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Resident Evil Requiem
Resident Evil Requiem is the ninth entry in the Resident Evil series. Experience terrifying survival horror with FBI analyst Grace Ashcroft, and dive into puls…
About three hours into Resident Evil Requiem, I caught myself doing that thing I only do with good horror games: leaning forward, shoulders tense, completely forgetting what time it is. I’d just spent forty sweaty minutes as Grace creeping through the Rhodes Hill Hospital basement, juggling fuses and batteries while some wet, wheezing thing hunted me by sound. The moment I finally slotted the last battery into the right power bank, the game snapped me back to Leon S. Kennedy, handed me a rifle, and basically said: “You earned this. Go make something’s head disappear.”
That swap – from nerve-shredding survival horror to confident, crowd-controlling action – is Requiem in a nutshell. It plays like a curated mixtape of everything this series has done well over the last 25 years, cut down to roughly 10 hours with almost no fat. And after finishing the campaign twice, that length went from “wait, that’s it?” to “honestly, don’t change a thing.”
I played on “modern standard” difficulty on PS5 for my first run, taking my time, checking every corner for Mr. Raccoons and hidden ammo, and I rolled credits just shy of the 10-hour mark. No speedrunning, no guide, just old-school RE paranoia. My second run, knowing the layouts and puzzle solutions, I came in around six and a half. At no point did I feel like the game was stretching itself to justify that $70 tag. If anything, it felt like Capcom finally trusted a mainline Resident Evil to be exactly as long as it needs to be and nothing more.
The thing that really sold me on Requiem’s pacing is the dual-protagonist structure. You alternate between Grace Ashcroft, a new face with a nasty past, and series veteran Leon S. Kennedy, who is basically the franchise’s action poster boy at this point. But this isn’t a simple “A/B campaign” situation; it’s more like the game has two nervous systems that keep pulsing in different rhythms.
Grace’s sections are mostly first-person, and they’re mean. Her opening stretch in Rhodes Hill Hospital might be the tensest Resident Evil has felt for me since the first house section of RE7. You start with almost nothing: a weak improvised weapon, a flashlight that never quite feels bright enough, and a crafting system based around contaminated blood that feels as gross as it sounds. Enemies in these areas aren’t just bullet sponges; they’re unpredictable. One “blister-head” zombie jerked its way down a hallway with these horrible, stuttering lunges, then went limp, and I thought I was safe. It waited until I was literally stepping over it to explode back to life and grab my ankle.
Grace plays like a crash course in resource terror. You’re constantly debating whether to make a blood coagulant to slow infection, or a splashy, short-range bomb that might save your life in the next room. She sneaks more than she fights, and the camera being in first-person amps up every creak of the old hospital. There’s a bit where you have to move between patient rooms while something stalks the corridors and responds to sound. I died twice because I bumped a metal cart in the dark and panicked, sprinting instead of freezing. Those deaths felt fair, though; the rules are clear, and the game lets you learn them the hard way.
Then you swap to Leon and the whole vibe flips. Suddenly you’re in third-person again, with that familiar over-the-shoulder RE4 framing, a dedicated dodge and a brutal axe parry that never stopped being satisfying. Leon’s segments are closer to RE4 and Village: chunky, mobile combat, siege arenas, big setpiece boss fights. The first time I perfectly timed a parry on a lunging zombie, watched the axe spark off its claws, then followed up with a roundhouse kick that took out two more behind it, I actually laughed out loud. It’s power fantasy, but still grounded in that slightly clumsy, weighty RE movement we know.
The magic is how the game cuts between these two tones before either wears out its welcome. Just when I started to feel like I’d had enough of creeping through vents as Grace, I’d swap to Leon and unload a shotgun into a boss’s swollen weak point in a ruined Raccoon City street. And after an hour of exploding heads as Leon, I caught myself missing the stomach-knot tension of Grace’s slow door opens. The structure makes both protagonists feel like a reward for putting up with the other, which is a weird trick that somehow works.
Requiem’s runtime is where the discourse is going to orbit, so let’s address it head-on. Yes, roughly 10 hours for a $70 game is going to make some people flinch. I get it. My playtime on the Resident Evil 4 remake hit the mid-20s because I cleaned every corner of every village and castle and did all the side quests. Village and RE2 took me around 12 hours each on my first runs. RE7 was closer to 10. This new one lines up much more with that older-school survival horror length than the modern blockbuster “30-hour campaign.”
