Distributor provided a review copy.
Your enjoyment of Resident Evil Requiem will hinge on nostalgia. Namely how much is too much, and your attachment to legacy characters in the now almost 40-year old franchise.
If, like me, you felt that Resident Evil 7 and Village were some of the best additions to the series because they finally took a step outside the recycled elements, you're going to have a rough ride. Resident Evil Requiem is a soft reset, one that leans on your knowledge of minutiae so much that it feels like homework.
Joonatan Itkonen
That said, it's also Capcom's latest showcase of their technical wizardry and one of the most visually stunning games of this generation. At its best, it is still an effective and thrilling ride that balances out the scares with absurdity like no other.
If you're a mega-fan who spends a lot of time connecting the dots between minor characters from previous entries and knows exactly what Leon Kennedy likes to have for breakfast, you'll have a blast with Requiem. For everyone else, it's much more of a mixed bag.
Requiem introduces a new protagonist to the series: Grace Ashcroft, an FBI analyst whose mother, Alyssa (of Resident Evil Outbreak fame), was brutally murdered years prior. When a new rash of killings flummoxes the bureau, Grace is sent to investigate the most recent crime scene in the same hotel where Alyssa was slain.
It's a fantastic setup for a story and the first couple of hours work like wonders. Grace makes for a fascinating leading hero as she's a walking a contradiction thoroughly at odds with the world around her. On paper, she's a trained FBI agent with a supernatural ability to understand both crime and criminal. In reality, she's so broken by past trauma and innate fear that when removed from her safe office surroundings she's immediately lost.
Her gameplay is familiar from Resident Evil 7, where Ethan Winters suffered through a nightmarish ordeal at the hands of the Baker family. Grace has a gun and the occasional knife to use, but she's far from an expert, and the enemies are even bigger bullet sponges than ever before.
To balance things out, Requiem also features a second playable character in Leon Kennedy, who is more of a walking tank compared to Grace. He's been around the block so many times that killing zombies is as easy as breathing. His sections are more reminiscent of previous titles in the franchise, where you start out with a gun and knife and quickly amass an arsenal as the enemies get bigger and scarier.
Unlike other Resident Evil titles with two heroes, Requiem doesn't split the experience between two distinct campaigns. Instead, the story starts and stops at random intervals as you complete levels and switches point of view elsewhere. Most of the time this means you're repeating entire sections of the game with minor differences, but without the ability to actually make a huge difference in either story.
There are even entire sequences where neither character knows the other one is there, and the game has to remind us that these plots intertwine through huge exposition dumps that slow down the narrative even further.
It's this divide that makes Requiem an immensely frustrating experience.
Joonatan Itkonen
Grace's campaign is old school to the point that it feels dated. Her inventory is extremely limited (though you can find small pouch upgrades at random intervals) and every item, including plot essentials, take up valuable space. There are more than a dozen times where you'll end up running back and forth between the sparsely located magic trunks to throw out things just to fit in an important key.
If you play on the Classic difficulty, you have to throw in ink ribbons for manual saving, as every death sends you back to the last typewriter. Since enemies can often one-shot kill Grace the moment they see her, it leads to an aggravatingly slow experience which is at odds with the fast-paced narrative.
Leon's story, on the other hand, is much more fun. The only problem is that it feels like a different game entirely, one where Grace ceases to exist for huge lengths at a time. It's almost as if Capcom had made one game and then realized they didn't have enough content for a full release. Had Leon's version of the game released in conjunction with the Resident Evil 2 Remake, it could easily be viewed as an expert continuation and closure for his story.
Now, we're stuck with a constantly shifting perspective that never lets you settle into a rhythm that feels natural. At one point, I could swear Leon gets only five to ten minute segments of play, only for the situation to change entirely about halfway through the game, where he turns into the main character.
Requiem also suffers from numerous poorly thought out puzzles, which have barely improved from previous entries. Some are even tied to the plot in ways they haven't before. Instead of allowing the player to solve or find keys to them on their own, you're forced to follow a strict cinematic that handles the puzzle while you're not looking.
Other times the solution requires backtracking multiple times across the entire level just to open a single door. It feels fiddly and like busywork instead of the intense running of the gauntlet as in previous games.
Then there's the fan service, which is very heavy this time around. Most incidents are so spoilerific I can't mention them here, but let's just say that I had to resort to a Resident Evil Wikipedia more than once just to make sense of it all. The new villains are wholly unmemorable, except for The Girl, who we already met in the Gamescom demo. Her sections remain some of the best in Resident Evil history. They're nightmarish runs that will haunt me for a long time.
But, on a positive note, Resident Evil Requiem is a technical marvel. It looks incredible on the PS5 Pro, running at full 4K with ray-tracing and at a totally steady 60fps. It's superlative on every level. HDR is brilliant and there's a constant thrill in seeing Grace reflected through distorted mirrors and windows.
The gameplay itself is fine, as well, though controls feel clunkier than they did in Village. Level design is more of a mixed bag, with some places intricately designed and gorgeous, while others feel unfinished.
Some puzzles are clear repeats of prior entries (looking at you, fake heart and lungs), and the final boss battle is such a letdown I was shocked the game ended where it did.
And yet, despite all this, there are immense highs. Like an intense fight against undead nurses in a closed ward. A chase in a warehouse with The Girl. A return to an iconic location. The sense that you're never truly alone in a darkened room. The things that make Resident Evil such a brilliant spectacle worth returning to.
Perhaps because Resident Evil is such an iconic franchise that my expectations were always a little higher than usual. Resident Evil Village is my favorite game in the series history. It is a perfect title in the saga, as far as I'm concerned. Part of that is because it finally dared to take the story into a new direction, with very little to tie it back to its convoluted history.
Requiem does the opposite. It leaps into the past and never lets go. How much you'll enjoy that depends entirely on how much you abide nostalgia.
