Game intel
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…
The first time Resident Evil Requiem asked me whether I wanted to play in first- or third-person, I froze on the options screen longer than I’d like to admit. I’ve loved both flavors of modern Resident Evil: the suffocating first-person horror of 7 and Village, and the over-the-shoulder dominance of the RE2 and RE4 remakes. Requiem is the first mainline game that tries to have its cake and eat it too from day one-and instead of a gimmick, it’s baked into how the whole game feels.
After about 15 hours across a full playthrough and a chunky second run where I flipped the perspectives, I ended up with a weird mix of admiration and frustration. Capcom clearly spent a small fortune making both views work, and when they click, this is some of the best survival horror the series has ever had. But the way Requiem can’t quite commit to your chosen perspective-especially in Leon’s sections-keeps the experiment from being an all-timer.
Requiem splits its campaign between two characters: series veteran Leon S. Kennedy, and newcomer Grace Ashcroft. Structurally, it’s classic dual-protagonist Resident Evil—interwoven chapters, occasional crossovers, two different takes on the same nightmare—but the twist here is that each of them is built around a different perspective and playstyle.
By default, Grace is in first-person. Her sections are all about fragility and dread: sneaking around the decrepit Roads Hill Care Center, counting every bullet, and abusing any hiding spot you can find. Leon, meanwhile, is pure over-the-shoulder spectacle. His chapters lean hard into action-horror: chunky weapons, brutal melee follow-ups, and that almost cocky sense of crowd control that RE4 perfected.
The clever bit is that these aren’t just two different camera heights slapped onto the same mechanics. Perspective is design here. Grace’s routes are stuffed with narrow corridors, sound-based threats, and systems that feel tuned for the tunnel vision of first-person. Leon’s arenas are wider, with flanking routes, environmental hazards, and waves of enemies that beg for third-person awareness.
The game lets you swap each character individually between first- and third-person, and I eventually toyed with every combination. But the more I played, the more obvious it became: default Grace and default Leon are how Requiem actually sings.
Grace’s opening stretch in the Roads Hill Care Center immediately sold me on the first-person choice. You wake up somewhere you really don’t want to be, holding only a lighter, and the game just lets you sit in that darkness for a minute. In third-person this would still look great, but in first-person it feels like your own hand is holding that lighter out, arm trembling slightly as you inch forward.
After about an hour with her, I realized I was playing differently than I do in most Resident Evil games. I wasn’t just scanning hallways; I was leaning into the space—staring at labels on pill bottles, reading scrawled notes way too closely, tracking stains on the floor to guess where something had been dragged. First-person naturally invites that kind of nosy inspection, and Requiem rewards it with an obscene amount of texture and detail.
The stealth systems also feel tuned around the viewpoint. Being able to crack a door just slightly to peek into a room is a tiny mechanic on paper, but in practice it’s huge. In first-person, you can nudge the analog stick and open the door just a sliver, letting Grace and the camera share this tiny cone of vision. Seeing a zombie chef endlessly slamming his knife into the same piece of meat beyond a shelf—right there, close enough that you can practically smell it—hits different when it fills your entire screen.
Hiding feels more natural too. Slipping behind a shelf or into a locker in first-person robs you of that comforting over-the-shoulder “third eye” you get in other games. Often you’re staring at a thin slat of visibility or nothing at all, clinging to the audio design to sense if something is inches away. Grace isn’t built to fight her way out of bad decisions, so that limited field of view is crucial to selling her vulnerability.
On my second playthrough, I forced myself to run her chapters in third-person out of curiosity. It still works—this is Resident Evil, after all, and over-the-shoulder survival horror is practically the house style now. You get a better sense of your model, cool animations for creeping along walls, and the comfort of being able to see just past your immediate cone.
But I lost something important. Peeking with doors became clunkier. The act of hiding felt less like me holding my breath and more like watching a character do it. For Grace, the trade-off just wasn’t worth it. The game looks prettier in the detached, cinematic way, but it’s less scary. And if there’s one thing her sections absolutely nail, it’s that sick, quiet fear where you’d rather backtrack three rooms than risk making noise.
