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Introduction
As a fan of the Resident Evil series since the very beginning, the ride concerning where the series progressed to in the past nine years has been rough. The switch to first-person perspective and focus on reactionary streamer-bait horror tendencies in Resident Evil 7 set a new direction for the mainline series, starting down a path that I wasn’t fond of and which has never grown on me, despite many attempts. This is a path which Resident Evil 8 continued a few years later. When announcements about Resident Evil Requiem began last year, I began to have hope that they would try something new, with a new protagonist who wasn’t a superhero and who felt like they could be refreshing to the mainline games.
Not only this, but all the early gameplay that was showcased showed that they’d be returning to third-person perspective as an option, with some elements that felt closer to true survival horror, such as very little resources or ways to defend yourself. There was also a lot of refreshing mystery revolving around the images we saw and how Grace fit into the larger Resident Evil universe. It felt like Resident Evil Requiem could possibly be a return to form and a step forward for the series I’d loved for all these years, which I felt had been led astray in its recent attempts to move the series forward.
Just a few months later, after going out of their way to publicly deny it for several months, the creators then revealed that Grace would not be the sole heroine of Resident Evil Requiem, and that you’d be spending a good amount of your time in the game as Leon S. Kennedy himself, in his 11th game appearance in the series.
Everything from this point started a spiral of PR and hype cycle nightmares for me regarding this game, as Capcom also used the marketing for Requiem to advertise everything from $200,000 sports cars and $2000 wristwatches to exercise equipment. They seemed to be doing almost everything they could to make me have less faith in the game as being a return to what I loved about the series or something truly new, aside from questionable marketing practices.
In the months leading up to Requiem, I chose to avoid watching or reading much about it, and wanted to approach it as open-mindedly as I could, trying to assess it in a fair way despite pre-release missteps. Stepping into the world of Requiem last week was an interesting experiment not only in personal restraint and introspection, but also in adopting a different perspective of what the series has become in spite of its 30 year history.
Gameplay
When Requiem starts, you’ll be playing as Grace, with a fairly long narrative section where she explores the abandoned hotel that she and her mother (Alyssa Ashcroft, from Resident Evil Outbreak) stayed before a bizarre series of murders began in the area. Grace is trying to unravel the mystery surrounding her mother’s death and an item Alyssa left behind just before dying. This section will take quite a while in setting up the continuously paper-thin narrative of the game, mostly featuring walking simulator and hold-a-button-to-progress gameplay segments for the first 45 minutes to an hour.
This starts to get tiresome after a bit, ending with Grace being kidnapped by a mysterious hooded man, but this certainly won’t be the last of the walk-and-talk segments within Resident Evil Requiem.
Immediately after the kidnapping, the game snaps over to Leon’s perspective, where you run through the city streets following the kidnapper and end up blowing away a few dozen zombies with high-powered firearms and kung-fu moves, demonstrating the first example of how the game’s tone violently jumps between one style to another when it switches characters. It’s not just the style of the gameplay that changes, but also the level of seriousness and tact with which it approaches itself, jumping from trying to be a deadly serious horror game to being a bombastic action movie, and these jumps happen fairly often.
Next, there’s another switch back to Grace, to the section of gameplay that was the first footage shown off by Capcom last year, where Grace awakens in the hospital, defenseless and confused against a giant monster that chases her through the halls while trying to solve puzzles and survive.
This section felt fairly refreshing the first time through, highlighting that stealth mechanics and staying hidden would be one of Grace’s most effective ways to survive. This immediately gave me some comfort in knowing that her sections would be much more in the survival horror realm of things, especially being the huge fan of stealth gameplay that I am.
Leon’s massively jarring tone shift then continues, as you make your way to the hospital where Grace has been taken, where within the span of five minutes, Leon ends up dismembering another dozen zombies with a giant chainsaw, blowing their heads off with a hand cannon, and cracking one-liner jokes while on his “rescue mission.” Shortly after this is where the gameplay switches back to Grace again, to begin what feels like the first segment of true gameplay where you’ll get to play as either of the characters for more than a few minutes at a time as Grace tries to escape the facility.
