mobile devices, with the goal of targeting huge prospective markets like India.

It will be very interesting to see first-hand how these Resident Evil titles, which continue to be some of the best-looking games on current-generation gaming platforms like the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X, fare on Apple‘s new iPhone. When we tried Resident Evil Village on Apple‘s previous Macbook Pro model, we were shocked at how well it ran – even when the laptop was silently running on battery.

It’s clear that Apple‘s current hardware architecture is very capable of running modern game engines, like Capcom’s RE Engine, with all the trimmings like ray tracing and DLSS-style upscaling. As to how the atmosphere of a survival horror game like Resident Evil holds up in a portable format, that’s another conversation entirely.