Resident Evil Requiem - A Search for Clarity and Closure
Requiem for the dead. Nightmare for the living.
The tagline of Resident Evil Requiem is, like many aspects of the game itself, kind of confusing – but still somehow sort of beautiful. After the success of the games immediately preceding it, the ninth entry in the series has a high bar to clear, and Requiem is a clear attempt to capture the magic of recent entries. With dual protagonists newcomer Grace and fan favourite Leon, this latest entry in the beloved survival horror franchise aims to mix tension and unease with heartstopping action in perhaps the most intentional way yet – and mechanically, it does so with great success. Narratively though… hmm.
This is, without a doubt, a Resident Evil game, with all that entails. Over its decades of success, the series has developed a formula that provides a certain comfort throughout even its most suspenseful moments. Though you never know what horrors might be around the corner, there are always signs that something is coming. A suspiciously large amount of ammo or a well-placed cover section will let you know when a battle is ahead, while a series of winding but interconnected rooms are a clear sign that you’re about to try to outrun – or outsmart – a threat that you may not be able to face head on. You may not always know what you’re about to face, and that’s what makes it scary – but you can generally know how you’re going to face it.
In Requiem, that is especially true. Early marketing portrayed the game’s only protagonist as Grace – an FBI Intelligence Analyst who, throughout the course of an investigation, is forced to return to the hotel where her mother was brutally murdered in front of her many years prior. Grace’s boss, whose name I simply refuse to remember, tells her that she should take on this case because it is time she “faced her fears”. Personally, I feel like maybe there’s no real benefit to being forced to revisit an exclusively traumatic location that you would otherwise have no reason to need to tolerate being in. But hey – I only have a psych degree.
Questionable reasons for attending the scene aside, it isn’t long before it’s clear that Grace’s murder investigation is a part of something much bigger. Her search of the abandoned hotel begins to unravel some of the mysteries behind her mother’s death instead, but she is attacked before she can make sense of it all, taken instead to what soon reveals itself to be a medical facility where ‘treatment’ of the patients doesn’t seem to involve a whole lot of healing. Thankfully, Grace’s kidnapping is witnessed by everyone’s favourite no-longer-rookie cop, Leon S. Kennedy, saviour to women everywhere – and he follows her to the facility, where the two of them become unlikely partners in their attempts to reach a (largely) common goal.
From here, what follows is a series of what I’ll call ‘extremely Resident Evil’ plot points that strict embargo details dictate I am not allowed to discuss. What I will say is what is already public knowledge – this game takes place over a number of locations, all of which are distinct and present their own unique enemies. Early locations like the hotel and Rhodes Hill Chronic Care Centre feel much like the manors of Resident Evil Village or Resident Evil 4, but also feel unique in their own ways. The specifics of the others cannot be discussed, but it’s not a secret that one of them is Raccoon City – a place where Leon has faced many past horrors, but which now looks very different to the Raccoon City we all remember.
Requiem seems to have taken some cues from earlier entries, particularly when it comes to the presence of large enemies that are not designed to be fought, but must be avoided. Particularly in the early game, these enemies provide a constant and ever-present threat, keeping tension levels high for both Grace and Leon. Grace, who is not equipped for close combat, will need to sneak around these enemies as well as the smaller, technically-killable threats. She has a limited inventory and a significantly smaller arsenal of weapons, and her sections feel much slower – and for the most part, much scarier. Her sections feature more threats that cannot always been seen, and there is nothing scarier than the unknown. Leon, while he will come face to face with more aggressive attackers, is also equipped to fight them – and there is a clear shift in the feeling of the gameplay when shifting between the characters. That balance – letting the player sit in the tension of helplessness, followed by the guns blazing empowerment of a seasoned soldier – is the game’s greatest strength.
The game recommends these two playstyles be complimented by different camera perspectives, with Leon’s sections designed to be played in third person and Grace’s more suited to the new first person perspective introduced in Resident Evil 7 and 8. For me, the shift to first person was one of the reasons I avoided 7 for so long, so I wasn’t thrilled to be thrown back into it. Thankfully, though there are recommended perspectives for each character, you also have the option to use either perspective wherever you like, and switch freely between them. This meant that I put Grace’s perspective into third person as soon as I got past the introductory section, and immediately felt more comfortable moving around the environment. You could argue that it makes the game less scary, and if you want to really up the tension, first person is the way to go simply because of how much it restricts you and your ability to see incoming threats. But I, a coward, did not want to make the game scarier – I simply wanted to move around a nice linear environment, solving basic puzzles and avoiding being mauled. So third person it was.
It’s at this point that I need to say that for most of this game, I thought it was going in a certain direction. Narratively, it seemed to be building towards something bold, and I was on board with the way it was approaching it. But then I got to the end, and I felt… mostly confused, and a little disappointed. This game does a lot of cool things, particularly in its second half, that I think will excite many fans of the series. But those cool things also make the direction of some of the story beats even more confusing. There were moments that fell flat because the game seemed to assume I’d remember some small detail from a previous game, and would refuse to explain it to me on the off-chance I didn’t. I think I needed it to hold my hand a little more.
That said, I also think that in order to enjoy this, you need to throw logic aside completely. There’s always been a bit of that with Resident Evil, but there’s a little extra required here. Honestly, the gameplay was so fun that by the end, I was pretty willing to forgive most of the glaring plot holes and hand-wavey explanations for some of the game’s biggest reveals. But I do wish that I had gotten to the end and felt more satisfaction and clarity, particularly in regards to Grace and her character arc. I have a lot to say about the story of this game, but nothing I can say without massive spoilers – so go away and play it, and then we’ll talk. But I do think that perhaps the writers were relying a little too much on shortcuts and tropes here, and as fun as ‘show don’t tell’ is, sometimes people need to be told if you really want things to hit right. I wanted to be told things a little more explicitly.
Overall, I think Requiem is a solid Resident Evil game, and once people start to get their hands on it, I think it’s going to spark a lot of discussion. It took me about 14 hours to finish, and I left it with a whole lot of questions. There’s a lot to be said about what’s included in it, and perhaps even more to be said about what isn’t there. They’ve nailed some parts of the formula (the sound design on those save typewriters and those door unlocks is unmatched), and as long as you’re not looking for anything particularly new here, it’s likely you’ll be satisfied. There are some nice touches for the fans, but I could see newcomers struggling to follow story points that are left unexplained. Grace, though somewhat underutilised at times, is a fun addition to the series – a woman who, unlike many Resident Evil protagonists, is clearly out of her depth in the field, but who is brave in the face of abject physical and psychological horror. Leon, of course, is a classic action hero, who is always prepared to provide his own kind of horror – cheesy one-liners.
So is Requiem a ‘nightmare for the living’? Perhaps less than some might expect. But it’s also the name of Leon’s unnecessarily ornate gun, and somehow, I’m sure that’s beautiful.
Resident Evil Requiem was reviewed on Playstation 5 using a code kindly provided by the publisher.
