Resident Evil Requiem | Review

This review copy of Resident Evil Requiem was provided to Source Gaming by Nintendo.

Content warning for blood and gore.

Since 1996, the Resident Evil series has had innumerable permutations, adaptations, and iterations, but we can boil the Capcom series down to three phases. From the mid Nineties to early Aughts, it defined survival horror with cramped spaces, tank controls, and tight resource management. From the mid-Aughts to mid-Tens, it reimagined itself as “action horror,” with big setpieces and a sea of bullets. And since the late-Tens, it has become nastier, wittier, and more visceral, with thoughtful remakes and gross out comedy. There’s always camp and always scares, but for a series that traffics so much in nostalgia, Resident Evil prides itself on bold innovation. All of this makes its ninth mainline installment as curious as it is great. Resident Evil Requiem is a 30th Anniversary celebration, zealously stitching every part of that history together. From the collapsing rafters to the corpse-strewn basement, it bleeds Resident Evil. And it bleeds plenty.

It all starts with our hero. Grace Ashcroft is a young FBI analyst who has found herself abducted in a creepy, palatial laboratory. A mad scientist calls her the “chosen one,” zombies try to nosh on her flesh, and it’s all she can do to keep her head above water. Like most Resident Evil leads, she’s a cop whose training isn’t nearly enough to handle biological weapons. Like most of the modern leads, she has extensive trauma, naturalistic dialogue, and strong voice work. And in the most literal example, she’s a legacy character. Grace is the daughter of one of the leads of the largely forgotten Resident Evil Outbreak, and her story is about inheriting this legacy. What does it mean to grow up in a world where a zombie outbreak led the U.S. Government to destroy one of its own cities? How does it feel to be thrown headfirst into a space already full of Bio-Organic Weapons and bizarre architecture? Is her future filled with anything more hopeful than ash, conspiracy, and the living dead? As perhaps the most “normal” protagonist the series has crafted thus far, she navigates these questions as she navigates the building: with a mix of fear, panic, gumption, and dogged inquisitiveness.

Image: Source Gaming. Grace Ashcroft, seconds before cutting her wrist strap with a bloody glass shard.

In her personality and in her actions, Grace feels like a summation of the current era of Resident Evil, the one that started in 2017. Her movement and the gore through which she wades follow in the footsteps of Ethan Winters, the oaf who bumbled his way through the fantastic Resident Evil 7: Biohazard and Resident Evil Village (both out now on Nintendo Switch 2!). And the doomed clinic matches 2019’s exquisite Resident Evil 2 remake. It’s a horrific maze where every room features slobbering zombies, obtuse puzzles, and locked doors whose keys always seem to be on the other end of the building. There’s an immense satisfaction every time she manages to open up a corridor and untangle the knot, and an immense dread every time some horrible, flesh-eating complication makes that corridor less safe. And with a tight inventory that quickly fills with breakable knives, healing herbs, and plot-critical doodads, every trip out of the hospital’s atrium carries immense risk and reward.

The combat is tried and true survival horror. Grace can pull off a headshot like nobody’s business, but bullets are scarce and the zombies incredibly durable. Even better, any downed one has the potential to come back with a fleshy mass for a face and a much worse attitude. These “Blister Heads” are great (they’re also a great nod to an obscure Resident Evil baddie), but really, their job is to make it abundantly clear that open gunplay is the last resort. Like most horror games, Resident Evil Requiem has a strict economy of useful items, but it also has an economy of enemies. The onus is on the player to decide which need to be killed, which are worth the semi-secret resources that keep them from coming back, and which can be avoided with an intermittent kneecap. It’s also a good reminder that horror draws as much from what we know as what we don’t. I know the zombie butcher is too tough to fight directly. I bet he’s carrying a useful key. I… thought I knew his patrol pattern?

Image: Source Gaming. Relaxing in an operating room, with a zombie just out of frame.

In keeping with the series’ history, there are a few enemies who don’t even offer the choice of wasting ammo. Throughout the main area and a few extra points, Grace gets chased and hunted by seemingly invincible monsters. The most prominent of these is a ghastly thing, one who fears light and burrows through walls. “The Girl” follows other invincible Resident Evil hunters—Jack Baker, Nemesis—but she’s not quite as strong. She lacks the eccentric charm of a Lady Dimitrescu, or the unpredictable behavior of a Mr. X. There’s a lot of tiptoeing around before dashing to an overhead light. And yet, for all my criticisms, these moments with her and foes like her were consistently the scariest and most upsetting in the game. They were the sections I dreaded the most. It didn’t help that the unsafe spaces seem to get larger each time, culminating in an endgame moment where a noninvincible enemy from years past chased Grace all the way to a save point. I had to douse it in acid. Classic.

