The line between a reflective look back at a series’ legacy and something that feels like pandering fanservice is razor thin, and I don’t know which one Resident Evil Requiem is trying to be. The latest entry in Capcom’s horror series is coming out during its 30th anniversary, and while it is one of the most robust marriages of horror and action the series has ever put forth, I can’t help but feel like it stumbles on its way to saying something more profound about its own legacy. Capcom has touted Requiem as a fulcrum point in which the old generation of survivors converges with a new one, but when all is said and done, it kind of just feels like another Resident Evil game.
That might be all you’re looking for, and Grace and Leon’s story delivers a pretty great one of those. But as I reached the climax of Requiem, the contemplative review that had been forming in my head started to dwindle in favor of a more confused one. Requiem is a polished fusion of nearly every era of Resident Evil Capcom has ever devised, but it can’t quite decide if it’s reflecting on those eras in a meaningful way or merely playing the hits for those who want to point at the screen and nod at every reference. It’s the kind of “break in case of emergency” retreat to basics you pull out when your series is in trouble, which makes it confounding that Resident Evil, a series that is in damn fine standing as of late, would do something so safe when it had all the runway it needed to do something brave.
Requiem is a dueling story starring both frightened newcomer Grace Ashcroft and grizzled veteran Leon Kennedy, both of whom find themselves tied up in the remnants of the Umbrella Corporation’s bioterrorism. Grace is kidnapped by a former researcher from the organization for reasons she doesn’t quite understand, while Leon is searching for a possible cure for a disease lying dormant that he and other Raccoon City residents have apparently carried with them in the decades since Resident Evil 2.
Circumstance brings them both to the Rhodes Hill Chronic Care Center, where Grace is held prisoner and Leon is searching for answers. Here is the beginning of a tale in which Resident Evil’s many pasts converge, and there’s a lot of lore to sift through that will delight sickos and at least intrigue anyone who has even a passing knowledge of Leon and company’s history. For most of Requiem, I was enamored by how many old threads the game tugged at, as it seemed to be really reckoning with the decades of damage suffered by both its post-apocalyptic world and by those who have fought through it all with a handgun and a dream.
Resident Evil is a horror series, but it’s also a soap opera of wise-cracking bioterrorist fighters now reaching their twilight years and feeling the weight of all the carnage they’ve seen. When it’s at its best, there’s a real weight to Leon’s contemplation and Grace’s self-actualization. When it’s at its worst, Requiem feels like it’s only playing pretend. It gestures at a moment of great change before it dusts off its shoulders and gets back to doing what Resident Evil always does. Exceptionally well, mind you. But it stops short of making meaningful use of all this reflection and all these nods to decades of history. With maybe one or two exceptions, I wouldn’t be surprised if nothing from Requiem really factors into the future.
The Care Center is not the only stage in Requiem, but is the most concise at getting the game’s core conceit across. Grace is a green survivor solving puzzles in an effort to escape the facility, and Leon is a walking arsenal that tanks through zombie attacks that would one-shot most humans. Even as they both explore the same facility, they move through the space very differently. Grace’s inventory is much more limited, her safety reliant on crafting whatever tools she can piece together from things you find in your surroundings, and even a bullet in her handgun does demonstrably less damage than it does when Leon is wielding a similar weapon. Her segments are gripping, as her lack of raw power means that even a low-level zombie is a threat, and more often than not, she’s also running from something much, much more powerful and ugly to look at than a doctor who’s been infected.
Playing as Grace is a constant tug-of-war between your limited bag space and the few precious resources you can find scattered around the environment. Where most Resident Evil games have a sense of power creep that builds over the course of the story, Grace stays pretty grounded throughout the game. Even in the late-game sections, she’s pretty much using the same tools she did in Rhodes Hill, only against far greater threats. Requiem’s commitment to making Grace’s sections so markedly different from Leon’s is how it maintained a terrifying vise grip on my nervous system that Resident Evil games often discard in the latter half as I pick up a shotgun and stockpile ammo in my pack. Yeah, I gained a greater understanding of Grace’s tools, but no amount of play time was going to help her go toe to toe with a zombie. If you find hide-and-seek-style horror exhausting, I’m sorry to tell you that such segments don’t really go away in Requiem as long as you’re playing as Grace. But Requiem attempts to balance them out with Leon’s segments, which are some of the best realizations ever of the action horror the series has leaned into since Resident Evil 4.
Requiem’s duality as it pays homage to every era of Resident Evil is most on display when you swap over to Leon. In segments like Rhodes Hill, Leon navigates the same space as Grace but with a different toolset, which in quiet moments allowed me to access areas or open supply caches Grace couldn’t thanks to the hatchet he has on his belt at all times. Meanwhile his plethora of firearms and combat armor meant I could pretty fearlessly walk around the area in a way that was cathartic after sneaking around as Grace for several hours. How thorough you are as Grace or Leon in one section may help the other when you switch perspectives; you might, for instance, walk through an area as Leon and have fewer enemies to face in a brawl because you took some of them out as Grace. Walking around a location and seeing the remains of carnage from when I had done so previously as the other playable character, it clicked for me that these two survivors aren’t on separate paths, but an interlinked one in which each side could influence the other.
When Leon’s not simply walking through Grace’s mess, however, he is as much of a blast to play as he’s always been. He’s powerful, his guns are always well-stocked with ammunition, and every time he reloads a weapon it looks cool as shit. If you know a zombie’s weak points (the head and the kneecaps), you’re pretty much playing with your food as Leon. A zombie’s pained moans and growls are no longer a reason to cower in fear; those are the sounds of Leon’s next victim as he practically dances on their undead form with an axe and pistol in hand. Requiem hams up Resident Evil’s campiest excesses with Leon, and the guy’s introspection on his decades-long career killing zombies while the same infection he’s been fighting all this time grows within him manages to ground the action and keep it from reaching an insufferable level of cheesy unseriousness.
Back-of-the-box quote:
“The stuff you like is still good, mostly!”
Developer:
Capcom
Type of game:
Horror game with an emphasis on both hide-and-seek scares and zombie action.
Liked:
Leon and Grace, the best of both worlds for scares and shooting.
Disliked:
Lopsided split between its protagonists; the introspective navel gazing doesn’t really pay off.
Platforms:
PC, PS5 (played on), Xbox Series X/S, Switch 2.
Release date:
February 27, 2026
Played:
~8 hours for first playthrough.
Unfortunately, Leon’s earliest segments in Requiem gave me the wrong impression of how much the game divides time between its leads. Despite being initially presented as Grace’s story, Leon’s play time ultimately dwarfs hers by a pretty significant margin, to the point where I’d say she takes a backseat in the latter half of the game. The lopsided split felt odd in the moment, and only felt worse by the time Requiem ended and a lot of the ideas it had been gesturing at regarding his inner struggle and Grace’s potential didn’t really go anywhere.
Requiem starts with a lot of promise, seemingly striving to pave the way for the future of the series that it then seems too afraid to follow through on, but the bigger swings it had the chance to take only happen if a game is interested in real introspection about its legacy. Resident Evil is 30 years old now, and we’ve reached a point in this medium’s existence where a lot of franchises are celebrating long lives and considering what the next 30 years looks like. Requiem seems mostly content to think about the past and not give much thought to the future. But hey, the guns shoot good, the scares still hit, and Leon still looks good in a tight shirt. So maybe there’s no real need to make sweeping changes when the formula of multiple eras still goes down real smooth, even if it leaves me feeling a little bit empty.
