Resident Evil Requiem Review: The Pinnacle of 30 Years of Fear

The Maid Who Wouldn't Let Me Leave

I'm creeping through a hallway on the second floor of the Rhodes Hill Chronic Care Center, two dead zombies behind me, when I hear it. A wet collapse from a bathroom I had already passed. I stop. Through the open door, I see her: a maid zombie, down on her knees before the corpses, staring at the blood smeared across the tile. Then she starts scrubbing at it with her bare hands, no sponge, no cloth, just fingers raking uselessly against the gore. I don't breathe. She looks up. Four full seconds of silence. Then she screams, "Why the mess?!" and launches herself at me.

I backed into a corner, fired twice with shaking hands, and stood there in the dark for a long moment afterward. That is Resident Evil Requiem. That is what thirty years of fear looks like when it finally grows up.

Capcom's Crowning Achievement

Resident Evil Requiem, the ninth mainline entry in Capcom's legendary franchise, arrives on PS5, Xbox Series X/S, PC, and Nintendo Switch 2 for the series' 30th anniversary. It is directed by Koshi Nakanishi, built on the RE Engine, and designed around two co-protagonists: series newcomer Grace Ashcroft and returning icon Leon S. Kennedy. Rather than committing to a single identity, the game embraces every identity Resident Evil has ever had, horror and action, first-person and third, classic resource tension and modern spectacle, and somehow makes all of it work. I played it on PS5 Pro on Standard difficulty, then went back in immediately on Classic. I lost sleep over both runs. I regret nothing.

A Mournful Story, Told in Blood

Grace Ashcroft is the daughter of Alyssa Ashcroft, a journalist and survivor of the Raccoon City incident who appears in Resident Evil Outbreak. Alyssa was murdered in a hotel eight years before the game begins, and Grace, now an FBI analyst, is sent to investigate a series of deaths among Raccoon City survivors at that same hotel. The illness killing these survivors leaves black, spreading wounds on the skin. Leon S. Kennedy, now a weathered 49-year-old DSO agent and one of those very survivors, carries those same marks.

Their paths converge around a mysterious project called Elpis and a new antagonist: Victor Gideon, a former Umbrella scientist with a disfigured face, greasy goggles, and the theatrical menace of a villain who absolutely knows he is the villain. He is a tremendous screen presence, flamboyant and threatening in equal measure.

The story is pure Resident Evil in the best sense: absurd, sincere, lore-dense, and occasionally genuinely moving. There are moments in the second half, particularly once Raccoon City enters the picture, that hit me with the kind of emotional weight I did not expect from a game about exploding zombies. Leon's evolution from the bright-eyed rookie of RE2 to this sickly, battle-scarred agent carrying the weight of every bad day he has survived lands with real force. Nick Apostolides gives a career-best performance here, and Angela Sant'Albano as Grace is arguably even better, her fear so convincingly rendered that I found myself holding my breath in solidarity during her worst moments.

The narrative is not flawless. The ending accelerates when it should breathe, and a few lore decisions in the back half will send longtime fans into heated debate about whether certain canonical choices make sense. I have my own reservations about some of those choices. But the core human story, two people shaped by the worst day in modern history trying to survive one more nightmare, holds together with corny, earnest conviction that is entirely the point.

Two Characters, Two Resident Evils

Grace Ashcroft: A Horror for the Ages

Grace's segments are built for first-person play, and I cannot stress enough how correct that recommendation is. In first-person, the limited field of view transforms every dark corridor into a potential ambush. I found myself tilting my head toward the television as if that extra inch of angle might reveal what was waiting around the corner. It never helped. It was always worse than I expected.

Grace is not a fighter. She has a standard handgun, a limited supply of breakable improvised knives, and the titular Requiem revolver, a hand cannon Leon gives her early on whose ammunition is so scarce that each round feels like a last resort. What she does have is a blood collector, a device that lets her syringe infected plasma from downed enemies and combine it with scavenged scrap metal to craft critical supplies: pistol rounds, med injectors, steroid upgrades that raise her maximum health, throwable acid vials and molotovs, and most valuably, hemolytic injectors.

