I love Resident Evil. That wasn’t always the case. I’ve mentioned in past reviews that growing up, I hated scary video games. One of my core memories is my cousin trying to get me to play Resident Evil 2 and failing spectacularly — he couldn’t even get me past the opening because the zombies terrified me and I didn’t understand how tank controls worked (I still don’t, if we’re being honest). Years later, I had weeks of nightmares after watching a 10-minute preview of Dead Space late at night on my great-grandmother’s on-demand cable. I was not built for this genre.

All that to say: for years, I tried to work up the courage to play horror games and always bailed. Then, during my freshman year of college in 2017, I stumbled onto Resident Evil 7: Biohazard the day it launched, which permanently altered my brain chemistry. I’ve been chasing the high of wandering through the Baker house ever since. Only a handful of games have even come close to scratching that itch, but RE7 was the spark.

Plus, RE7 didn’t just convert me, it saved the series. The Resident Evil franchise had been languishing after the mixed reception to Resident Evil 6, which leaned hard into bombastic action and drifted away from its survival horror roots. But RE7 marked the beginning of what I think of as the “RE Engine Era”: a creative resurgence powered by a new engine and a renewed commitment to dread. That era gave us Resident Evil Village and the stellar remakes of Resident Evil 2, 3, and 4.

Which brings us to the ninth mainline entry — and what I see as the culmination of everything the RE Engine Era has been building toward: Resident Evil Requiem.

With protagonists Leon S. Kennedy and newcomer Grace Ashcroft, the daughter of Alyssa Ashcroft from Resident Evil Outbreak, Requiem wears its intentions on its sleeve. As the title suggests, it’s a “token of remembrance” — a playable elegy for everything that came before. Specifically, it frames itself around the Raccoon City Incident from 1998’s Resident Evil 2, the singular catastrophe that detonated the series’ lore, set the next 28 years into motion, and forged Leon into the wisecracking, trauma-scarred super agent we know today.

Across the roughly 13 hours I spent with the main campaign, Requiem swings hard at reinvention. It tries to thread the needle between pure survival horror during Grace’s sections and the slick, action-horror bombast that defines Leon’s. Sometimes it finds that balance, however, it doesn’t always stick the landing. But I’d be lying if I said I didn’t have a good time. That said, man, does it lean on nostalgia.

Resident Evil Requiem is an elegy for the dead, nightmare for the living

Meet new series protagonist, Grace Ashcroft.
Credit: Capcom

Thanks to Capcom, I received early access to Requiem, though embargo restrictions prevent me from discussing the game’s back half. The setup is straightforward: Grace Ashcroft, an FBI intelligence analyst, is investigating a string of deaths at the Wrenwood Hotel — the same place her mother, Alyssa, died years ago — when she’s kidnapped and imprisoned inside the Rhodes Hill Chronic Care Center. Meanwhile, Leon S. Kennedy is tracking the suspicious deaths of Raccoon City survivors, following leads tied to a former Umbrella scientist named Victor Gideon, which also brings him to the Care Center.

For most of the campaign, the two remain separated, and their gameplay styles reflect that split. Grace plays in first-person, similar to Resident Evil 7 and Village, while Leon sticks to the modern third-person style popularized by the remakes. Leon’s early Care Center sections are brief before the back half shifts focus back to Raccoon City.

Grace’s gameplay leans heavily into survival horror. Ammo is scarce, weapons are limited, and avoidance is often smarter than confrontation. She’s inexperienced and visibly shaken, still carrying grief and trauma, which contrasts with Leon’s hardened confidence and mirrors the rookie cop he once was in Resident Evil 2. As a new protagonist, Grace is serviceable — motivated by guilt and driven to protect Emily, a blind girl she meets in the Care Center — even if some of her decisions feel more plot-driven than organic.

Leon plays almost exactly like he does in the Resident Evil 4 remake, with the biggest addition being a hand axe that emphasizes melee combat. Unlike Grace’s breakable knives, Leon’s axe is permanent but dulls with use and must be sharpened. It’s satisfying, weighty, and absolutely going to inspire “axe-only” challenge runs. Character-wise, Leon is still the gruff, traumatized, slightly corny veteran we know — far removed from the naïve rookie of RE2, but still carrying decades of survivor’s guilt along with his one-liners.

