The Resident Evil games have always been about more than just gunning down whatever shambling corpses you happen to cross paths with. They’re about managing resources, allocating crafting supplies and ammunition to keep you alive in dangerous circumstances. That’s how the first game popularized the concept of “survival horror,” after all, and Resident Evil Requiem follows in its footsteps.
Resident Evil Requiem: 10 Tips and Tricks When Playing as Grace
Grace’s sections are infinitely harder than Leon’s in Resident Evil Requiem, but there are a few ways to make it easier.
In addition to the game’s base combat and exploration elements, Requiem is a balancing act of managing inventory space, carefully utilizing consumable elements like ammo and heals, and being conscious of when to use highly-limited items like powerful weapons. This is more true for Grace, as her playstyle emphasizes stealth and disengagement rather than direct firefights, but even Leon, swashbuckling hero-type that he is, needs to keep his attaché case organized if he doesn’t want to get caught with his proverbial pants down. It’s this little tinge of organizational stress on top of the bullet-flying, zombie-biting action, that gives Resident Evil Requiem its distinctive flavor profile.
Scenario and gameplay spoilers ahead!
10
Scrap and Rare Scrap
You Can Never have Too Much Metal Crud
All throughout both Grace and Leon’s sections, you’ll regularly acquire little satchels of scrap metal, your first and foremost crafting resource. Grace needs scrap alongside infected blood to craft most of her items after unlocking recipes with blood vials, while Leon uses it alongside bottles of gunpowder for more or less the same purposes.
It goes without saying that scrap needs to be carefully managed and rationed out, whether you’re playing as Grace or Leon. In the former’s case, you need to decide between making more bullets for head-on conflict, or making hemolytic injectors for stealth takedowns. In Leon’s case, it’s more about deciding which of your weapons are currently most in need of ammo and allocating the scrap as necessary.
In addition to regular scrap, some optional puzzles will yield rare scrap, a special resource that can be used to craft large-caliber ammo for the Requiem. As the name implies, this stuff is very hard to come by, and is best saved for an emergency.
9
Bottles and Molotovs
Distract or Inflame
Not long after waking up in the care center, Grace finds a couple of empty bottles, perfectly sized for chucking. Even after she gets a gun and can more overtly defend herself, these bottles still crop consistently, perfect for distracting gaggles of zombies out of her path. They’re particularly invaluable if you’re running low on health or ammo and can’t afford to get into a fight.
Because they’re good for distractions, though, you need to be strategic with your usage of them. The sound of a shattering bottle will distract zombies, but they’ll still turn your attention to you if you run right in front of them, which not only means the bottle was wasted, but you’ll lose health anyway. Bottles should be conserved for when fighting isn’t the ideal choice.
Bottles become an even more precious resource in the underground area, where they can be crafted into molotov cocktails. A molotov is the perfect deterrent for The Girl, given her distaste for heat and light, but obviously, a bottle used to make a molotov is a bottle that can’t be used to distract a regular zombie. Yeah, you could use the molotov on the zombie, but that’s a bit wasteful.
8
Charms
Lose an Inventory Slot, Gain a Perk
In both Grace and Leon’s sections, completing certain special objectives will reward you with charms, cute little goobers you can carry around with you or, in Leon’s case, hang from your guns. Equipping charms bestows beneficial effects, like increasing the damage you deal or allowing you to survive fatal damage, obviously beneficial abilities.
The catch with charms is that they take up space in your inventory. This isn’t a huge problem for Leon, since he’s got his massive attaché case, but for Grace, it’s slightly more problematic. A charm takes up one slot in Grace’s inventory, same as your gun, a stack of ammo, a stack of heals, and so forth. Inventory space is very precious, especially if you’re not going out of your way to find hip pouches, and dedicating a whole slot to a single perk may cause problems later down the line.
Granted, some charms do have positive effects on your overall resource management, like the one that makes your knives last longer. You’ll just have to decide if that net positive is worth not having as much space in your pockets as you otherwise would.
7
Antique Coins
Upgrades? In This Economy?
In the west wing of the care center, Grace stumbles upon an opulent parlor, complete with a wet bar and a roulette table. Not sure why a hospital needs this kind of room, but it’s an opportunity nonetheless. On the wall of this room are several display cases containing vital upgrades like a hip pouch, health and damage boosts, and a capacity upgrade for the Blood Collector. To open these cases, you’ll need to collect and spend Antique Coins.
Antique Coins are scattered around the care center, some out in the open, others hidden in locked safes or otherwise obscured spots. Finding Antique Coins requires you to be very thorough in your searches of the center’s rooms, and while they do stack, they also take up space in your inventory. You can stash them in the save room chest, but you’ll have to go get them and bring them to the parlor when you want to spend them.
Speaking of which, while there are enough Antique Coins in the care center to open all four cases, whether you’ll actually find all of them is another matter. If you can’t find all the coins, you’ll need to make a decision on which upgrades to prioritize, and which you may end up having to abandon.
6
Grace’s Knives
Keeping You on the Edge
Grace isn’t exactly an expert combatant. As opposed to Leon’s roundhouse kicks, when a zombie is stunted, the best she can manage is shoving them to the ground. Even if she’s not a martial artist, though, Grace can at least manage to stick the pointy end of a knife in a zombie’s neck.
A handful of knives, either proper combat knives or improvised shivs, can be found around the game, as well as crafted from two pieces of scrap. When armed with a knife, Grace can use melee attacks, which are good for finishing downed zombies, as well as fend off a zombie that grapples her from the front without taking damage.
Resident Evil Requiem: Where to Find All Hip Pouches
Inventory space is absolutely crucial in Resident Evil games, especially in Requiem. Thankfully, we can help you expand that space with Hip Pouches.