The hemolytic injector is a masterstroke of survival horror design. Jam it into the spine of an unaware zombie and the creature swells, shudders, and detonates in an explosion of blood and viscera that removes both the immediate threat and the corpse from the equation entirely. The corpse removal matters because the dead do not stay dead in Requiem. Leave a body long enough and it convulses, hardens, and rises as a Blister Head, a faster, tougher, grotesquely armored variant that recalls the Crimson Heads of the REmake but hits considerably harder. Entire rooms I had carefully cleared became traps on my return if I had been too slow or too careless. The first time a Blister Head exploded out of a pile of bodies I thought I had safely managed, I died before I even understood what was happening.

The zombies themselves are the most unsettling the series has ever produced. They retain memories of their former lives. A chef patrols near the kitchen, muttering that dinner will be ready at six. Orderlies endlessly flick light switches on and off. A nurse zones out mid-corridor before snapping her attention to the nearest sound. A woman by a grand piano picks out a few haunting notes before turning her head toward the stairs. And then there is the one that stays with me most: a woman who says "I'm sorry" in a broken, gurgling voice before she lunges. There is real grief in Requiem's monsters, a melancholy that makes every bullet feel like a mercy.

The primary recurring threat in Grace's sections is a creature referred to simply as The Girl, a massive, tattered, forlorn-gaited monstrosity with eyes on the verge of rupturing. She fills the same psychological role as Mr. X or Lady Dimitrescu, appearing when you least want her to, disappearing when you are most paranoid. One image stays with me: The Girl squeezing herself down a corridor too small for her frame, pressing against the walls with obvious, agonized effort, still coming. The horror Capcom cultivates around her is impeccable.

Inventory management in Grace's sections uses a classic-style limited slot system, and on Classic difficulty, ink ribbons return as the save mechanic. The ribbons can be crafted from empty tins found in the environment. The result is a constant low hum of pressure that never fully releases, a game of tough decisions made under stress that I found utterly invigorating. My only genuine complaint about Grace's campaign is that I wanted more of it. The Rhodes Hill Chronic Care Center is one of the finest locations Capcom has designed in thirty years, a labyrinthine, interconnected space with real depth to its exploration, and I could have spent another four hours inside it without complaint.

Leon S. Kennedy: The Power Fantasy Done Right

And then Leon arrives with a roundhouse kick and a deadpan joke, and the entire register of the game shifts.

Leон's sections are presented in third-person and are designed to feel like the most fully realized action-RE experience ever made. The comparison to RE4 is apt but insufficient. This is RE4 grown larger, louder, more improvisational, and more ruthlessly kinetic. Leon carries a hatchet as a permanent melee weapon that can be sharpened on the fly, never breaking, always available. It parries attacks on a well-timed press, decapitates staggered zombies, and can be used as a quick close-range finish when guns are not the answer. He also has access to the environment as a weapon in ways Grace does not: discarded enemy weapons, fire axes, lead pipes, and exploding gas tanks can all be scooped up and hurled at the nearest group of targets. A zombie drops a chainsaw? Leon takes the chainsaw. Another zombie grabs it back out of his hands during a scrum? That happens too.

The opening combat sequence involving a chainsaw-wielding zombie set the tone perfectly. I shot the creature's legs out. It hit the ground still gripping the saw, which dragged its body across the floor. I killed it, took the chainsaw, drove it through another zombie's back. That zombie pulled the chainsaw out and came at me with it. We were, at most, four minutes into Leon's first section.

His inventory uses a Tetris-based attache case system, a direct nod to RE4, and his upgrade currency is earned automatically from kills, incentivizing aggressive play at all times. Supply crates scattered through his sections allow him to purchase new weapons, upgrade parts, armor, and ammunition. There is no merchant, which I missed slightly, but the system is clean and well-paced. By the time Leon reaches Raccoon City, he feels genuinely unstoppable in a way that makes every encounter feel celebratory rather than tense.

Those who have played RE4 will recognize the DNA in Leon's combat, but Requiem pushes past it. The gore is the most extreme the series has attempted. Enemies react to bullets with physics-accurate force, knocking into walls and tumbling down stairs. Rooms fill with blood spatter that persists through backtracking. Heads erupt. Bodies collapse in ways that feel genuinely physical. It is excessive and glorious and absolutely the point.