Resident Evil Requiem brings a new story, same vibes

Doesn’t this look vaugely familiar.
Credit: Capcom

As I alluded to in the headline of this review, Requiem is peak nostalgia slop in a way that feels both intentional and a little exhausting. From the overall layout of the Care Center to the structure of its objectives, the return of familiar enemy types, and even another trip back to Raccoon City, the game is overflowing with callbacks to earlier entries, but it is especially obsessed with Resident Evil 2.

While exploring the Care Center as Grace, I constantly felt a sense of déjà vu from the Resident Evil 2 remake, because the building is laid out in a way that is almost beat-for-beat reminiscent of the Raccoon City Police Department. You have two main wings, East and West, each stretching across three floors, all connected by a large central lobby that acts as a temporary sanctuary from the monsters roaming the halls. There were multiple points where I genuinely stopped and thought, “This has to be lifted from RPD,” because the similarities go beyond homage and start veering into repetition.

It made me miss the simplicity and relative uniqueness of the Baker house in Resident Evil 7, which, at its core, was just a house. Yes, it had a freaky-ass basement and its fair share of locked doors and puzzles, but it was intimate and contained in a way that made it feel distinct. Compared to the sprawling Spencer Mansion from Resident Evil or the museum-turned-police-station grandeur of RE2, RE7 felt tighter and more focused, and in hindsight, that restraint worked in its favor. Requiem, by comparison, feels bigger but not necessarily fresher.

‘Requiem’ is peak nostalgia slop in a way that feels both intentional and a little exhausting.

Of the two primary antagonists, one serves mostly as a recurring boss encounter rather than a fully realized character, and the other comes off as a bargain-bin imitation of franchise antagonist Albert Wesker, lacking the charisma and presence that made him iconic. They’re serviceable threats, but they lack the kind of personality that lingers once the credits roll.

There is even what I’m fairly certain is a nod to Silent Hill 2 embedded in the level design — something I can’t spoil — that reinforces the broader impression that the developers are deliberately channeling late-’90s survival-horror iconography rather than pushing the series in a new direction. Leon’s sections in the back half of the game are where this becomes most noticeable, as the nostalgia factor gets dialed up to an almost distracting degree, and moments that are clearly meant to spark recognition instead risk feeling like the game is relying too heavily on past successes rather than confidently standing on its own.

Living through Blister Heads and bad decisions in Resident Evil Requiem

Credit: Capcom

If you’ve played Resident Evil Village or the recent remakes, you know the drill already. The twist here comes in Grace’s sections, where killing enemies is often the worst move you can make.

Like the original Resident Evil, zombies don’t always stay dead. In Requiem, some resurrect as Blister Heads, stronger variants that repopulate areas you’ve already cleared. Every corpse becomes a potential problem later, which is brutal for Grace and mostly manageable for Leon. Ammo is scarce, so combat as Grace is usually about stunning foes and running rather than finishing the job. Combat quickly becomes a calculation of risk versus reward, and more often than not, the smarter move is avoidance.

To deal with Blister Heads, you have a few strategic options. One approach is to simply let the problem become Leon’s later; since the two characters share the Care Center at different points in the campaign, you can theoretically clear zombies as Grace and deal with their evolved forms when you’re controlling the better-equipped Leon.

To permanently stop them, Grace can use her Blood Collector to gather infected blood and craft hemolytic injectors, which cause zombies to explode in a massive, permanent bloodbath. Resources are limited, though, so you have to carefully choose which enemies are worth eliminating for good, echoing the corpse-burning strategy from the 1996 game. It’s a smart system that reinforces her vulnerability and raises the tension.

Less successful is Grace’s stalker enemy, The Girl, who forces you into hiding-focused sequences that often feel more like padding than purposeful horror. That sense of bloat becomes my biggest issue with Requiem. My first run clocked in at nine hours, but it felt more like 13 because some objectives felt stretched.

The most frustrating examples comes near the end of Grace’s time in the Care Center, when the primary objective is to find three quartz stones to unlock a courtyard door. Each stone is hidden in the office of one of the facility’s former directors, locked behind identical puzzle boxes. The puzzle itself is straightforward; solving it is mostly about finding the clues hidden in each room to know the correct order of buttons to press. The issue arises with the final puzzle box, where the button icons have been removed and replaced with Braille. Now, Grace is repeatedly framed in promos as a “booksmart” FBI intelligence analyst, and given that the mechanism visibly shows which symbol corresponds to each button press, it’s not hard to imagine she could logically deduce the solution. Unfortunately for you, Grace (and the writers) think using Emily — the blind child who has been locked in a cage for most of the story — is the best solution for this puzzle. This requires you to carry her through the monster-infested East Wing so she can read the Braille and input the code while defending herself from the zombies.

