Resident Evil Requiem Review

Requiem opens by taking away everything the modern series handed you. Grace Ashcroft is a technical analyst, not a soldier, and for the first long stretch she has no weapon, no radio and no reason to be brave, which returns the franchise to the thing it was genuinely good at before it became an action series. The toggle between first and third person is the smartest concession here, because the encounter design survives both: sightlines, item placement and enemy approach angles were clearly authored twice rather than once and then patched.

Raccoon City is rebuilt as a ruin instead of a nostalgia tour, and the RE Engine's lighting does more scaring than any creature in it. When the game hands you competence it shifts register into something closer to a shooter, and that stretch is the weakest, trading dread for confidence at exactly the wrong moment. Grace's arc from liability to survivor earns its ending, and tying her to the Outbreak cast rewards twenty years of patience without demanding it. The best sustained horror Capcom has shipped since the Village castle, and this time the whole game holds that level.