The motorcycle chase sequence through the ruins of Raccoon City is the single most entertaining set piece I have played in a Resident Evil game. It is so aggressively over-the-top, involving a snake-skin coated Victor Gideon on his own bike wielding an RPG, that I laughed out loud while playing it. Resident Evil has always had this absurdist streak running beneath the horror, and Requiem lets it run completely free in Leon's sections.

The Balance Between Them

I estimated my first playthrough at roughly 55 percent Leon and 45 percent Grace over about sixteen hours, though other playthroughs have clocked shorter depending on how thorough I was. The back-and-forth pacing is structurally masterful: Grace's tension builds until it becomes almost unbearable, then Leon's cathartic violence releases it entirely. Then Grace's dread begins reconstructing itself. The rhythm is never accidental.

The one genuine structural criticism I accept is that Grace's stealth presence diminishes meaningfully in the second half. Once the setting shifts to Raccoon City, Leon dominates a sustained stretch that runs five or more hours with relatively little Grace interlude. I craved more balance in those chapters. A late-game sequence that returns Grace to proper stealth horror is excellent and one of my favorite moments in the game, but it arrives later than I would have liked and ends faster than it should.

The Look and Sound of Dread

The RE Engine has never produced anything like this. On PS5 Pro, the game runs at a flawless sixty frames per second with ray tracing enabled, and the lighting in Grace's sections achieves something genuinely rare: it makes darkness feel physically present, weighted, oppressive. The hospital's fluorescent flicker, the basement's absolute black broken only by Grace's flashlight, the way blood on a white tile reflects the overhead lights, all of it is rendered with a precision that makes the horror feel inescapable.

The sound design is equally extraordinary. I played with headphones throughout, and I recommend the same to anyone who intends to take Grace's sections seriously. Every zombie gurgle, every distant shuffle, every scrape of fingernails on tile is positioned and mixed with meticulous care. The silence between sounds is weaponized. Angela Sant'Albano's vocal performance as Grace, her hitched breathing, her restrained sobs, her escalating terror, deserves specific recognition as one of the finest pieces of voice work in the genre's history.

The musical score weaves original material with carefully placed callbacks to themes from earlier entries in the series. I will not detail the specific moments where the franchise's older music appears, but I will say that if you played the early games, you should prepare yourself. Some of those cues hit with a force that surprised me completely.

Where Requiem Stumbles

The narrative's back half rushes what its front half took time to build. The ending is not bad but it needed another hour of room to breathe, and at least one late canonical decision reads as strange enough that I am still not entirely sure how to interpret it. Longtime lore enthusiasts will have strong opinions.

The puzzle density is lower than I expected from a Resident Evil carrying this much classic DNA. The puzzles present are satisfying and well-constructed, but there are simply not enough of them, and the back half abandons them almost entirely in favor of momentum. I would have traded two action sequences for one more elaborate Grace puzzle without hesitation.

Leon's boss encounters, while spectacular in presentation, fall below the difficulty curve of the regular combat. The Requiem revolver can end most of them quickly, and some bosses that carry enormous narrative weight die in ways that feel anticlimactic. The regular combat is more consistently challenging than the supposed climactic confrontations, which is an unusual inversion.

The absence of a Mercenaries mode at launch is a legitimate disappointment. Leon's sections, with their kill-based economy and improvisational combat, feel purpose-built for it. I expect it will arrive as DLC, but it should have been here.

The Verdict

Resident Evil Requiem is the game this franchise has been building toward for thirty years. It is terrifying in a way that feels genuinely new, not just in its mechanics but in its humanity, in zombies that remember who they were and say so in broken voices as they try to kill you. It is spectacular in the way only Resident Evil knows how to be spectacular: ridiculous, earnest, over-the-top, and somehow emotionally resonant despite itself. Grace Ashcroft is the most relatably human protagonist this series has produced. Leon Kennedy has never been better, older, sicker, still somehow the coolest person in any room he enters.

The ending rushes. Some lore decisions will divide fans. The puzzle count is too low and the balance tilts too far toward action in the final stretch. These are real criticisms. They are not enough to change what this game is: a masterpiece of the survival horror genre and the best argument Capcom has ever made for why Resident Evil deserves to exist for another thirty years.

If you have ever loved this series, play Requiem. If you have never played a Resident Evil game, this is not your entry point, and it knows it, but what you find inside is worth every hour of prerequisite homework. This is the one they will talk about for decades.

9.3 / 10

-- The Gaming Vanguard