Resident Evil Requiem Review: Two Games in One Anniversary Package

Thirty years is a long time for any franchise to stay relevant. Most don’t manage it. Resident Evil not only survived three decades but arrives at its anniversary with what might be its most ambitious mainline entry yet — a ninth instalment that essentially asks: what if we made two different games and shipped them together?

The answer, as it turns out, is pretty compelling. Whether you’re a longtime fan who remembers the original mansion or someone who came in through the action-heavy later entries, Requiem has something built specifically for you.

The Setup

Requiem lands in 2026, placing it exactly 28 years after the Raccoon City incident that started everything.

Leon Kennedy — series veteran, perpetual survivor, man who has fought more bioterror threats than most governments — is back, older, and dealing with the long-term consequences of spending time in an infected city in his twenties.

It’s a surprisingly human angle for a franchise that once featured a man punching boulders. He’s looking for a cure. Along the way, he finds considerably more trouble than he bargained for.

His search brings him into contact with Grace Ashcroft, an FBI analyst and daughter of a character from Resident Evil: Outbreak.

Grace is investigating a string of deaths linked to a mysterious new virus called Elpis — named after the Greek goddess of hope, the one who remained inside Pandora’s box after everything else escaped.

It’s the kind of mythological nod the series has always enjoyed, sitting comfortably alongside Nemesis and other references scattered across the franchise’s history.

The MacGuffin is a previously unknown piece of Ozwell Spencer’s legacy: a pathogen supposedly capable of controlling human minds. Villains want it. Heroes need to stop them. The framework is familiar.

Here’s the honest part: the story isn’t good. Even by Resident Evil standards — a series where narrative has historically played second fiddle to atmosphere — Requiem’s plot raises questions it never answers.

Character motivations stretch credulity. Logic gaps accumulate steadily across the runtime. Several scenes that should land emotionally simply don’t because the groundwork hasn’t been laid. If you’re genuinely invested in the lore, there will be moments of frustration.

The game seems aware that storytelling isn’t its strength and leans hard into gameplay and presentation to compensate. That trade-off works, mostly — but it’s still a trade-off.

Two Campaigns, Two Completely Different Games

This is where Requiem earns its reputation. Grace and Leon don’t just have different personalities — they play differently enough that their campaigns feel like separate games sharing a world.

Capcom has described it as a “two-in-one” experience, and for once that kind of marketing language is actually accurate.

Grace’s sections are survival horror. Proper, tense, resource-scarce survival horror set in a mansion environment that draws clearly from the series’ roots. First-person perspective by default, which amplifies the claustrophobia considerably.

She has a limited inventory, modest weapons, and a crafting system built around improvised materials — including, in one of the game’s more creative touches, the infected blood of enemies.

Knives, ammunition, medical injectors, preservation tapes for saving — all craftable from whatever Grace can scavenge.

There’s also a haemolytic injector enabling stealth kills and preventing the corpse mutations that fans of the remake will recognise immediately. Here they’re called bubbleheads rather than crimsonheads, but the threat is identical and just as punishing if ignored.

Grace herself reacts to everything — breathing hard, trembling, occasionally sobbing through the horror unfolding around her. She’s an office analyst dropped into a nightmare, and the game commits fully to that framing.

Her vulnerability isn’t a weakness in the character design. It’s the entire point, and it works consistently throughout her campaign.

Leon’s sections are the opposite in almost every respect. Third-person, action-focused, wider arsenal, substantially larger inventory, and a crafting system built from gunpowder rather than biological material.

A wrist tracker awards points spendable on weapons and upgrades between encounters, nodding to more recent instalments in the franchise.

He’s 50, imperturbable, and apparently now comfortable wielding a chainsaw — something series fans have been waiting to see from his perspective for an embarrassingly long time.

His sections are bloodier than anything in previous entries, and the hatchet he uses to finish off downed enemies is responsible for most of it.

The balance between the two campaigns shifts noticeably across the game’s runtime. Early on, Grace dominates and Leon appears in shorter, more intense bursts — almost as if the game is rationing him to prevent tonal whiplash.

