Resident Evil Requiem review - survival horror's greatest hits album

Inevitably, there comes a point in life where we look at our loved ones and notice, for the first time, that they are getting older. Leon S. Kennedy emerges from his Porsche Cayenne in Resident Evil Requiem, and I'm struck with the same feeling. When I first met Leon, I was a wide-eyed six-year-old, and he was a '90s heartthrob. Now, I'm in my thirties, we've both got dark circles around our eyes, and somehow curtain bangs are back in style.

RE Requiem shares an unlikely parallel with, of all things, Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children. Here we have a nostalgia-driven retrospective starring a fan-favorite protagonist, riddled with a deadly virus and forced to confront his past. If I had a nickel, etcetera, etcetera. Requiem's story is by no means as impermeable as Advent Children's, but it does share many of the same challenges for a newcomer. Requiem isn't just a new addition to the franchise; it's an anniversary game in the truest sense. It's impossible to divorce Requiem from its purpose as a celebration of Resident Evil's three decades of cultural relevance.

In fact, the callbacks are so relentless that Requiem can occasionally feel like playing through an overly elaborate pastiche rather than a new mainline entry in the series. Déjà vu is a constant companion for the devoted fan, conjuring up scattered memories of the most innocuous moments - think attic ladders, broken windows, and mutated arms - all overshadowed by major character reveals that I won't spoil here. Suffice it to say, one particular cutscene had me swearing at the screen with a smile on my face. Requiem's nostalgia isn't so much bait as it is an all-you-can-eat buffet. Capcom wheels out reference after reference, reveal after reveal, then hurriedly ushers it off-stage to make way for the next in line.

As a fan, consider me well and truly serviced. I'm not so blinded by it that I can't spare a thought for the player who will inevitably sit blank-faced in front of their own screen, but I've got to hand it to Capcom: Requiem could easily have disappeared into the dustiest annals of Resident Evil's lore, heedless of everyone out of the loop. Instead, it deftly avoids alienation simply by refraining from excessive pointing and shouting. To new audiences, these callbacks stand proudly on their own two feet, even when stripped naked of their original context. It's no more incomprehensible than most other entries in the series.

Requiem's Rhodes Hill clinic is the jewel in its crown, analogous to the Spencer Mansion and the Raccoon City Police Department. Hours of my first playthrough were spent poking and prodding in its darkest corners, hungry for any little trinket that might reveal an interactive prompt. It's a testament to the clinic's level design that I cleared it in 45 minutes on my second playthrough from memory alone, and I'm already mulling over how to optimize my route for the third attempt - it's just a shame that there's no grade system this time around. In true Resident Evil fashion, the exploration is freeform, yet dovetails beautifully along a linear path that remains satisfying to follow even once you look back and see it for what it is. It's even more fun to see this series convention from the perspective of a terrified new protagonist.

In a series featuring a long line of characters prone to powercreep, Grace represents a soft reset. It's an approach that I can get behind on paper; it's almost impossible to experience much semblance of horror when you're piloting a superhuman wielding an RPG. Through Grace, Capcom strips all of that away to get back to basics: the living versus the dead. Her sections evoke the early hours spent in the Baker house in RE7, a silent acknowledgement of its role as a soft reboot that lifted the series from the doldrums of RE6. Still, Capcom has clearly been following its first-person horror contemporaries to iterate upon that formula. Resident Evil is replete with stalker enemies, but the hulking creatures that patrol the Rhodes Hill Clinic are more reminiscent of Frictional's Amnesia: The Bunker than Mr. X and his ilk.

The cycle of tension and release, so integral to the horror genre, is magnified to encompass Requiem's entire structure through its dual protagonists. Grace's sections are the tension; Leon's, the release. Leon is, well, Leon, with just a dash of Chris Redfield for grizzled flavor. The one-liners come thick and fast, to the point where it becomes silly - and then they still keep coming, until they somehow become even funnier. Where Grace is forced to grapple with the average zombie with little more than a knife and a handful of bullets, Leon is taking down colossal beasties with all manner of shotguns, grenades, and sniper rifles. It's RE4 all over again.

It takes a little while to warm up to Grace, but in her defence, the chips are stacked against her. It's not easy for any new protagonist to stand as a true equal to Resident Evil's golden boy, even when they aren't impotent by design. Unfortunately, Grace's ineptitude is compounded by her introduction, in which she's established as an FBI agent even before we learn that she's Alyssa Ashcroft's daughter. She's also a stammering, anxious wreck who's apparently incapable of making direct eye contact with strangers. I wouldn't trust Grace Ashcroft to open a bag of chips by herself, yet I'm expected to believe she can be trusted as a lone field agent.

