After three tense hours with a near-final build of Resident Evil Requiem, I walked away convinced Capcom has cracked a dual-protagonist formula that feels both fresh and faithful. My biggest worry—that alternating between newcomer Grace Ashcroft and series icon Leon S. Kennedy would create tonal whiplash—vanished as the game stitched survival-horror dread to high-impact action with surgical confidence.
A Confident Split Between Fear and Fury
Requiem borrows the best ideas from the series’ modern era: the slow-burn tension of the Resident Evil 2 remake and the kinetic aggression of the Resident Evil 4 remake. Instead of diluting either, Capcom uses the split to sharpen both. Grace’s sections are methodical and nerve-fraying, built around scarcity, stealth, and puzzle logic; Leon’s are explosive, demanding crowd control, timing, and bold positioning.
The contrast makes each return to a character feel like a palate cleanser. You exhale after Leon’s close-quarters brawls, then hold your breath as Grace edges past horrors that will delete her health bar in seconds if you slip.
Grace Ashcroft Rewards Stealth and Smarts
Grace plays like a love letter to classic survival horror. In a labyrinthine medical facility—equal parts operating theater and abattoir—every step feels costly. Inventory space forces hard choices. Light and sound become weapons and liabilities. The environment tells stories with toppled gurneys, congealed blood, and break room snapshots that hint at who these people were before the outbreak.
She isn’t helpless. Grace can craft limited ammo, and her signature tool—a device that taps infected blood to synthesize single-use injectors—creates instant-kill opportunities if you earn them. That system pushes you to study patrols, break lines of sight, and commit. I burned a corrosive on a lock, slithered through a service corridor, and used an injector to quietly erase a patrol that had stonewalled me for 20 minutes. It felt earned, not scripted.
Puzzles are plentiful and grounded: photo clues, multi-step lockboxes, keycards that loop you back to master doors, and gear upgrades that expand health and inventory. There’s no traveling merchant this time; instead, found coins fund incremental boosts—think utility, not power fantasy—which keeps Grace vulnerable by design.
Leon Kennedy Is Pure Forward Momentum in Combat
Leon, older but utterly un-slowed, is the franchise’s action thesis made flesh. He opens by parrying a charging chainsaw with a hatchet, then dismantles a mob with ballistic confidence. His toolkit emphasizes space management—shotgun staggers, decisive finishers—and split-second blocks that turn panic into advantage. A magnum appears sparingly, and when it roars, heads simply stop being a problem.
A standout encounter pits Leon against a grotesque, rampaging brute in a tight room of destructible cover. It’s a controlled demolition derby that forces movement and smart use of the environment. Crucially, when I revisited an area previously explored as Grace, the world remembered: safes I’d opened stayed empty; corpses lay where they fell; new chests only Leon could handle cracked open. That persistence evokes Resident Evil 2’s intersecting campaigns while feeling more seamless.
Enemies That Hear, See, and Adapt to Your Actions
Requiem’s infected skew closer to Raccoon City’s zombies than RE4’s calculating Ganados, but they’re not brainless. They key off noise and light, and a few specials complicate the chessboard. One screecher locks you in place with an ear-splitting howl, essentially painting you for the horde; another turns hyper-alert if you flip a switch. The best flavor touch: low, haunted muttering that hints at lives interrupted mid-routine—creepy and oddly humanizing.
Big bodies patrol defined zones rather than stalking you across the map. That restraint is smart; it transforms them into movable puzzle pieces. I tried to ghost past a butcher-sized monster while sliding an island counter for a shortcut—metal scraped, the thing snapped to alert, and I barely squeezed through a doorframe it couldn’t fit. Victory through inches, not firepower.
Design That Honors the Series’ DNA and Legacy
Capcom’s RE Engine continues to shine, especially in micro-detail: viscera that looks wet without gaudiness, particle-rich destruction that aids readability, and positional audio that telegraphs threats without overexposing them. The loop—explore, unlock, backtrack with purpose—remains intact, but modernized by persistent states between protagonists and restrained, coherent upgrade paths.
This is also a tonal course correction from the maximalism that once threatened the brand’s identity. Where Resident Evil 6 sprawled, Requiem focuses. It’s confident enough to let Grace be scared and clever, and to let Leon be ruthless and efficient, without smashing the two into mush.
Why Requiem Could Be the Next Benchmark for Survival Horror
Resident Evil remains Capcom’s crown jewel, with the company reporting franchise shipments north of 150 million units in recent financial statements. Requiem looks positioned to extend that momentum by unifying the two pillars that revitalized the series over the past five years. If the final act sticks the landing and the campaign balance holds, this could be the template for how legacy horror can evolve without losing its pulse.
Three hours wasn’t enough. I’m eager to see how Grace and Leon’s paths entangle, which systems scale across late-game threats, and whether the game keeps finding new ways to make every corridor feel like a decision. So far, Requiem plays like a studio at the height of its powers—measured, menacing, and impossible to put down.
