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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…
This review includes mild spoilers for the Rhodes Hill Chronic Care Center section of Resident Evil Requiem, but I’ll avoid late-game story reveals.
I went into Resident Evil Requiem expecting a greatest-hits package for the series’ 30th anniversary. Leon on the box, Raccoon City in the trailers, a familiar logo slapped on every corridor. After about an hour creeping through Rhodes Hill Chronic Care Center as new protagonist Grace, it hit me: Capcom isn’t just replaying the old songs – they’re remixing the entire album.
I played on PlayStation 5 with the performance mode locked on, and spent just over 14 hours finishing both main routes and poking around for collectibles. The part that’s still lodged in my brain isn’t the huge late-game set pieces or the return to Raccoon City. It’s that damned hospital – a place that feels like the RPD’s twisted cousin, built for stealth, paranoia, and the kind of backtracking that makes you mutter room names under your breath like a GPS.
Requiem is split between Grace’s first-person, resource-starved survival horror and Leon’s later, more confident third-person action. On paper that sounds like a compromise. In practice, when you see how both of them move through the same space in totally different ways, it ends up being Capcom’s sharpest idea in years.
My first steps into Rhodes Hill Chronic Care Center felt like déjà vu in the best possible way. Within five minutes I’d hit a locked door that only opened with an ornate key, stared at a dead fusebox blocking a metal shutter, and walked into a grand reception hall with a sweeping staircase that might as well have had “WELCOME BACK, RESIDENT EVIL NERD” carved into the floor.
The layout is pure classic Resi – a central hub with branching east and west wings, each feeding into side rooms, shortcuts, and locked doors you’ll be obsessively marking in your brain. But the important thing is how it flows. After about three hours with Grace, my internal map of Rhodes Hill felt as solid as my memory of the RPD, which is wild considering I’ve been wandering that police station in various forms for decades.
Capcom layers just enough puzzle gating to keep you thinking without grinding the pace to a halt. You’ll pick up color-coded keycards, juggle power reroutes, and, yes, hunt down three special “quartz cubes” from separate wings to unlock the final exit. That last one is absolutely the medallion statue puzzle from Resident Evil 2 in a different coat of paint, and I rolled my eyes when I realized it. The thing is, solving it inside this new context still felt good. Familiar, sure, but not lazy.
What really sells Rhodes Hill is how it keeps opening up on itself. An elevator here, a side corridor there, a one-way drop that’s a huge risk until you find the ladder back up. It’s more sprawling than the Baker house or Castle Dimitrescu, but it never tips over into confusion. I rarely opened the map to find where to go next; I opened it to check if I dared cut through “Flick’s hallway” or if I’d rather take the safer, longer route.
That’s the magic trick: it’s structured like classic survival horror, but it’s tuned around modern stealth and AI. The result is a place you don’t just navigate – you negotiate with.
Grace’s section of Requiem is where the game feels the boldest. She’s not a cop, not a soldier, and she definitely isn’t built for the kind of suplex-heavy nonsense Leon gets up to later. In first-person, with a jittery flashlight and a revolver that might as well fire IOUs, Rhodes Hill becomes a slow, suffocating panic attack.
The game gives you the option to use classic ink ribbons to save, and I absolutely turned that on. Limiting my saves meant every decision in the hospital carried weight. Do I risk sneaking through the ward with the noise-sensitive patient to grab a healing item, or do I hoof it back to a safe room and bank the progress I’ve got? On one run I pushed my luck, triggered a chase, and ended up limping into a save room with literally one pistol round and a sliver of health. I put the controller down and just exhaled.
Requiem’s stealth isn’t some full-on immersive sim system, but it’s way more than “crouch to be quieter.” Zombies have patrol routines, sound matters, and line of sight actually feels like a mechanic instead of a suggestion. Peeking through cracked doors to watch a corridor, timing your move based on a zombie’s distracted animation – that’s the core loop here, not headshotting everything on sight.
The Blister Heads are the nastiest spin on classic zombies the series has had in a while. If you leave regular infected downed but not properly dealt with, they can get back up later in a faster, more violent form, complete with disgusting cracked skin and lurching, unpredictable rushes. The first time I carelessly left a corpse in a main hallway and found it evolved on my return, it basically rewrote how I played. Suddenly I wasn’t just thinking about surviving the next room – I was wondering what my choices would do to the building three hours from now.
Crafting with infected blood – using vials harvested from enemies to cook up improvised tools – adds another smart layer. Turning a precious resource into a noise-distracting blood vial or a single powerful round always felt like an argument with myself. There are so few enemies in Rhodes Hill compared to most action games that every one you decide to kill for materials genuinely matters.