As Grace’s chapter continues, I found myself reveling in the joy of being able to sneak past enemies in Resident Evil Requiem again, after Revelations 2 and the Resident Evil 4 Remake had shown me how fun it could be several years before. Even though Grace does end up having a few guns to defend herself, the ammo stays fairly scarce throughout, making it a necessity to think things through and maximize your ability to stay hidden as you navigate the hospital’s many puzzles and areas.
In your time spent as Grace in her early sections, the game feels like it’s progressing similar to most other Resident Evil games, uncovering the secrets and puzzles of a large building with several floors, and while it does feel fun and familiar overall, there’s also a certain sense of “been there, done that” which sets in after a while.
After playing as Grace for a few hours and exploring a good amount of the hospital, you’ll snap back to Leon again, who has to blast and slash his way through a few more dozen enemies on his way to rescue Grace yet again, ending up with another convergence for the two characters and another jarring tone shift. Despite Leon’s combat feeling very good for what it is, which is an evolution of the action gameplay that the series has been developing since Resident Evil 4, it also made me yearn to go back to Grace’s gameplay after a little while. This feeling would persist for a good amount of my time with Resident Evil Requiem, even though there were a few curveballs thrown in here and there.
As you continue switching back and forth between Leon and Grace a few more times, Grace’s gameplay also shifts to being heavily focused on navigating environments with the relatively annoying stalker creature from the beginning of the game popping up in nearly every room in a way that felt overzealous and annoying at times. Because of this shift, your ability to use stealth to avoid enemies becomes nearly non-existent through the later sections of her gameplay after the hospital.
Thankfully, most of Leon’s later sections allow him to start using the stealth mechanics more, which felt like an absolute delight, especially since he has an infinitely-usable hatchet weapon to perform stealth kills without using your precious resources, though there’s also plenty of more scripted encounters throughout where he’s unable to use stealth.
After a few more sections of switching back and forth between Grace and Leon, you’ll hit a point at around half way through when the game switches almost permanently to Leon, as Grace disappears to sulk after the death of another character takes place. She’s somehow nearly instantly won over by a new villain who approaches her saying they need her help, which makes about as little narrative sense as anything I’ve ever seen from this series.
Narrative
As the narrative continues to be almost entirely inconsequential nonsense until the very end, it feels hollow and gives very little motivation to keep you invested in the characters and the world they’re trying to build. The amount of strange, weasel-y retcons they end up squeezing into the story here also raises quite a few red flags about just how bankrupt of ideas they are for the series’ future.
As far as conveying any kind of narrative through characters, it’s of note that Grace’s voice acting often hits a bothersome waif-like caricature quality that very quickly made me detached from whatever kind of surface-level emotion she was trying to convey. She’s constantly stammering on words and freaking out in a way that feels manufactured and inauthentic.
On the other side of the coin, every word out of Leon’s mouth feels like he’s become a caricature of himself, delivering lines with the corny, over-the-top nature of the worst movie heroes we’ve ever seen, and also playing into a very strange and uncanny sense of pandering to nostalgia in a way that was frequently uncomfortable and cringe-inducing.
Once landing at the part of the game where Leon takes over for most of the remainder of the game, the gameplay remains wonderfully fun to play and explore, as his return to the bombed-out ruins of Raccoon City turns into a sort of open-world area with many side quests and locations to explore in the order you choose. He even gets a silly “merchant” system to be able to upgrade his abilities and equipment where he gains currency by killing more enemies, making for a very bizarre and nearly fourth wall-breaking bit of video game-y farce in a game that has otherwise presented itself as trying to be relatively serious.
Unfortunately, this is also where the game takes its deep dive into nostalgia-bait fan service territory, as you explore the ruins of Raccoon City, since you’ll start running into tons of references and Easter eggs from the previous games in the series in ways that feel quite ham-fisted and out-of-place. Even though it’s nice to see some of these references or returning elements from Leon’s past at first, none of it feels very natural or organic, resulting in a strange emptiness being left behind from what was potentially aimed to be a “celebration” of the series’ history in some way. These things will likely appease the reactionary audiences and fans of the series when first encountered, but if you think about them for just a short time after they occur, they stick out like a sore thumb.