By the second half, that inverts completely. Leon takes centre stage, settings open from mansion corridors into urban environments, and the nostalgia callbacks intensify to a level that longtime fans will find difficult to resist. Some references are subtle.

Others are not subtle at all, and are clearly designed to provoke a specific reaction from anyone who has been with the series since the beginning.

For players who enjoy gaming as part of a broader entertainment rotation — and there’s significant overlap between Resident Evil fans and those who unwind at platforms like ReveryPlay between longer sessions — Requiem’s chapter structure suits focused play particularly well.

Each segment has a clear beginning and end, making it easy to step away and return without losing momentum.

The Zombies Have Developed Personalities

Among Requiem’s more memorable innovations is giving certain enemies fragments of their former selves. The ex-cleaning lady mutters about rubbish and, if she gets hold of you, begins frantically scrubbing at your face as though removing a stain.

The former doctor demands patients get in line. The cook haunts the kitchen, repeating his phrases while attempting to prepare something that probably isn’t on any menu you’d want to encounter.

None of them are articulate in any conventional sense. Their vocabularies are narrow, their repetitions unsettling rather than informative — closer in spirit to the original game’s guard diary entries than anything resembling coherent speech.

That limitation makes them stranger and more disturbing, not less. A zombie with full conversational ability would be alarming. A zombie with one phrase and no idea why it’s saying it is something else entirely.

The voice acting includes Russian among its languages, which is worth mentioning simply because full localisation at this level is increasingly rare.

Puzzles are present but generally straightforward throughout. The exception is an optional final puzzle involving a couple who must hear a voice — a multi-step sequence that includes, among other things, flushing a toilet a specific number of times.

At the time of writing, it had only been solved through data mining. It rewards 20,000 points and an achievement.

Whether that justifies the effort is genuinely unclear, but the existence of a puzzle that stumped the entire player base for this long is itself remarkable in a game that otherwise doesn’t prioritise the quest component.

Presentation and Technical Quality

Visually and technically, Requiem is the strongest entry in the series. Animations are detailed and expressive in ways that genuinely serve the storytelling.

Sound design is immaculate — the audio work in Grace’s campaign in particular contributes meaningfully to the tension in ways that a less carefully produced game simply couldn’t replicate. Staging of cinematic sequences is confident and polished throughout.

There are minor issues. Occasional clipping when Grace collects blood in first-person mode, a few texture interactions that break immersion briefly. These feel like the kind of things patches address, not fundamental problems with the experience.

The environmental interactivity is a genuine highlight that deserves specific mention. Walls can be broken with the zenith gun.

Glass floors can be shot out from underneath enemies. The world responds to player actions in ways that feel deliberate and considered rather than incidental. It’s the kind of detail that doesn’t necessarily make headlines but significantly affects how the game feels to actually play.

The Verdict

Requiem works because the dual-campaign structure genuinely delivers rather than merely promising to. Players who came to the series through classic survival horror get a campaign built for their sensibilities.

Players who arrived through the action-heavy later entries get theirs. The contrast between Grace and Leon enhances both rather than diluting either — each campaign feels more distinct because the other exists alongside it.

The story is the real weak point, and it’s a meaningful one given that Requiem clearly wants to say something about legacy, consequence, and the cost of spending decades fighting battles most people don’t know are happening.

The ambition is there. The execution doesn’t quite meet it. The plot holes and logic gaps are hard to ignore once they accumulate.

Everything else, though — the gameplay variety, the visual and audio presentation, the environmental detail, the enemy design, the callbacks that feel earned rather than cheap — lands consistently.

Thirty years in, Resident Evil still knows what it is. Requiem isn’t a reinvention. It’s a confident, technically accomplished argument that the formula, thoughtfully expanded, has a great deal left to offer.

Pros 

Dual campaign structure that delivers two genuinely distinct gameplay experiences; outstanding presentation across visuals, animation, and sound design; series callbacks that feel meaningful rather than gratuitous.

Cons

Weak narrative with logic gaps that compound across the runtime; puzzles are generally too simple, with one that goes dramatically in the opposite direction.