The difference is that Requiem is almost aggressively uninterested in padding. There are no arbitrary wave-defense segments that go on two rooms too long. No bloated stealth chapters where you’re stripped of your weapons for an hour. No sprawling open zones full of samey side contracts. The game has a rhythm: you push through a new area, solve a handful of focused puzzles, get a couple of efficient combat sandboxes, hit a boss, then move on. When a location or mechanic reappears, it’s twisted enough that it doesn’t feel like copy-paste.
One moment that sold me on the pacing: midway through, there’s a “return” to a wing of Rhodes Hill that you thought you’d cleared. In a lesser game, this would be a recycle – same corridors, new enemies. Here, the route is partially flooded, lights flicker in different rhythms, and new shortcuts make it feel like you’re seeing the same place with scar tissue. The objectives are different too; you’re retracing Grace’s steps as Leon, and that contextual shift is enough to keep it from feeling lazy.
The only time I felt the story brush up against being undercooked was near the end. There’s a late-game emotional beat between Grace and Leon that clearly wants to land like a gut punch, and it almost does, but the scene cuts away just as it’s heating up. It feels like someone shaved thirty seconds off for pacing and took a chunk of the catharsis with it. It’s the rare case where I’d have actually taken a little more runtime.
Outside of that, I never hit a section that felt like it existed purely to stretch the clock. I appreciate that. I’m at a point in my life where the idea of a horror game I can start Friday night and comfortably finish by Sunday without a guide feels like a gift, not a problem.
Structurally, Requiem sticks pretty hard to the classic Resident Evil loop: explore a semi-open environment, find weird keys and emblems, backtrack to gated doors, solve a few logic puzzles, then unlock the next chunk of map. What matters is how smooth that loop feels, and here the game is in a great place.
Rhodes Hill Hospital might be one of my favorite RE locations in years. It’s compact but dense, with a layout that becomes legible in your head over time. Early on, I remember staring at a locked ICU door and muttering “I’m going to be back here three hours from now with some stupid heart-shaped key.” Two hours later, I was sprinting down that same hallway in a panic, chased by something that didn’t care about doors, clutching that exact key. The best Resident Evil spaces feel like characters; Rhodes Hill definitely does.
The puzzles sit comfortably in the “I feel smart but not stuck forever” zone, with a couple of dickish outliers. That basement battery puzzle almost broke me. You have multiple power banks, batteries with different charge levels, and a map of what powers what. The solution isn’t complicated in hindsight, but in the moment — with audio cues hinting that something is moving in the dark — I wasted fifteen real minutes swapping these things around while sweating. When I finally heard the right generator spin up, it was actual relief, the kind that physical horror games rarely give me anymore.
Raccoon City’s return is more linear, but there are still plenty of reasons to poke around. Alley shortcuts, smashed storefronts hiding side pickups, and the series’ beloved Mr. Raccoon toys tucked into obnoxious corners. One of them is perched above a streetlight that you only see if you look back over your shoulder after a bus crash sequence. That kind of “if you know, you know” design nudged me into replaying levels just to see what I’d missed.
If there’s a weak spot, it’s that some later puzzles feel like they’re there because a Resident Evil game is legally required to have a fuse box conundrum in the final third. They’re not bad, just a little perfunctory compared to the early-game ingenuity.
Moment to moment, Requiem swings between genuine horror and full-on action, and the pendulum definitely ends up sticking more on the action side toward the finale. That might annoy people who wanted the whole thing to feel like Grace’s opening chapters, but for me it landed about right.
Enemy behavior is a big part of what kept the tension high. Even basic zombies have tells you can learn: the way some shamble just a touch too fast, or the way a “corpse” on the floor subtly twitches before it springs up. On my first playthrough, I wasted so many bullets double-tapping bodies that never moved, but that paranoia is the point. Later enemy varieties introduce fun wrinkles — armored monstrosities that force you to reposition and flank as Leon, infection-spewing horrors that turn enclosed rooms into timing puzzles for Grace.
Leon’s combat sections are where the gunplay really sings. Weapons feel punchy, from the crisp snap of the starting handgun to the meaty recoil of the magnum you earn later. The axe parry is the standout system: time it right and you not only negate damage, you often stagger the attacker, setting up those glorious context kills. It never quite reaches the sheer mechanical high of RE4 Remake’s late-game arenas, but I also didn’t feel like I’d done the same encounter ten times by the end.