The problem is that these knives are generally very fragile, and will break after a few solid stabs. Knives cannot be repaired, only replaced, so you can only use them so many times to finish or fend off a zombie. Even if you can make a new knife from scratch, that takes scrap that you then wouldn’t be able to use to make ammunition or hemolytic injectors, which presents its own problems.
5
Leon’s Hatchet
Gotta Stay Sharp
After his little stint in Spain, Leon learned a vital life lesson: breakable knives are not a great choice for extended combat engagements. This, I assume, is why in Requiem, he opts instead for a reinforced hatchet as his melee sidearm of choice. Compared to his old knife, the hatchet is extremely effective, especially for popping a downed zombie’s head. Even better, it’s completely indestructible, so you don’t need to worry about replacing it.
While the hatchet can’t be broken, though, its use is still technically limited. Whenever you use the hatchet to attack, parry, or finish off an enemy, its durability meter decreases slightly. When it’s completely drained, it can’t be used to finish off enemies anymore, much less fight them off. The good news is that Leon can quickly re-sharpen it using his personal whetstone, refilling the meter in the process.
In this way, rather than a consumable resource like Grace’s knives, Leon’s hatchet is more like an additional weapon that needs to be reloaded. It takes about three seconds for you to sharpen it, and if you forget to do it in the middle of a scrape, you won’t have time to do so when a zombie is already bearing down on you.
4
The Blood Collector
You Should Really be Wearing Gloves for This
A large part of Victor’s research at the care center revolved around using infected blood drawn from T-virus patients in novel ways. You can’t just grab a fistful of the stuff to use it, though, it needs to be collected with a proper piece of equipment. Specifically, the Blood Collector, a gadget Grace stumbles upon in the center’s blood analysis labs.
Using the Blood Collector, Grace can harvest infected blood from downed zombies, as well as collection points like random blood splatters and collection buckets. When harvested, this blood can then be used in crafting to create vital items like med injectors and ammo. No, I don’t know how mushy blood plus scrap metal equals bullets; don’t think too hard about it.
While infected blood is plentiful, the Blood Collector can only hold so much at once, and it takes time to draw. You need to make strategic use of the blood you have to craft the right resources, and occasionally make journeys into dangerous areas to get more if you’re running on empty. The game does occasionally give you transfusion packs for blood on the go, but if you can’t store all the pack’s contents, you’ll automatically discard whatever isn’t used, which is a waste.
3
The Tactical Tracker
Upgrades are for Earners
Late in the game, when Leon returns to the blasted-out ruins of Raccoon City, he finds an abandoned BSAA camp with an automated resupply crate. This crate is packed with goodies, including new guns and even upgrade systems. However, I guess the BSAA doesn’t just let its agents have upgrades for free. No sir, you gotta earn ‘em from the company store.
Alongside the crate, Leon finds a Tactical Tracker, a little bracelet that automatically tracks the number of zombies or other baddies he kills, awarding credit in the process. This credit is tallied when you return to the crate, after which you can use it to buy stuff. Obviously, money is a limited resource. If you try to avoid zombies rather than fighting them, you won’t be able to afford any better equipment, which can be a problem when you’re faced with a situation you can’t run from.
However, the inverse is true as well. If you kill every single zombie in the city and spend all the resultant credit frivolously, there won’t be any more heads you can pop in order to get more. You need to balance your books between upgrades and items like ammo and heals, as well as repairs for your body armor.
2
Hemolytic Injectors
Ensure They Stay Dead
In the original Resident Evil, you were encouraged to burn any zombies that you killed using oil from save rooms and Jill’s lighter. If you didn’t burn them, they’d come back later as even more dangerous Crimson Heads. Requiem features a very similar mechanic, though the way it’s implemented puts even more pressure on you.
While exploring the care center, Grace finds hemolytic injectors, special doodads that can be used to pump a zombie full of corrosive stuff that instantly makes their heads pop like a zit. Hemolytic injectors can be used on zombies to stealth-kill them from behind, or when they’re knocked down by guns or shoving. You can also use an injector on a zombie that’s already dead to pop them on the ground. There’s a reason for this: after a dead zombie is left long enough, assuming you didn’t pop its head with a lucky bullet, it will reanimate as a much more dangerous Blister Head.
While hemolytic injectors can be found and crafted, they’re not exactly in ready supply, so you need to carefully decide between popping a zombie that you can’t sneak past or finishing off one in a critical hallway so it can’t inconvenience you later.
1
Requiem Ammo
In Case of Emergency, Pull Trigger
Of course, the signature weapon of Resident Evil Requiem is the Requiem, an absurdly high-caliber handcannon revolver used by both Leon and Grace. It’s one of the strongest weapons in the game, more than sufficient to put down most recurring enemy types in one shot, as well as repel larger stalker enemies like The Girl or Chunk.
Because Requiem is so high-caliber, though, it won’t take just any ammo. When Grace first receives Requiem from Leon, it only has a few shots in the chamber, and the only way to get more is to either find them lying around, which almost never happens, or craft them, which requires both rare scrap and a large quantity of infected blood.
The Requiem is not a weapon to be used willy-nilly like your regular pistol. It’s the last resort, a get-out-of-chomp-free card, for when all other options have been exhausted, and you need to make a break for it. Each one of those precious bullets is a potential lifeline, and they absolutely cannot be wasted.
Resident Evil Requiem Review
Capcom has finally mastered the balance of horror and action in the series’ most melancholy and anxiety-inducing work yet.
Resident Evil Requiem
9/10
- Released
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February 27, 2026
- ESRB
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Mature 17+ / Intense Violence, Blood and Gore, Strong Language, In-Game Purchases