After about six hours as Grace, I realized how rare it was that I’d actually cleared an area of threats. Most of the time I was learning to live around them, memorizing who was where and which rooms were instant death if I slipped up. It’s the closest Resident Evil has felt to pure survival horror in ages – not because the game is impossibly hard (it isn’t, on normal difficulty), but because it keeps pushing you to avoid fights rather than win them.
One of Requiem’s smartest tricks is surprisingly simple: give the zombies personalities. Not in the “they talk” sense, but in the way they move through the space.
There’s a big chef zombie in the kitchen who shuffles between the pantry and the stove, clattering pots as he goes. For nearly an hour I refused to go through his domain, taking the long way around the east wing just to avoid the sinking feeling of seeing his silhouette in the freezer door window. When I finally worked up the courage to sneak in behind him, I timed my move to the rhythm of his ladle clanks like I was playing some horrible horror rhythm game.
Then there’s the guy I started calling “Flick.” All he does is flick a hallway light on and off, over and over, making the corridor pulse with illumination. You can technically sprint past him, but I found myself stopping at the doorway, waiting for the lights to go dark so his vision cone shrank in my head, then sliding along the opposite wall. By hour five, I didn’t need the map; “Flick’s hall” was a landmark all by itself.
A blood-soaked maid zombies her way from room to room, stopping to scrub at impossible stains, and an off-key singer warbles from a balcony above the dining hall, her shrill notes occasionally triggering the rage of a sound-sensitive patient lurking below. It’s darkly funny, but it’s also genuinely unnerving. You’re not dealing with faceless fodder; you’re sharing a building with twisted echoes of who these people used to be.
And then the game throws proper stalkers on top. The first time “The Girl” appears – an impossibly tall, bug-eyed figure with limbs that seem a few joints too long – Rhodes Hill stops being an eerie puzzle box and becomes an outright haunted house. She doesn’t just trudge around like Mr. X; she slips into hidden crawlspaces, disappears from your view, and then pops out of a vent or a hidden service hatch right where you thought you were safe. There was a moment in the west wing where I was lining up a puzzle solution, heard a dull thud in the wall, and realized she was traveling parallel to me behind the plaster. I completely abandoned the puzzle and just hid.
“Chunk,” the second major stalker, is the opposite – a massive, baby-faced mass of flesh that fills entire hallways and moves way faster than something his size should. The tension with Chunk is different because, unlike Nemesis or Mr. X, he’s not truly invincible. You can kill him. With Grace, that idea feels like fantasy; every time I got him stuck behind furniture for a few seconds, I was sprinting to the nearest safe room, not chipping away at his health bar.
What ties all of this together is repetition. You’ll sneak past that chef a dozen times, hear Flick’s light clicking every time you come up the stairs, and feel Chunk at your back on the same stretch of corridor where you calmly walked through ten minutes earlier. Because Rhodes Hill doesn’t flood itself with enemies, Capcom can afford to make almost every threat feel bespoke. It changes the vibe completely: this isn’t a “zombie hospital,” it’s a specific hospital full of these monsters.
After hours of tiptoeing through Rhodes Hill as Grace, Leon’s arrival is like ripping off a weighted vest. The camera pulls back into the familiar over-the-shoulder view, he whips out his pistol with that Leon flourish, and suddenly those corridors you dreaded are begging to be sprinted down.
Your move set expands dramatically: quick-turns, melee follow-ups, a parry axe that can deflect swipes and even some projectiles if your timing’s good. It’s not quite Resident Evil 4 chaos, but it’s close enough that my first proper combat encounter as Leon felt like I’d switched discs to a different game entirely.
The genius is that Capcom doesn’t build a new level for him. You go back through Rhodes Hill – the same rooms, the same landmarks, often the same enemies you’ve been avoiding for hours. Only this time, you’re the problem. That kitchen chef who owned me earlier? Two shells from the shotgun and a brutal roundhouse later, he was down, and I caught myself actually laughing out loud. Not because it was easy, but because the game had set that moment up so carefully through Grace’s helplessness.
Leon can also crack open previously locked containers and smash through a few fragile walls, effectively “paying off” a bunch of question marks from Grace’s section. I had a running list in my head of cupboards she couldn’t open and suspicious weak spots in the environment. With Leon, I made a messy little revenge tour, cleaning up Blister Heads I’d been dodging and finally tackling Chunk head-on in a fight that felt like the right kind of unfair – brutal, but winnable with smart positioning and ammo discipline.
If I have one gripe, it’s that Leon’s time in Rhodes Hill ends a bit too fast. Just as I was really settling into the idea of turning this meticulously-learned stealth maze into an aggressive combat sandbox, the story yanked him onward. It’s still one of the game’s highlights, and probably the best take on the old “A/B” dual-playthrough idea since the original RE2, but I would have happily spent another hour letting Leon tear through the place.