A suspension of disbelief is obviously always a prerequisite for Resident Evil, but here, I'm at my limit. What's truly bizarre is that this incongruity in her character could easily have been remedied if she'd instead been a private citizen haunted by the circumstances of her mother's death. Not only would the story's trajectory remain the same, but it would at least have established Grace's determination, despite her being utterly incapable in the field. Incidentally, if you think I'm being unfair here, please switch to third-person perspective as Grace, watch her trip over her own feet while running in a straight line, then get back to me.

I was initially skeptical of how Requiem's perspective switching would work in practice, but I was pleasantly surprised to find that it offers a degree of replayability. Yes, Grace's default perspective leans into the claustrophobic horror that she endures, but watching her third-person animations gradually resolve from a baby deer to a pro zombie killer has its own charm. Conversely, Leon's first-person perspective leans into the action even further, offering a front-row seat to the goriest headshots. I'm confident we'll see speedrunners discover hidden benefits to switching between perspectives at certain times. Nonetheless, this makes Capcom's decision to omit a FOV slider even more confounding. Motion sickness was a common complaint in RE Village thanks to its limited FOV. While affected players can switch to third-person in Requiem, this concession is a poor substitute for accessibility.

The disparity between Grace and Leon leads to an unfortunate, inescapable truth: players will always prefer one over the other. Where you fall on this binary depends on the kind of player you are - or, perhaps more accurately, your favorite version of Resident Evil. The series has been tonally conflicted from the outset, forever caught in the balancing act between action and horror. Grace and Leon are a manifestation of those two forces; a distillation of RE7 and RE4. Regrettably for us oldies, the OG Resident Evil 2's place in Requiem has been entirely superseded by the remake, which generates an uncanny, multilayered nostalgia for a game that came out both seven and 28 years ago.

Above all else, Requiem heralds our long-awaited return to Raccoon City. Barring remakes and spin-offs, players haven't set foot in it for 25 years, and it's hard to overstate the emotional weight of bringing Leon back to where it all began. It's just a shame that Capcom inexplicably decided to resurrect the brown filter of the mid-2000s right along with it. Yes, Raccoon City is a bombed-out husk in Requiem, but it's so nondescript that it could really be any post-apocalyptic city in any third-person shooter released in the last two decades. Were it not for the familiar landmarks that occasionally leap out of the sea of brown to tweak my nostalgia, I would lose all semblance of place.

In its most reductive form, Resident Evil's core gameplay loop is a series of fetch quests padded with esoteric puzzles and zombies. You are, essentially, fetching an item from one area to another to progress. In Requiem's sagging middle, that loop becomes so prominent that it almost slips into parody. I need to open a door, but first, I have to locate and combine three items - but wait! I can only reach those items by tracking a whole inventory's worth of garden-variety videogame detritus.

There is also an interminable number of objectives that involve generators, fuses, or restoring power to something or other. Yes, it's a common convention, but do we have to endure so many iterations? I've never relished changing a lightbulb; the prospect of going through a glorified version of those motions in a digital space doesn't fill me with much enthusiasm. Frankly, I'd have taken more of the esoteric puzzles; there is no elaborate shadow puppetry, family portraits, or moving statues to be found here. Not since Isaac Clarke have I felt so much like an engineer in an action-horror game.

Thankfully, all this tedium is quickly forgotten by what follows - namely, an action set piece pulled straight out of mid-2000s gaming. Spectacle remains a mainstay of big-budget action-adventure games like God of War Ragnarok, but they're all too busy taking themselves seriously to truly capture that millennial magic. In an extended motorbike chase sequence, Capcom shoots for the height of absurdity and then keeps going. A tower block collapses. Leon empties round after infinite round of SMG ammo into a pack of mutant dogs. The villain of the hour pulls out an RPG. Now this is videogames. Fuses, generators, and lightbulbs are all forgotten. Instead, this sequence is the fuel that propels Requiem to its denouement.

Requiem is successful in what it sets out to do, and that alone is pretty remarkable. It's a compilation of greatest hits that's not too dissimilar to a music album. Just as Queen's Greatest Hits doesn't instantly transport younger generations to Live Aid in 1981, Resident Evil Requiem could never hope to capture the childhood experience of hiding your face in a cushion while the sound of Leon Kennedy being devoured by zombies squelches out of a CRT TV's speakers.

Fortunately, Capcom is aware of that. Like Village before it, Requiem is a mainline entry in the series. That puts it in a very precarious position. The higher the number that appears at the end of a game's title, the harder it is to pull in new blood, but a series this long in the tooth demands new blood to survive. That new blood will find itself entertained by Requiem from a pure gameplay perspective, invited to form its own connection to the series. And for the old blood, well… Ain't this one a treat?

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