Leon, on the other hand, fits third-person like a tailored suit. His chapters are built around crowd management and timing: shoulder-shot staggers into melee finishers, desperate reloads while backing up a staircase, perfect parries with his axe that send enemies reeling. All of that feels instantly readable from an offset camera.
Early on, there’s a fight in a tight diner-style space that perfectly shows why Leon belongs in third-person. Enemies pour in through windows and kitchen doors while you’re weaving between booths, kicking chairs, and trying not to get cornered. Being able to see the whole room, including what’s about to flank you from the side, matters way more here than the raw intimacy of first-person.
The animations sell the fantasy nicely. Leon’s parry timing is strict enough to be satisfying without feeling cruel, and watching him slam a hatchet aside or counter a lunging freak with a brutal close-range finisher hits that same power-trip node as the RE4 remake. In third-person, those moves read cleanly: you anticipate space, you position around groups, you make deliberate choices.
The camera distance feels tuned for this pace. It’s not a hyper-wide, pulled-back shooter camera; it’s the traditional over-the-shoulder, with just enough peripheral vision to give you situational awareness without turning the game into pure action. When Requiem leans into this style, it’s some of the best hybrid action-horror the series has managed in years.
Then I flipped Leon to first-person on my second run, and the whole vibe changed. Not broken, not unplayable—just… strange.
The immediate oddity is the gun positioning. Instead of the modern off-center view you’d expect from RE7 and Village, Leon’s weapons sit dead center on the screen, old-school Doom style. Grace uses the same setup, but with her single handgun and slower pacing, it doesn’t stand out as much. Pair that centered view with Leon’s beefier arsenal and faster rhythm, though, and the whole thing looks a bit goofy at first.
After about half an hour, my brain mostly stopped tripping over it. Shots lined up fine, headshots still popped with that wet RE gusto, and the sound and recoil feedback are strong enough to sell impact even without seeing Leon himself. On a purely mechanical level, it works. The narrower field of view does hurt, though. Situations that felt fair and readable in third-person—especially multi-angle ambushes—suddenly became more trial-and-error in first-person.
The bigger issue is how often the game breaks its own illusion. Certain actions, like melee prompts, gun finishers, and those glorious axe parries, almost always snap the camera out to third-person for a second or two. You get this awesome, cinematic payoff shot… and then you’re yanked back into Leon’s eyeballs. In isolation these transitions look cool, but stacked over a long session they start to feel like flickering between two different games.
Grace has a bit of this as well—some contextual animations push you out of first-person—but for Leon it’s frequent enough that it became my main complaint about the whole dual-perspective system. If I’m choosing first-person Leon, I’m clearly signing up for a specific experience; it’s frustrating that the game keeps reminding me it was secretly directed as a third-person action movie.
That said, there are moments where first-person Leon is undeniably cool. Lining up a tight shotgun blast as a hulking enemy charges, seeing that thing fill your screen right before it collapses, or doing a last-second 180 spin to parry an off-screen attacker feels incredibly immediate. It just never stops feeling like the “remix” mode rather than the main event—and the constant camera snapping underlines that.
Grace in third-person lands in a better spot than Leon in first-person, but it still feels like a compromise. On the plus side, swapping her camera creates a nice bridge for players who loved the RE2 remake but bounced off 7 and Village’s first-person intensity. Stealth and resource management remain intact; you just get a bit more breathing room, visually and mentally.
However, a lot of the little design flourishes clearly assumed a first-person view. Peeking around corners with your lighter or easing doors open loses nuance from behind the shoulder. Sometimes the camera fights for an angle in especially cramped hallways, and the elegance of simply moving your head in first-person doesn’t quite translate.
It’s playable, it’s good even, but it feels like you’re watching a carefully directed horror movie rather than being trapped inside one. For some players, that might be comforting. For me, it left Grace’s sequences feeling noticeably less special on my second run.
