Baffled by: Resident Evil Requiem

If you know me, you know how much of a Resident Evil fan/nerd I am. I fell in love with it since after experiencing the Director’s Cut of the first game back in 1997 or so, but of course it doesn’t mean that I like all of the games in the series. There are games that I like less, games that I like more, game that I have replayed countless times and games that I rarely revisit. Yet in all this time Requiem might be the first time ever that I have finished a Resident Evil game and immediately uninstalled it. And have no desire to play it again.

The idea behind Resident Evil Requiem (usually just called RE9) seems to have been the creation of a game that captures the essence of Resident Evil in all of its different iterations. After all, the series that invented the term “survival horror” later switched to something they called “survival action” and then even had a few entries that were almost purely third person shooters. They tried different camera perspectives, different gameplay focus, different approaches to level design… Requiem attempts to distil all of that into one game. Which, of course, cannot have been achieved without having at least a couple of distinct sections that emphasize different aspects of the series. The game does it by having completing different gameplay for when you’re playing as Grace and when you’re playing as Leon.

When playing as Grace, the game defaults to First Person perspective and attempts to evoke the general gameplay of Resident Evil 7, but with some additions that are reminiscent of the two Revelations games, especially the second one. There’s a curious idea of additional resource management for crafting, more emphasis on stealth and enemies that, despite being zombies, exhibit systemic behaviours that can be exploited. It’s a very moody and atmospheric part of the game with lots of really beautiful interplay between light and darkness and also one that had the potential to be a really good game. Sadly, it turns out to be severely undercooked and is dropped before it can be expanded into something even more interesting.

When playing as Leon, the game defaults to the third person perspective and pretends to play like the recent Resident Evil 4 remake, but in actuality has a lot more similarities with Resident Evil 6. This whole section of the game is, frankly, quite garbage despite few interesting ideas here and there. Most of what is alright is a repeat of things that other Resident Evil entries did much better, and an unhealthy amount of it is built entirely around nostalgia bait that is handled cynically, blatantly and tastelessly. Honestly, I’d rather play Resident Evil 6 than this again.

The thing that dealt the most psychic damage to me was the storytelling. I thought that time when I sat in front of a screen in complete disbelief at what I’m witnessing when I watched The Rise of Skywalker was unique and it would never be re-experienced. And yet, here I was playing the Other M of Resident Evil series (as far as all of the Leon’s part is concerned) and trying to understand if the game is trying to be a spoof or just takes tis audience for morons. I mean, look Resident Evil was never known for good storytelling. But the modern revival of the series started with RE7 and that game had some of the best writing and characterization in the entire series, setting a new level for what the series could be. And yet, we somehow got to something as offensively stupid as Requiem.

It doesn’t help that the music is terrible. Or how the way the game handles the New Game plus aspects is somehow worse than in Resident Evil 5, despite all of the other recent entries being so incredibly smart about it. Or why is there yet another extremely tedious unskippable scripted spooky section in the game? People hated how the giant baby moment in the Village made replaying the game tedious, and yet Capcom decided to repeat the same mistake. And why is the nostalgia bait so confused? We’re using the narrative and locations from the new RE2 from 2019, but constantly referencing elements that were only in the original titles? Even when I want to praise the game for doing things well, it finds ways to break it. We finally get the “run by default” option, yet none of the vaulting logic is designed around it, so it’s very easy to jump into an enemy while carefully approaching a vaulting spot… At least the visuals are genuinely pretty, though Path tracing is, unsurprisingly, quite heavy. And is locked to nVidia hardware, which sucks. But it does look very good.

If the idea really was to have some sort of a tribute to the series up until now, it was terribly executed. When I think of good examples of titles that attempted that, I think of Final Fantasy IX – a game that is still fantastic as both a big tribute to everything that came before it, but also as its own game. Heck, Resident Evil 7 was a fantastic way to revisit the series with new characters and stories, while smartly evoking things that happened in the past. This, though? Feels like a high budget shitpost. If instead we could get a full length game out of the Grace’s section, that’d be a good game. But then the rest of the game happens and ruins everything. I don’t know what the audience for this game is and have no clue why the reaction to it so far has been positive. But I absolutely do not recommend it.