Spoilers ahead, baby:

This game shoulda, coulda, woulda been better.

Resident Evil Requiem is a puzzling game and features a mix of extremes. Player enjoyment may depend on individual responses to its nostalgic sensibilities.

Like Village before it, Requiem tries very hard to have its cake and eat it too, functioning as both an immersive, intimate horror experience and a bombastic, chaotic action game. Resident Evil VII was a sensationally atmospheric survival horror experience that, for most of its runtime, completely shed the fatiguing, recycled elements of the Umbrella global terror plot (it still ended up cowardly tying back into that narrative, but I forgive the last fourth of VII for how sensational everything before it is), and it felt extremely refreshing after the series took an extremely jarring turn with Resident Evil 6 and its subsequent franchise hibernation.

Village, conversely, represented a return to that same maximalist approach, with numerous linear segments and set pieces that attempted to rekindle the magic of Resident Evil 4, which mostly failed and also spat in the face of the more atmospheric passages the game tried to echo from VII.

Requiem once again employs this approach and handles it more effectively than Village. Separating the more intimate sections with Grace from the action-heavy stretches with Leon allows each distinct gameplay style to operate on its own terms.

This structure leads to some success. Grace’s sections in the first half of the game are quite good. Navigating the hospital is an eerie, tense experience. Grace is also a fantastic character for this framework. As much as I liked Ethan and love VII, she provides an even more fitting archetype for the regular jack-off out of the gooning pool approach. Ethan was a regular jack-off, sure. But Grace is a regular jack-off and also a timid, meek individual.

She is someone consumed by the trauma of her past and buries herself in her work and office to escape it. So when she's forced into the field to do actual agentic work, she’s already lost. That vulnerability is only intensified when a character like this is thrown into a nightmare scenario.

One highlight of Grace’s section occurs at the beginning, when she wakes up in a hospital as the game makes brilliant use of its lighting system. The unfamiliar hallways and environmental design contribute to a persistent sense of unease, evoking something close to PT.

Grace discovers a children's book describing a monster afraid of light. She is later pursued by an enemy that represents a notable aesthetic departure within the Resident Evil series since VII. Grace is completely powerless, running back and forth between sources of light, using a mere lighter to see in the dark. Having to navigate this hallway in such a roundabout way was legitimately alarming.

After this, Grace is left to slowly peel away a hub area, very similar to Resident Evil 2 and, in particular, Resident Evil VII, as the space is small but dense, and you will loop around many times as you unlock doors and gain access to new areas. It’s good, classic RE stuff!

So what’s the bad?

Unfortunately, likely because Capcom doesn't trust audiences to fork out as much for an ostensibly vulnerable character like Grace, they decided to include Leon for half the game, and his sections range from serviceable to aggressively mediocre. While Leon controls well and the gunplay is polished, his sections outside of one portion of the game are highly linear combat arenas with boring, spongey enemies and an overpowered parry that quickly transform the game into a slog.

What’s worse is that while the game is divided between the distinct Grace and Leon sections, during Grace’s campaign, you will be constantly interrupted to play these dreadful Leon segments that absolutely butcher the pacing. They always show up right after climaxes in Grace’s portion of the game, and honestly, I can’t decide if Capcom structured the game this way because they thought players would need a break from the narrative build or because they don’t respect us enough to sit through a slower stretch without some dopamine hits sprinkled in for our little monkey brains.

Even Leon’s “open” segment is deceptive. It's clear that this area is a remnant from the game's scrapped open-world/co-op structure. While you appear to have freedom in how you approach this open area, you will mostly be required to follow a golden path and fight off incredibly boring sand zombies along the way. Upon reaching this portion of the game, Leon finally has access to his full—and underwhelming—kit, including the anemic upgrade system that is limited to a mere two weapons per type, each of which has an objectively superior upgrade other than the bolt-action sniper (which is the best gun in the game).

While there are a few cool, Call of Duty-esque setpieces during Leon’s campaign, the nostalgia bait becomes overwhelming with incessant callbacks to older titles, including a romp through Raccoon City PD that feels entirely pointless other than to have the player soypoint at things from Resident Evil 2 Remake.

The nostalgia overload is more likely included to trigger recognition than to serve the story. A perfect example of this is how Mr. X/Tyrant just fucking instant transmissions during the cutscene where Leon is confronting Zeno. There’s no narrative contextualization for why he deus ex machinas his way into the game. He’s just there.