Rhodes Hill is so strong that the rest of Requiem occasionally struggles to keep up. Once you leave the hospital, the game leans harder into action, with bigger arenas, more explosive set pieces, and a steady drip of upgraded weapons for Leon. It’s a fun ride – think somewhere between the tighter horror of Resident Evil 7 and the blockbuster madness of 4’s island section – but it doesn’t quite have the same identity.
The eventual return to Raccoon City is pure fanbait in the way you probably expect. Crumbling streets, familiar signage, a heavily teased look at the old police station. I won’t spoil exactly how far Capcom goes there, but let’s just say if you’ve walked those halls before, you’ll recognize more than a few beats. For me, the emotional punch wasn’t as strong as Rhodes Hill, simply because the hospital was new. I’d seen riffs on the RPD a dozen times by now; this was the first time I’d had to memorize a chronic care ward’s entire layout just to stay alive.
Story-wise, Requiem is… fine. Grace is likable enough, Leon slips back into his weary-hero persona comfortably, and there are a handful of cool lore nods for veterans. But if you’re hoping the narrative will hit as hard as the best moments in RE7 or the more human beats of Village, you might be disappointed. Characters feel more like vehicles for the gameplay ideas than fully fleshed-out people.
The pacing also creeps toward action-heavy in the back half. After the thoughtful, methodical horror of Rhodes Hill, some of the later gauntlets and boss fights feel a little too eager to throw bodies at you. They’re exciting, absolutely, and mechanically solid, but they occasionally flatten the tension instead of twisting it.
On PlayStation 5’s performance mode, Requiem stayed consistently smooth for me. Even in Leon’s busier combat sequences with gore, fire, and multiple enemies, I didn’t notice any major dips or stutters. Load times between deaths and area transitions were pleasantly short – enough that dying to Chunk a few times in a row only bruised my ego, not my patience.
Visually, the hospital is the standout. Harsh fluorescent lighting in the patient wards, sickly greenish hues in the treatment rooms, and genuinely gross little environmental details – mildew on shower curtains, clotted blood in drains, scratched-in notes on walls – all sell the idea that this place was failing long before the virus finished the job. The later Raccoon City environments look good, but Rhodes Hill feels considered.
3D audio does a ton of heavy lifting. Hearing The Girl’s footsteps echo through vents above me, or the chef’s utensils clatter two rooms over, had a very real impact on how I moved. The DualSense haptics are used with some restraint – subtle heart rate rumbles when you’re hiding, punchier feedback on Leon’s heavier guns – and it fits the tone nicely.
Bugs were minimal for me. I had one zombie get briefly stuck in a doorway animation, and a single reload where an audio cue failed to trigger during a cutscene, but nothing that broke progression or undercut a big moment.
Requiem feels like a game made first and foremost for people who’ve been with the series for a long time. Its biggest swings – the stealth-heavy hospital, the dual run through the same space with Grace and Leon, the deliberate nods to the RPD structure – all land hardest if you have that history.
That doesn’t mean newcomers are locked out. Mechanically, Grace’s campaign teaches you what you need to know, and Leon’s sequences are intuitive if you’ve played any modern third-person shooter. But a lot of the winks, callbacks, and even some of the late-game emotional beats assume you already care about Raccoon City and its serial disaster magnet of a police officer.
If you bounced off Resident Evil when it went full action with 5 and 6, Requiem is absolutely worth your time just for Rhodes Hill. If you loved Resident Evil 4 and the RE2 remake and want both ends of that spectrum in one package, this is basically a love letter addressed directly to you.
After rolling credits, what sticks with me about Resident Evil Requiem isn’t any one boss or plot twist. It’s the way Capcom took a familiar template – the RPD-style hub, the dual protagonists, the semi-persistent stalkers – and made it all feel strangely fresh by asking a simple question: what if you had to live with these enemies instead of just mowing them down?
Grace’s stealth-focused trek through Rhodes Hill is some of the best pure survival horror the series has offered in years. Leon’s follow-up romp through the same space is a clever, cathartic spin on the old A/B scenario structure, even if it ends a little too soon. The back half leans more into familiar action and nostalgia, and the story never quite escapes “serviceable,” but the overall experience feels like a confident, fan-savvy evolution rather than a safe remix.
On the series’ 30th anniversary, that feels exactly right. Requiem doesn’t pretend the past didn’t happen; it studies it, steals from it, and then quietly twists it into something that had me hiding in hospital closets one hour and dropkicking zombies down stairwells the next. That’s Resident Evil at its best.
Score: 9/10
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