In these times, and so many others, Resident Evil Requiem connects to its series’ past. And that comes through most strongly with the game’s deuteragonist, Leon S. Kennedy. If Resident Evil has a mascot, Leon’s it. He starred in Resident Evil 2, Resident Evil 4, and Resident Evil 6. Unlike the newcomer Grace, he’s been around the block; he literally headlined the game that made Resident Evil turn towards action and the game that took that action too far. Appropriately, he’s able to take the direct approach by fighting entire crowds of zombies. Leon also has an economy, but his is about juggling guns, ammo, bombs, and an axe that needs to be sharpened every so often. Over the course of ten to fifteen hours, the two heroes pass the main character baton to each other as they unravel a mystery comprising the mysterious Connections criminal syndicate, a lost doomsday weapon by the Umbrella Corporation, and a syndrome affecting the survivors of RE2’s long-dead Midwestern town of Racoon City. Ain’t Resident Evil without a mystery.

Image: Source Gaming. Leon painting the town red.

This double act is a way to tackle a series of questions that virtually every Resident Evil has asked, things like “how much action should be in our horror game” or “how can we get players more bang for their buck?” The series has always been invested in offering content, for instance, and to that end it has traditionally gone for things like multiple leads, alternate playthroughs, and switching characters. Jumping between Grace and Leon synthesizes these. It combines Resident Evil’s two playthroughs, RE2’s “A and B” stories, RE6’s multiple campaigns, Resident Evil: Revelations’ time hopping thriller plot, and Revelations 2’s unique character types. There doesn’t seem to be critical consensus on how well Requiem handles it, but it worked wonders for me. On the whole, whenever I started feeling tired of one play style, we’d jump to the other.

Crucial to that is how differently the characters play. Grace is a classic survival horror hero in the vein of RE1 and RE7. She captures Resident Evil’s oldest and newest attitudes, particularly in how she contends with space and foes. Leon takes the action-heavy approach and follows the excellent remakes of his main games, RE2 and RE4. His moves come straight from them, complete with parries, stealth takedowns, and some wonderfully bad one-liners. Their inventory works differently, too; Grace juggles items and scrounges for pouch upgrades, while Leon plays “Inventory Tetris” to stuff every bag of gunpowder in an attache case. Grace has a first-person camera and Leon a third (you can change these in-game, and unlike the weak third-person mode in Resident Evil Village, Requiem was made with this in mind. Still, I never felt a need to). Both enjoy a crafting mechanic, just with different items. Perhaps the craziest example is that Grace has limited saves on the hardest difficulty—as was the case in the first Resident Evil—but Leon doesn’t. These are nods to constituent parts of older entries, but more importantly, they make these characters feel deeply distinct.

Image: Source Gaming. Just like Resident Evil 4, there’s a chainsaw. And just like Resident Evil 7, there’s a chance to turn the table.

Every Resident Evil game has to ask itself when the scary, slow walking goes out and when the head-splattering, boss-exploding action comes in. I’m not sure it’s ever been more obviously delineated. It’s rather astonishing that Capcom essentially made two games that give perfectly valid answers—of course they’re valid! They come straight from all the best games in this series!—and put them into one game. Grace will sneak by enemies and stick gemstones into door sockets for a while, and then Leon will blast his way past zombies and bosses for a while. It does mean that a Resident Evil fan who only likes one side of the equation may have a tough row to hoe, but I’m pretty confident the balance will satisfy, one extra-long Leon section aside.

It should be said that Resident Evil Requiem is a very scary game. It’s especially so in Grace’s part of the plot, with her lack of resources and the overpowering enemies, but it’s everywhere. Leon may have high powered rifles and cool, execution-style finishing moves, but his levels are tense and his enemies as tenacious as ever. One of the single best moments is his first appearance, where he’s running through cramped streets at the start of a viral outbreak. The soundtrack for both stories got under my skin with horrible footsteps, wheezes, and undead shrieks. If the screenshots thus far haven’t made it clear, this is also exceptionally gory. Eyes are gouged, pustules popped, bodies bursted, blood sprayed, skulls crushed, torsos chainsawed, hands sliced, and flesh cooked. One of Leon’s stealth kills involves him ripping a zombie’s head off with an axe, and Grace collects blood off fallen enemies and buckets of viscera as a crafting resource. A particular highlight of her story is a sequence with a conveyor belt that launches straight into the pantheon of video game horror-comedy.

Image: Source Gaming. Grace injecting a Blister Head with a kind of a zombie destroying device. Best way to keep one from getting back up.

As an aside, even before we got a code from Nintendo, I was intrigued by the Nintendo Switch 2 version of Requiem. There’s a lot of writing about this port, almost all of it dry and technical, and I wanted to avoid that and engage with it on its own terms. As a game, not a value judgment on the potential of Switch 2 ports. I don’t think I can fully ignore that, but there’s fortunately little for me to say. Requiem simply runs like a dream on Switch 2. There are obviously weaker textures, and Grace’s hair isn’t great, but it in no way feels cheap or seriously compromised. The main technical issue I found—and this may be on me for keeping the game running for multiple days straight—was a few seconds where the frame rate tanked while I was in the sandbox…

Wait, what? Resident Evil has a sandbox!?

