Last week, Nintendo invited me to an event in New York where I played a handful of upcoming Switch 2 titles, including the Virtual Boy and the Super Mario Bros. Wonder DLC. I was far more curious about the event’s third-party titles, though. Specifically, Capcom decided to demo Resident Evil Requiem and Pragmata for the Switch 2, and after playing both, I’m shocked at how well Nintendo’s newest console handles them.
Both demos are ones we’ve played before at Game Informer, though it was my first time with either. The Requiem demo is the same as what was offered at Summer Game Fest and Gamescom last year, showing Grace scramble through a dark medical facility to escape a mutated monster in a hospital gown. Meanwhile, the Pragmata demo is now available on PC and features protagonists Hugh and Diana as they hack and blast their way through a station on the moon.
The clearest downgrade between the Switch 2 versions of these games and the higher-quality footage I’ve seen in trailers, presumably captured on other consoles or PC, is in the texture quality. It was especially noticeable in Pragmata, where the sci-fi environment is plastered with high-tech walls. In the PC demo, you can see how shiny and detailed these metallic surfaces are, but on the Switch 2, they’re slightly more blurry and less reflective. Outside of cutscenes, however, it was less noticeable, and having played my fair share of subpar Switch ports, it certainly could have been much worse.
Requiem was similar but looked cleaner, especially in the lighting. I played with headphones on in the corner of the event space, and I got so immersed that I genuinely forgot which console I was playing on at times. It didn’t feel like a Switch 2 version of Resident Evil Requiem – it felt like Resident Evil Requiem. I’m sure that after playing the full game on a more powerful system, I’ll eventually be able to pinpoint the differences more accurately, but I was pleasantly surprised to say the least.
It’s worth noting that I played Requiem in first-person, but in both games, the character models also had a clear downgrade. This is most easily seen in how the RE Engine rendered hair, which is fuller and flows more smoothly on more powerful machines. Like the textures, it was far more noticeable in a cutscene than in a faster-moving gameplay section, but not quite egregious in either. Meanwhile, the performance of each demo was extremely stable. The fast-paced gunplay and puzzle-solving of Pragmata felt buttery smooth, and Requiem felt the same, even though the latter didn’t have twitchy combat to test frame rates to the same degree.
There are plenty of caveats. I only had time to play each game in docked mode, but I heard good things about handheld as well. My sessions were also limited to bespoke demos, and it’s fully possible that technical success is limited to these earlier builds, or that later areas might look worse. Still, based on what I played, these seem like the best-case scenario for a Switch 2 port. There’s an expected, minor drop in visual quality, but the game runs just as well as on other platforms, and you can take it on the go.
It’s a theoretically even trade-off that has me excited not just for Pragmata and Requiem, but for the other Resident Evil games coming to Switch 2 (Resident Evil Biohazard and Resident Evil Village launch on Switch 2 the same day as Requiem), along with whatever else Capcom decides to bring to the console. I play my Switch 2 all the time, but if this is the level of quality to expect from third-party releases going forward, I think I’ll be playing that handheld even more often.