This then leads to a laughably bad “chase” sequence through the RCPD before culminating in an equally derisory boss fight that may be the worst in the series. I shit you not, it is essentially a glorified 3D Mario boss fight, and Tyrant, who exists here mostly to elicit soyjaking from the audience, is easily deleted with little fanfare before the game shuffles onward.

As I said, I appreciate this approach quite a bit more than Village's constant attempt to do both at once. However, the second half of Requiem completely sidelines the game's best material for a section overloaded with cloying, gratuitous fan service.

An improvement? Yes. Good? Not so much.

Also, I’m not really a stickler for the Resident Evil story, because it’s honestly kind of shit if you’re paying attention to anything other than the main beats. It’s a very stupid and nonsensical overarching plot, which is why Ethan’s story in VII (prior to being looped back into the larger narrative at the end) and Grace’s opening sections are so great. They are contained, personal stories about this conspiracy’s effects on normal people.

That said, what Requiem does seems so incredibly stupid that I cannot understand how more people aren’t upset about the retcons surrounding the destruction of Raccoon City and how absolutely dogshit the characters Zeno and Victor are.

Zeno is treated like some huge revelation, as if his existence is supposed to fundamentally recontextualize the story, but he ends up being a complete nothing, killed off in a cutscene before any of that can matter. The game presents him as if he should be a massive addition to the series' mythos, when in reality, he has the narrative weight of a fart in the wind.

And the implication that Raccoon City was destroyed to cover up Elpis is somehow even dumber. It is such a clumsy, needless retcon of one of the most important events in the series, and it does not deepen that tragedy at all; it cheapens it. That problem is only magnified by how heavily this section relies on the very nostalgia it simultaneously undermines. Why obsess over the past so much if you are just going to take a cleaver to it?

I initially liked Requiem and was quite surprised by how well executed the first half of the game is. However, Leon’s sections, his gameplay, the constant callbacks, and the cowardice of thinking Resident Evil needs cheap keys dangled in front of the player leave the second half feeling exhausting by the end. It fucking blows that, instead of feeling like an escalation, the back half feels more like the game losing confidence in its new protagonist and stuffing in half-assed action sections to compensate.

More than that, the whole thing starts to feel messy and weirdly slapdash, like a game still carrying around remnants of earlier development builds that got crudely stapled onto the finished product, especially the traces of those open-world and co-op-oriented versions. More than that, the whole thing starts to feel messy and weirdly slapdash, like a game still carrying around remnants of earlier development builds that got crudely stapled onto the finished product, especially traces of those open-world and co-op-oriented versions.

And the more I think about it, the less I think this problem is limited to Leon’s campaign. Parts of Grace’s campaign also feel haphazardly implemented, like the developers did not know how to integrate certain mechanics organically within constrained development timelines. The blood system is probably the best example. It gets a lazy textual explanation, but even light scrutiny reveals it barely makes sense. There is just blood everywhere, and somehow you can use it to make bullets, Molotovs, and healing items. It feels less like a fully realized mechanic and more like leftover scaffolding from some earlier co-op currency system.

I’m very whelmed by Requiem, which is still much better than outright hating it, as I do Village. I’ll bump this one up to a begrudging “like” simply because of how much I enjoyed the Grace sections of the game and her growth as a character from a traumatized NEET into someone with the resolve to confront her own trauma and selflessly help others along the way.

I just wish Capcom wouldn’t have used Leon to completely hijack what should have been a distinctive Grace-led story.

Conclusion? Grace good. Leon bad. The wildly dissonant quality gap is crazy, and I wish they had just gone all in on splitting these sections instead of interspersing Leon into Grace's campaign. Can we have something that commits to an experience more like VII? If not, I am begging Capcom to at least commit to something and stop trying to make a Resident Evil game that appeals to everyone.

Also, fuck that vile fucking raccoon taunting me with his stupid little jig and not even having the decency to break into satisfying pieces when I shoot or knife him and instead vaporizing into particle effects.

A very well-written, tightly assembled adventure game that’s ultimately kneecapped by combat that’s perfectly competent yet overwhelmingly prolific. I’d love to keep going because the environmental puzzle-solving and progression actually ask you to read, digest conversations, and process clues in ways games rarely bother with anymore. Pure hazenip.

But fuck me, I got so exhausted by the constant combat against essentially the same four enemy types that every encounter started to feel identical, and I lost the will to continue engaging with what was turning into a very thought-provoking anti-war narrative.

Another one tossed onto the “most games need less combat, actually” mass grave.