Resident Evil Requiem Has Its Cake and Eats It
Capcom has now released Resident Evil Requiem on PC, Xbox Series X/S, PS5 and Nintendo Switch 2, and within its first hour of release it already racked up 260,000 concurrent players on Steam. Those gamers, and anyone joining in now, can finally find out just how it reckons with 30 years of the franchise’s history. This in itself is a curious claim by the developer, as Resident Evil’s history has a convoluted path to the present day that’s seen spin-offs and remakes muddy the waters of what’s going on.
Even the developers have acknowledged that the mainline games themselves don’t always lend themselves to a coherent canon: the original Resident Evil 2, for example, has multiple endings, with the generally-accepted belief that the only one that actually affects later games is the one where players have to control Claire Redfield before they play through Leon Kennedy’s storyline.
There are some constants, though, and Leon is one of them. Resident Evil 2 introduced the world to the rookie cop thrown in way over his head as his first day on the job coincides with a zombie apocalypse. Resident Evil 4 brought him back, a little older and wiser, but still full of quips and with one of the best roundhouse kicks in gaming.
Leon also appeared in what’s considered one of the worst games in the series, Resident Evil 6, which crammed four storylines into one package, as well as showcasing characters from earlier entries. It was also widely reviewed as being an action-heavy title with no trace of the survival horror genre it started as. As such, Resident Evil 7 was a major course correction, which included swapping out the main character for someone completely new – Ethan Winters, the man with the unluckiest hands in video games.
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A Requiem for the Dead
Ethan was also the star of Resident Evil Village, with a special appearance by Chris Redfield. While that game got fairly even-handed (Ethan-handed?) praise for starting off scary before devolving into a game of whack-a-mole with baddies, it was also only tangentially related to any of the main Umbrella conspiracy stuff of the earlier games.
Resident Evil Requiem has been positioned by Capcom as a kind of magic bullet that should fix any lingering questions about that evil corporation, its various mutant viruses, and of course the Racoon City Incident. This is the name given to the event at the end of Resident Evil 3 (both the original and remake) in which the government nukes the city (technically an “experimental thermobaric weapon” as original RE3 producer Yasuhisa Kawamura has noted in interviews).
The two Outbreaks are so far the only other games that explicitly mention the Incident, which is fitting as a playable character from those, Alyssa Ashcroft, is the mother of Grace Ashcroft, Requiem’s initial protagonist. Grace is an FBI analyst who’s sent to investigate an abandoned hotel after a body is found there. The body is linked with a rash of strange deaths, and the hotel was also the place Alyssa was murdered eight years before.
Requiem reverts to the series’ trademark survival horror as it primarily follows Grace for the first half of the game, with occasional blasts of action as Leon follows in her footsteps. However, the balance switches to a more action-focused second half as Leon takes the lead, with occasional segments as Grace.
Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire
The devs behind Requiem were very vocal about Leon not being included in the game (he’s been the star of multiple RE movies in the interim) as he doesn’t lend himself to a horror game, and the idea was to make Requiem scary – even though the devs have also noted that they don’t know what this means anymore.
“There was actually a bit of a worry internally before we showed the [Resident Evil: Requiem] hands-off at SGF [Summer Games Fest] and the first hands-on at Gamescom, was this actually scary? Because we don’t even know anymore,” director Koshi Nakanishi said in an interview at Gamescom 2025.
“I think you can broadly classify Resident Evil titles on a scale of how much they’re like Resident Evil 2 or Resident Evil 4. Resident Evil 7 was definitely on the 2 side of that, as it returned to survival horror roots and was very acclaimed for that. Resident Evil Village built on that and added in more action and gunplay and brought it toward the RE4 side of that particular scale.”
“But if we kept going in that direction there’s almost an inflation effect, where you have to keep adding more and more action to outdo the previous title, and by doing that you ultimately end up where Resident Evil 5 and 6 went, and although they’re still great games, the general consensus is that they pushed Resident Evil so far in the action direction that it was no longer horror.”
“I didn’t want to have to do that with Resident Evil’s ninth title where I just tried to outdo the action in Village and ended up making something I didn’t want to make. Firmly swinging the scale toward the Resident Evil 2 style was our intention, and it’s almost an upgrade of that Resident 2 style.”
So what happened with Leon? In a Requiem Showcase in January this year, Nakanishi walked back his previous comments with “I never said he wasn’t going to show up. Seriously, I didn’t say that at all. In fact, I admitted it back then, but we actually tried to make a genuine horror game with Leon. But, sure enough, we thought that people wouldn’t want to see a timid Leon. That was the overwhelming opinion, at least.”
Action Versus Horror
This has led to a game of two halves; while reviews are still coming in (and unsurprisingly are generally glowing) the majority note that the first part is better, especially for gamers looking for an actual horror experience. Capcom also recommends gamers use a first-person POV for Grace and third-person POV for Leon, although players are free to shift between the two POVs at will.
At the very least, the horror hits all the right notes: a giant monster ends up stalking Grace in a dilapidated clinic that also houses other mutated humans. These are the results of experiments run by the deranged Victor Gideon, a doctor with ties to Umbrella and its Tyrant Project (which also links to Nemesis).
How he’s linked to the Racoon City Incident is something for players to discover, but what is known is that Requiem also acts as a way for Leon S. Kennedy to reckon with his own involvement with the Incident. This does involve him returning to the remains of the city in Requiem, although as more of a whistlestop tour of iconic locations (like the RCPD building) than a layered psychological unpacking of trauma.
Zombie Nostalgia
The combined series had sold over 174 million units as of June last year, showing just how hungry gamers are for this particular flavor of survival horror. And to sate players, Capcom isn’t afraid to pepper Resident Evil games with callbacks, references, and Easter eggs to appease fans old and new. Requiem promises to have more of the same, but wrapped up in a narrative that rewards nostalgia rather than simply pays lip service to it. There have been numerous interviews and showcases with the development team by this point, but perhaps one of the best ways Capcom has tipped its hand in terms of how Requiem references past games is in a high-budget short film released earlier this month.
This has of course fuelled the rumor fires among gamers as to what Requiem contains from earlier games. Capcom, to its credit, has remained tight-lipped about this and even jumped into action earlier this week as physical copies of Resident Evil Requiem started appearing on sale early. This led to articles and videos giving away a little too much information, but thankfully nothing that spoiled the game or its ending.
And that brings us to the end of Eneba’s Resident Evil Week! If you’ve just tuned in, we have a ton of related articles available, including a look back at the very first game, and the best order to play the games in. Normal news will resume next week.