Okay, so this description up to now isn’t entirely accurate. It describes, in truth, only the first half of a video game, because Resident Evil Requiem is about a lot more than a three story facility somewhere in Middle America. It goes places, narratively and also physically. There are ridiculous monsters, secret labs, and self-destruct sequences. But one of the most powerful and crazy beats of all is a section in a desolate urban landscape that was once Raccoon City, the Midwestern town whose decimation is Resident Evil’s most powerful image. You walk through the remains of streets and buildings that were standing just a few games ago. As a level, it stretches those lock and key puzzles from hallways city streets without feeling forced. Tonally, though, it feels unexpectedly poignant. More than any of the other “third wave” games that came out since Resident Evil 7, Requiem captures a sense of isolation and enduring trauma. This is an extraordinarily goofy game, with all of the action movie clichés fans have come to expect, but there were points where I was walking around the rubble and feeling like I’d stumbled upon some memorial to a fictional mass murder. Both the level and Grace’s overall story let Resident Evil explore something it rarely cares about, which is its own future.

Image: Source Gaming. Leon approaches a famous building from years past, one we’ve seen in games and movies.

If there is one big problem, and your mileage may vary on how much of a problem it is, it’s that Requiem doesn’t quite match the best of its predecessors. Resident Evil 1, 2, 4, and 7 were visionary, dramatic, and able to both chart and perfect new paths for the series. In the case of 4 and 7, those changes were desperately needed. They were no less full of connections to the other games, but they innovated. Requiem is great (and Resident Evil is in as good a place as it’s ever been), but its new ideas feel smaller, less crucial, and far more iterative. Take the new zombies, which retain the memories of their former lives. It gives them some much-needed personality and leads to a few fun puzzles where Grace tricks the living dead. But it’s not foundational. That’s true of the sandbox, a vehicle section, an escort mission involving a mysterious blind child, and a currency based around getting kills. It’s also part of what makes Grace compelling, as she’s part of this history from the get-go.

Then again, can Resident Evil have a hero who isn’t? This is a series about bioterrorism and world-shaking geopolitics and one of the most labyrinthine plots in the world of games. The stories it tells don’t have much room for people outside its conflict. It has also, over the course of thirty years, constantly looped back on itself. We may finally get to see the ruins of Raccoon City, but between remakes, spinoffs, and movies, we’ve never left it behind. And in one sense, that is Requiem as a whole: an ungouged eye trained on the past. The fanservice runs thicker and faster than ever before, with references to enemies, music, levels, characters, bosses, and puzzles aplenty. Perhaps this is why Leon slowly takes over more of the plot, though perhaps there’s a mechanical reason: we’re getting to the end, so we need to shift gears into action. Either way, he is a metaphor for the game as a whole, to the point where he’s literally dying from a virus that only affects the survivors of Raccoon City. Resident Evil Requiem is threatened by the weight and history of Resident Evil.

Image: Source Gaming. “The Girl” collects a number of classic Resident Evil tropes, in a way that’s both very scary and slightly derivative.

However, there’s a stickiness to that reading, because Requiem’s references aren’t exclusively indulgent (though they are at times hilariously indulgent); they’re also confrontational. The plot is full of beats that upend how we—or at least, how I—view this series. There are dramatic retcons across the board, elements that could drastically alter the course of the world, and fun reappearances by characters whose presence will either delight or aggravate their fans. It’s epitomized by a scene late in the game in which Leon kills a bona fide fan favorite in the world’s shortest boss fight. This moment is surreal, it’s strange, but more than anything else, it’s audacious. I loved it. And I think this stickiness, this ambiguity that hasn’t fully sat with me, is the thing that makes Requiem special. It also means it’s perhaps the least newcomer-friendly game in the series, and its self-referentiality makes me ready to move into a new era of Resident Evil. Taken that way, that virus is both a problem and a call to arms to challenge the past. I don’t think that challenge is fully met, but I admire how it’s tackled. Because it’s tackled the Resident Evil way: loud, gonzo, and over the top.

Since beating the game, I’ve thought about all this. The thorny ties to the past, the excellent game feel and pacing, the scares, the fights, the characters. I loved this experience, and everything else aside, I think I know why. Resident Evil Requiem is not the best Resident Evil, but it is the most Resident Evil: the most singularly frenetic, violent, crazy, and unhinged paean to everything Resident Evil is. It features some of the goofiest things this franchise has produced, alongside a genuinely scary and affecting story. Even its attempts to fight this thirty year legacy is demented. Its choices and its flaws imply that Resident Evil might need to reimagine itself once again, but if so, what a climax to this era.

Final score: 9/10

Thanks to Slink for edits and suggestions.