While carrying Emily, you cannot defend yourself, and if you want to clear out enemies beforehand, you have to awkwardly shuttle her back to the security office, set her down, eliminate threats, and then return to continue the escort. It’s contrived and really insults my intelligence more than anything.

Resident Evil Requiem is disgustingly beautiful

Again, oddly familiar.
Credit: Capcom

Visually, Requiem is stunning and just as viscerally grotesque as anything the series has delivered before. The gore borders on vomit-inducing in the best possible way, with zombies tearing apart in horrifying detail as you unload into them. The hemolytic injector is the standout here; when used, enemies don’t just die, they erupt into a massive explosion of blood that coats nearly every surface in the room. What’s more impressive is that it lingers. Rooms where you’ve cleared enemies with injectors remain drenched in thick, dark red for the rest of your time there, turning previously neutral spaces into grisly reminders of what happened. It’s disgusting, excessive, and technically impressive all at once.

The gore borders on vomit-inducing in the best possible way.

From an audio standpoint, the game is equally strong. The gunplay sounds punchy and weighty, with each shot delivering a satisfying impact. Outside of the occasional safe room theme, the game is largely music-free, which leaves the ambient sound design to do most of the heavy lifting. Hallways creak, pipes groan, and distant echoes bounce through the Care Center’s walls. The most unsettling touch, though, is that these zombies retain fragments of their former selves. Instead of the usual collection of guttural snarls and raspy moans, they speak. Often it’s just broken phrases — lingering thoughts caught in a loop from the moment they turned. One zombie repeatedly mutters about keeping the lights dim because it’s “his job” to make sure the building isn’t too bright, as if he were mid-task when the infection took hold.

That’s supposed to be the sling to Leon’s shotgun.
Credit: Capcom

Performance-wise, I played on PS5 and had very few issues. Aside from a couple of minor graphical glitches that were fixed by reloading the game, it ran smoothly throughout my playthrough. It continues to be impressive how consistently polished Capcom’s RE Engine titles are at launch, especially at a time when performance problems have become almost expected for major releases on PS5.

Is Resident Evil Requiem worth it?

Credit: Capcom

Resident Evil Requiem is a very good game that occasionally gets in its own way. It delivers tense survival-horror with Grace, satisfying action-horror with Leon, some of the most disgusting gore the series has ever produced, and rock-solid performance on PS5. Mechanically, it builds confidently on the foundation laid by Resident Evil 7: Biohazard, Resident Evil Village, and the modern remakes, and in many ways, it feels like the cleanest refinement of that formula yet. I’d go as far as to say it’s stronger overall than Village, even if it never quite hits the same highs as 7 did for the franchise.

Because while RE7 wasn’t revolutionary in the grand scheme of horror games, it was transformative for Resident Evil. It felt bold. It felt risky. It dragged the series back into the dark and forced it to recalibrate. Requiem, by contrast, feels safer. Bigger, slicker, and more polished, but rarely daring.

Ultimately, Requiem is mechanically satisfying, visually incredible, genuinely tense in stretches, and packed with enough fan service to make longtime players grin, even if they occasionally roll their eyes. It may not reinvent the wheel like RE7 did for the franchise, but it proves that the RE Engine era still has plenty of gas left in the tank.

‘Resident Evil Requiem’ is a very good game that occasionally gets in its own way.

The nostalgia is the biggest culprit. The Care Center’s near one-to-one echoes of RPD, the constant visual and structural callbacks to Resident Evil 2, the return to Raccoon City, and the late-game fan service in Leon’s sections all make it clear that this entry is deeply in love with 1998. Sometimes that works. Sometimes it feels like the game relies on muscle memory rather than new ideas.

Even the title, Requiem, feels deliberately engineered to tug at that same thread. A requiem is a mass for the dead — a memorial —and this game treats the Raccoon City Incident like sacred text. It isn’t just revisiting RE2 thematically; it’s staging a funeral for it, constantly reminding you of what was lost there and how it shaped everyone involved, especially Leon.

Without spoiling anything, the ending strongly suggests that the series may finally be ready to move beyond Raccoon City and Umbrella as its narrative crutch and establish a new overarching threat.

The name frames the entire experience as an act of remembrance, which sounds meaningful on paper but, in practice, often translates into repetition. Instead of laying the past to rest, Requiem spends most of its runtime digging it back up.