Grace’s “combat,” meanwhile, is mostly about not fighting. Using sound to distract enemies, timing your movement between their erratic patrols, and deciding when to burn one of your precious blood bombs to clear a path — that’s the good stuff. When the game does force a confrontation as Grace, it tends to be quick and ugly. I love that. Horror loses its bite when you can comfortably gun down everything. Here, I always felt like I was one mistake away from being dragged into some grisly grab animation.
The bosses are a mixed bag, but the highs are very high. A morgue encounter with flickering lights and a creature that’s only truly visible in flashes is an absolute standout. The final boss, by contrast, is more of a big loud spectacle that leans heavily on nostalgia. It’s fun, it looks cool, but mechanically it’s a little basic compared to what came before.
On the technical side, Requiem feels like a leaner, meaner extension of what RE Engine has been doing in the last few entries. On PS5, I stuck with the performance-focused mode and had a mostly smooth time: snappy loads, no crashes, and only the occasional frame wobble during big, effects-heavy chaos.
Visually, the game hits that sweet spot between grimy and readable. Rhodes Hill’s stained linoleum floors, peeling wallpaper, and damp, moldy ceilings all sell the idea that this place has been swallowing people for a long time. Raccoon City, meanwhile, gets to be a grim playground of wet asphalt, neon signs reflected in puddles, and burning cars casting orange light over alleyways. There’s a shot early in Leon’s campaign where he steps out onto a fire-licked street and looks up at the ruined skyline — it’s pure fan-service, sure, but it’s hard not to grin at it if you’ve been with the series for a while.
Facial animation and voice work are strong across the board. Grace’s performance in particular sells a believable arc from shell-shocked survivor to someone who’s just barely choosing to push forward. Leon is, well, Leon: quippy, exhausted, and just self-aware enough to comment on how cursed his life is without turning the whole thing into a parody.
Sound design does a lot of the heavy lifting in the horror sections. The hospital’s ambient groans, distant gurney squeaks, and the way your own breathing ramps up when you’re low on health all quietly push you into bad decisions. Playing on headphones, there were a few moments where I had to pause just to unclench.
Polish-wise, I ran into a couple of minor hitches: one enemy got stuck jittering in a doorway, and there was a cutscene where a character’s lips were very slightly out of sync with the dialogue. Nothing immersion-shattering, nothing that cost me a run. For a launch build of a modern AAA game, that’s honestly refreshing.
Short game or not, Requiem clearly wants you to come back. Finishing the campaign unlocks a harder mode, some new weapon variations, and a couple of fun cosmetic tweaks. There’s explicit encouragement to chase a four-hour completion time, and after my second run clocked in under seven without really trying to optimize, that speedrun target suddenly feels more achievable than ridiculous.
More importantly, the structure holds up to replays. Knowing when the game is about to swap you from Grace to Leon lets you plan your resource usage in a smarter way. Understanding how levels fold back on themselves makes every shortcut door you kick open feel like shaving minutes off some future run. It scratches the same itch that old RE2 A/B routes did, just in a much more streamlined way.
If you’re the kind of player who measures value purely in hours-per-dollar and only plays through a campaign once, Requiem might feel steep. If you’re someone who likes mastering routes, pushing higher difficulties, and living inside a game’s systems for a while, this thing is dense enough to support that for a good long time.
After two playthroughs, my main feeling about Resident Evil Requiem is relief. Relief that Capcom resisted the urge to bloat it into a 25-hour sprawl. Relief that the new protagonist isn’t just a glorified tutorial vessel. Relief that Leon still feels great to play without completely hijacking the tone.
It’s not perfect. The story leans hard on nostalgia in places, some late-game puzzles feel like box-ticking, and there’s at least one emotional beat that should have been given more room to breathe. But minute to minute, room to room, it’s one of the tightest, most confident Resident Evil campaigns in years. It knows what it wants to be — a concentrated shot of horror and action you can actually finish in a weekend — and it sticks to that.
If you’ve been waiting for a modern RE that remembers it’s okay for a game to end before you’re tired of it, Requiem is exactly that. For me, it lands at a very strong 9/10.
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