Ethan Winters’ survival in Resident Evil 7 hinges entirely on one specific event: Jack Baker kills him early in the game. The player isn’t told this until Resident Evil Village, but that moment is critical because it is exactly when Ethan is reanimated by the Mold, unknowingly becoming something far beyond human. Without that transformation, he would lack the regenerative ability that lets him recover from severed limbs, impalements, and direct attacks from Molded, Bakers, and bioweapons.
Therefore, if Resident Evil 7 had removed that one turning point, Ethan’s run would’ve been mundane, and he wouldn’t have lasted long. Even if Ethan had somehow evaded Jack’s fatal strike, he would still not have the capacity to endure what follows later in the game. Mere hours afterward, he’s stabbed through the hand, mutilated, thrown around by superhuman enemies, and forced into sustained combat scenarios that would kill any untrained civilian.
Resident Evil 7: What Happened to Zoe Baker?
Resident Evil 7 focuses a lot on the Baker family, but the fate of Zoe Baker is definitely something that's worth diving into.
Moldless Ethan Would Have Died Early Either Way in RE7
The violence Ethan sustains in RE7 is constant and progressively gets worse. For instance, his hand is chainsawed off, stapled back, and reattached. He also gets thrown down the stairs, buried under rubble, and bitten by RE7's Molded creatures. Even the Molded enemies, less intelligent than the Bakers but just as lethal, are capable of killing fully armed soldiers in canon. Ethan, without Mold, therefore, would’ve had no chance of surviving the game.
In Village, there are Lycans, mutant bosses, and Miranda, a being capable of biological manipulation at the cellular level. Ethan, with his mold-powered abilities, gets shot, loses fingers, walks on frozen feet, and continues operating after his heart is literally torn out. The Mold sustains its entire neural framework after clinical death, and without it, this would've clearly been the end for Ethan. Even Chris Redfield’s rescue team wouldn’t have made it in time to save Mia or stop Miranda’s ritual. The stakes, therefore, would’ve collapsed without Ethan’s unnatural biology keeping the mission alive.
Ethan, Without the Mold, Would Die, and the Entire Winter’s Line Would End
Ethan's death in RE7's first hour, without the mold, technically eliminates every plot thread in Village: no Rose, no showdown with Miranda, no mold-resistant vessel, no explanation for Eveline’s containment, and no bridge to Chris Redfield’s ongoing fight against the BSAA’s corruption. Ethan’s Mold resurrection, therefore, is the single event that kept the entire chain functional. If Jake Baker hadn’t killed him, the storyline and gameplay would’ve had to be vastly different for the game to make any sense.
If Jack Never Killed Ethan and the Mold Was Never Introduced
If Ethan had survived Jack’s attack as a normal human and never bonded with the Mold, Capcom would have needed to shift the game’s structure toward classic survival horror mechanics. Ethan’s damage intake would have been grounded; that means healing would rely on medical items with limited effectiveness, and every encounter would have to be rebalanced for realism. The Bakers would have likely been portrayed as biologically enhanced but not invincible, something closer to RE4’s Ganado rather than full Mold-based regenerators. Boss fights, too, would lean on tactical escape, stealth, or one-time-use weapons rather than sustained combat.
The story arc in Village, in that case, would also require major rewrites. Without a Mold-based lineage, for instance, Rose wouldn’t exist as a genetically viable vessel for Miranda’s experiment. Instead, and while this is purely imaginative, Capcom might have to shift the focus to a global Mold outbreak sourced from Eveline’s remnants or perhaps another RE's Cadou prototype leaking out of Eastern Europe. Ethan’s role, similarly, would pivot from sacrificial father to investigative survivor, possibly exposing BSAA or The Connections’ deeper operations. The storyline, therefore, would drop the Mold-as-resurrection device and instead likely expand on bioengineering through parasitic or synthetic BOWs.
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OpenCritic Reviews
- Top Critic Avg: 86 /100 Critics Rec: 90%
WHERE TO PLAY
- Engine
- RE Engine
- Genre(s)
- Survival Horror, Psychological Horror, First-Person