Even when the experiment stumbles, I couldn’t shake a basic respect for how much work clearly went into it. This isn’t Resident Evil Village’s late-arriving third-person mode, which always felt a little bolted on. Requiem’s dual perspectives feel like they were in the design doc from day one.
Cutscenes often adjust framing depending on whether you’re playing a character in first- or third-person. Animation sets shift to keep things from looking too stiff when you swap views. Environments are constructed to hold up to up-close first-person scrutiny and broader third-person readability. It’s the sort of expensive, unflashy craftsmanship you only really notice when you start toggling back and forth.
On current consoles, performance held steady for me. I played on PlayStation 5 and stuck mostly to the performance-focused mode; both perspectives felt smooth and responsive, with only the occasional camera hiccup during tight transitions or big scripted setpieces. Nothing game-breaking, just enough to remind you how hard this all must have been to stitch together.
If you strip away the camera gimmick, Requiem is a strong—but not groundbreaking—Resident Evil entry. The story does the usual series dance of conspiracies, bioweapons, and larger-than-life antagonists. Leon is his familiar mix of weary pro and one-liner machine; Grace brings a more grounded, panicked energy that works well in her quieter sections.
The pacing benefits enormously from the alternating perspectives. Long stretches with Grace keep you starved for resources and answers, then the game throws you into a Leon chapter where you suddenly have upgraded gear and permission to blow off steam. The second half leans more heavily on Leon, which sometimes undercuts the new horror tone Grace brings, but it keeps the back half from bogging down entirely in sneaking sequences.
Boss fights are where the dual design really shines. Some are clearly built to scare you in first-person (there’s one late-game pursuit that is miserable in the best possible way as Grace), while others revel in third-person spectacle: circling a lumbering monstrosity, managing adds, and popping weak points from a safe distance. They’re not all winners, but the variety helps the 15-ish hour runtime feel leaner than it actually is.
My biggest non-camera complaint is that the narrative never quite capitalizes on its dual-protagonist setup. The interplay between Grace and Leon is fine, with a few good late-game moments, but it doesn’t hit the emotional heights of something like the RE2 remake’s best character beats. For a game this ambitious mechanically, the story feels oddly safe.
After experimenting, my recommendation feels pretty clear:
Running the defaults first time through doesn’t just align with how the mechanics were clearly tuned; it also preserves the intended tonal contrast. Grace’s segments push you into that slower, tenser headspace, and when the game cuts to Leon, it feels like someone opening a window in a smoke-filled room. You lose some of that dynamic if you start tinkering from the jump.
On a second run, though, the perspective toggles become an excellent way to re-experience favorite sequences. One of my highlights was replaying a mid-game Leon siege entirely in first-person, forcing myself to relearn spacing and timing from a much more claustrophobic angle. It wasn’t better, exactly, but it felt new—no small thing in a series built on replays and higher difficulties.
Resident Evil Requiem’s dual-perspective system is the rare big-budget experiment that almost justifies its own excess. Grace in first-person delivers some of the most effective, grounded horror the series has attempted. Leon in third-person channels the best of modern Resident Evil action. Being able to flip both of them is a genuine treat for fans who love to pick apart design decisions.
At the same time, the game’s reluctance to fully commit to your chosen view—especially for Leon’s first-person mode—keeps that feature from feeling perfectly realized. Constant perspective snaps for finishers and parries, some slightly awkward animation compromises, and a story that never quite rises to the level of the mechanics all drag the experience down a notch.
Even with those caveats, I walked away impressed. Requiem doesn’t feel like a tech demo or a checklist sequel. It feels like a team genuinely wrestling with what Resident Evil should look and feel like in 2026, and mostly coming out on top.
Score: 8/10
Get access to exclusive strategies, hidden tips, and pro-level insights that we don't share publicly.
Ultimate Reviews Strategy Guide + Weekly Pro Tips