The marketing push for Resident Evil Requiem has leaned hard on nostalgia.
Trailers promised that Japanese developer Capcom was bringing back fan-favourite protagonist Leon Kennedy, who would also a return to Raccoon City, the fictional Midwest city where the series began.
With Requiem — the ninth main entry — Capcom has refined its formulas to near-perfection.
The scares are among the most bone-chilling in the series’ 30-year history, and the action sequences are equally thrilling. The two halves don’t always fit neatly together, though, resulting in an uneven adventure that feels afraid to tread truly new ground in lieu of returning to familiar territory (sometimes literally).
Something old, something new(ish)
Requiem begins with Grace Ashcroft, a timid young FBI agent sent to investigate the latest in a string of strange deaths at a condemned hotel — where eight years ago she witnessed the murder of her mother, who appeared in the 2003 spinoff Resident Evil Outbreak.
Putting aside how terrible an idea it is for her supervisor to send her on such a trauma-inducing assignment, Grace soon runs into the main villain Victor Gideon — a comical mad scientist with a raspy voice who used to work for Umbrella, the series’ longtime evil corporation whose failed experiments sparked the zombie outbreak in the first place.
Leon, meanwhile, has been suffering from a mysterious illness and is tailing Gideon in the hopes that he might have some clues to its origins.
Both soon find themselves stuck in the Rhodes Hill Chronic Care Center, where Gideon has been conducting experiments on patients and staff alike, and take separate yet occasionally overlapping paths to escape.
The centre, with its baroque architecture and putrid green-and-ivory walls, evokes the Spencer Mansion and police station from the series’s first two games — it’s classic Resident Evil, in its purest and most cerebral form.
Players navigate Grace through its labyrinthine interior, searching for keys to unlock doors and chambers like a puzzle box, avoiding its menacing inhabitants and scrounging items to defend herself.
Those enemies are more varied than before, as these zombies retain some of their pre-death characteristics. The chef chases you with his butcher’s cleaver; a former singer can be heard wailing several halls down like a mournful banshee.
The slight Grace, voiced by American/European actress Angela Sant’Albano, understandably cowers before such horrors, and in the opening hours is often armed with little more than an empty bottle to distract enemies, and a handgun with maybe 10 or so bullets.
I spent hours meticulously looking at the floor plan, planning my routes, and taking a deep breath before venturing forth, darting past the butcher before he could chop me in two.
Occasionally, we check in on Leon (voiced by Nick Apostolides) and go through a befuddling tonal whiplash — because his sections are a beautiful, bloody catharsis.
Between tiptoeing around a room full of zombies as Grace, Leon can mow them down with a hatchet, shotguns and rifles while throwing out quips worthy of a 1980s Schwarzenegger movie. (His first encounter? A chainsaw-wielding zombie doctor. Leon’s deadpan response: “I want a second opinion.”)
The action closely resembles Leon’s gunslinging romp in Resident Evil 4, and feels nearly identical to its 2023 remake with some new weapons and attack skills sprinkled in. Sometimes it veers into frenetic set pieces that feel ripped out of a Devil May Cry or Bayonetta game (though they thankfully don’t overstay their welcome).
Retrace your steps
If I’m talking a lot about the Care Center, where players will likely spend a good six hours or so their first time around, it’s because the later sections fall short of its brilliance.
It might not surprise series veterans, who often find subsequent areas like dank sewers or eerie science labs all-too-common backdrops. Indeed, most of the game’s back half feels like a re-tread specifically of RE2‘s 2019 remake, for better and worse. (Fans will relish a too-brief detour to the ruins of the police station, where Leon’s story began.)
The one brand-new setting is an extended trip with Leon to the dusty ruins of Raccoon City. Wide-open areas mix up the feel of the combat — here populated with twitchy, fast zombies — but we’ve seen this setting in a lot of games, already.
It’s as though Capcom saw The Last of Us, didn’t care for its moral quandaries and said, “They could have put way more zombies in here.”
Resident Evil has always been a series more about creepy environments and exciting moments over a compelling or coherent narrative, and Requiem follows suit. Gideon is chasing something called Elpis and believes Grace is the key to the mystery. And though there are other story points (heavily embargoed, preventing me from discussing them here) there isn’t, other than a few neat surprises, much to write home about.
There are some bright spots, though. There’s Grace’s slow growth from a frightened youngster to a capable, confident heroine we might well see in future installments. And Leon occasionally reflects on the horrors he’s seen over the series’ three decades with surprising pathos despite his tendency to spout off one-liners.
But Gideon is the most boring antagonist in some time, paling in comparison to RE7‘s lunatic Baker family and RE8‘s captivating vampiress Lady Dimitrescu.
There’s more to nitpick about Requiem than some might have hoped, but it does so much so well that none of them stop it from being a must-play entry in the series — even if it’s more concerned with closing the door on old chapters, rather than opening new ones.
Resident Evil Requiem releases Friday on PC, Xbox Series X|S, Nintendo Switch 2 and Sony PlayStation 5. It’s rated M for Mature 17+.