This persists for most of the remainder of the game, where more characters, enemies, and locations from his past continue to assault Leon in his journey to help Grace find out who she really is, while both characters are being antagonized by two villains who generally also add almost nothing to the narrative or the series. There’s several sections where you’ll get to play as tertiary characters in flashback and side-story sequences, most of which feel a little too drawn-out and inconsequential, even though it’s nice to have a little change-up from time to time.
The extent to which Requiem ends up feeling like a “Resident Evil’s Greatest Hits” compilation is disturbing in a way that’s hard to put a finger on, signaling what feels like a move from being a series that honored its history and established universe to being a product that’s meant to appeal to as wide of an audience as possible, losing most of its voice and personality in the process. Despite all this, it’s still a game that feels great to play for most of its runtime, even if your narrative motivation to keep playing is less present than ever before.
This “greatest hits” feeling intrudes not only in the gameplay, but also the narrative, level design, and much more, further adding to the feeling that it doesn’t have anything new to offer, like a paint-by-numbers reference to the series as a whole. The amount of times Requiem tried to spring an obnoxious jump scare or surprise and fell flat on its face was embarrassing, as I knew what was about to happen every single time as soon as I walked into a suspicious room or tried to put a puzzle piece into a slot.
At one point, Leon even starts making meta-jokes about how predictable the events are, which really started to make me question if the game was actually ridiculing itself or just embracing the fact that they’re out of ideas and afraid to take risks.
Similarly, the amount of overly-scripted, linear, on-rails scenes in the game that just end up being glorified cutscenes where you hold a button or an analog stick forward to progress felt very tiresome and slowed down the pacing of Requiem. The intent here is clearly to make boring narrative scenes feel more exciting by letting you technically control them, but when there’s so little thought or effort required to play them, there’s little enjoyment to be had from these scenes, despite the faux-interactivity.
Another strange element in Requiem is the fact that there’s two different endings based on a choice you make that drastically change the outcome, but similarly feels like there was no point in there being a choice at all. One of them very clearly signals to you that it was the wrong choice, and barely gives any closure or explanation for anything, and quickly cuts to the credits after you make the choice, with no epilogue scenes afterward. This ending swiftly and unceremoniously brings a dark and unsatisfying end to one of the longest-running legacies in horror gaming history and feels like more of an afterthought than anything, making it a truly perplexing inclusion.
Conclusion
Despite returning to the tried-and-true third-person gameplay that the series has so meticulously crafted over the last 21 years, Requiem just feels like a very underwhelming experience that’s getting a pass by resting on its laurels, and the first time in the series where a third-person game didn’t inspire me to jump right back in after finishing it for another playthrough. Something about it felt bloated and unsatisfactory in a way that was historically not the case with the series before.
The running time will last most players between 10-14 hours, depending on how long some sections take you and how many of the side quests you do during Leon’s later segments, but unfortunately, I felt there’s very little replay value here, since there’s no extra side stories and no Mercenaries mode to further enjoy the game’s fantastic combat engine. We can only hope that some will get added later, but Capcom hasn’t announced any plans yet.
The controls and performance were pretty solid overall, though it feels like the RE Engine is starting to show its age after all these years, with the visuals not being much of a step up from the last few games in the series. It still does look impressive, but some cracks are starting to form in its foundation as other modern engines move past it in some ways.
While Resident Evil Requiem is still far more enjoyable than RE7 and RE8 for its gameplay alone, it’s a far cry from every other entry in the series so far that feels a bit lazy and uninspired, even if it’s still fun to play, landing it at a pretty middling place in the series overall. It’s a game with a major identity crisis that only the most die-hard RE7/8 fans or the most reactionary horror fans will find truly worth celebrating.
(7 / 10)
Good
(7 / 10)
