Resident Evil Requiem is about two people whose lives are forever altered by the worst day of work ever. Those same people then risk it all to save someone. This act is unfeigned, full of the corny sincerity that is a staple of this series, and it is the heartbeat the hordes of undead they will maim are missing. Resident Evil Requiem is also a game about roundhouse-kicking zombies, physics-defying motorcycle chases, and a story that requires years of crisscrossed history to fully understand what transpires. It is fantastic, a revelatory mix of terrifying survival-horror and action that stops just short of being too over the top to dip back into the sentimental humanity of these seemingly everlasting characters. It is goofy, schlocky, and excessive, but it is also a masterclass in refinement, a tour de force of gameplay that arrives only after 30 years of lessons learned. Requiem is Resident Evil at its finest.
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Grace Ashcroft is the daughter of a woman murdered for mysterious but significant reasons. When she is called to yet another murder on a case she’s tracking for the FBI, she returns to the hotel where she watched her mom die. Thus begins a dreadful day in which the comfort of her office computer is a far cry from her journey to the heart of Raccoon City to fight both true evil and rotting corpses whose innocent slumber has been invaded by a virus. Leon S. Kennedy, who might view Grace’s adventure as just another day at work, is ill, racing against the clock to find a cure for something he doesn’t understand. Fatefully, their paths cross, and together, they must save themselves, a girl, and the world – they don’t know who’s pulling what strings, not really, but that only encourages them to keep fighting.
That hotel, the Rhodes Hill Care Center, sterile-white labs, Raccoon City itself, and the dormant secrets they hold are the labyrinthian playgrounds for what is the new pinnacle of survival-horror. Absurd puzzles involving sparkling gems, search-action gauntlets, and a scavenger hunt for detonator parts, and more color the pages of Capcom’s playbook in Requiem. It is familiar, sometimes to a fault, but it is always exhilarating.
The shakiness of Grace’s hands in first-person matches the hushed breaths I try to contain on my couch, as if the undead hulking chef, with his machete-sized kitchen knife, will hear me if I’m too loud. The copious one-liners that Leon can’t help saying are the capstones to my laughter after watching a pustulating, walking blister explode into a fountain of blood after I plunge a hatchet into its skull in third-person.
Whether my walk has slowed to a crawl as I inch closer to a zombie I have to sneak around, or I’m sprinting forward into the horde because I am finally in control of a chainsaw that has haunted me for years, I am in heaven (or maybe hell).
Just barely surviving the hallways of the aforementioned care center as Grace, desperate to save a girl who could have been her in a different universe, provides the scares and tension I crave from Resident Evil. I don’t care that zombies explode into reborn festering amalgamations of blood and thickened muscle before my eyes. I don’t care that a gigantic woman whose eyes verge on popping like the world’s most disgusting boba relentlessly searches for me. Well, that’s not true, actually. I do care, and Grace does too, of course, but for the sake of this girl, and both her survival and mine, we cannot care – these are our circumstances, and there is no other choice.
Instead of ramping up Grace’s adventures to a comical level of silliness and heroism – an issue I have with the series’ past – her time on screen remains a dreadful march of atrocity, agony, and heart. And just as it starts to feel overindulgent, in steps Leon, just the man for extravagant set pieces with mortar-firing zombies, motorcycle chases, and monstrous boss fights. It’s nothing new for him, after all. Capcom masterfully weaves Leon and Grace’s stories together to ensure her horrors never persist for too long and that Leon’s ditzy drive never overextends its enjoyment.
I would have welcomed another dozen hours of this back-and-forth with joy, and I am looking forward to optimizing my route through this nightmare to achieve a cleaner, faster completion time. That myriad post-game rewards and unlockables remain after the first playthrough demonstrates Capcom’s confidence: it knows I will be playing it again, and again.
There is such a simple change in the ever-present virus of Requiem, which has plagued Raccoon City and its surrounding mountains for nearly three decades: those who succumb to it retain their memories. Gone are the shambling, decomposed bodies that just want to taste the next living thing their eyes spot. No, these zombies are the soldiers who died with a machine gun in hand but still have a mission to accomplish, the doctors performing surgery who will use their scalpel prowess on you, and the lone police chief still looking for a donut, I assume. This viral change breathes new life into zombies we’ve killed countless times before, as there is a semblance of life within, and every bullet fired is the chance for mercy, finally. It also means some custodial zombies aren’t interested in killing you but rather are desperate to turn off the light you just switched on, and I’m thankful for that, too.
There is little room to breathe in Requiem. Grace cannot stop – she is not Leon and her survival depends on her ability to march forward toward an eventual but unknown escape, even when every cell in her body is screaming for her to turn the other way.
Leon will not stop – he has a mission after all, and nothing will prevent him from completing it, not even the threat of returning foes he has long thought dead. Those returning foes, and even the return of Raccoon City itself decades after its nuclear fallout, might come across as fan service, and to an extent, they are, by the very nature of their existence. But a delicate hand elevates these encounters and characters to be more. They are reminders of where someone like Leon has been and where he is today; they are callbacks that tease, through history, where Grace’s story can go; they are prompts to inspect internally what Resident Evil means to you. Is it the horror? Is it the action? Is it the characters? Is it the ridiculous lore? Is it Leon’s sculpted jaw and always perfect hair? It is all of these things, and Requiem is in commanding conversation with that mixture throughout its runtime.
Just as I mix various resources in the crafting menu to see what I get, so too does Requiem combine its various gameplay types, from claustrophobic horror to bombastic action and everything in between. Sometimes the result is familiar – mixing three green herbs still gives you an item that fully recovers your health – but sometimes the outcome is a new thrill of adrenaline and terror Capcom somehow hadn’t yet delivered.
Requiem is a repose for characters, corpses, and the chronicles of Raccoon City. Requiem is also the name of the laughably large pistol I used to kill yet another mutated nemesis, itself a deformed manifestation of man’s hubris. That duality of the word “Requiem” here speaks to Capcom’s success and the ways in which Resident Evil is finally harmonizing the disparate parts of its past to create a perfectly refined melody. And now, with its secrets exposed to me and its mazes awaiting my mastery of them, Requiem is also the name of my favorite Resident Evil.
