Resident Evil Requiem Review: Two Completely Different Games in One Box

Resident Evil Requiem is the ninth numbered game in this series and the best-selling release of 2026. It is also the strangest big-budget horror game we have played in years, because it is not really one game. It is two, and they take turns.

For roughly half of it you are Grace Ashcroft, an FBI analyst with almost no combat training, trapped inside a hospital with a handful of bullets and a knife that will break. For the other half you are Leon Kennedy, who has been doing this for nearly thirty years, carries a hatchet with an everlasting flint, and at one point picks up a chainsaw. One of these is the most frightened we have been playing a game in a long time. The other is a party.

Capcom clearly knew what it was doing. Requiem is a deliberate attempt to satisfy the people who want Resident Evil 7 and the people who want Resident Evil 4 at the same time, in one box, without compromising either. It mostly works. The place where it does not is not the quality of either half, but the order they arrive in.

Grace is a new character, and she is the reason this game works. She is sent to look into a run of unexplained deaths among people who survived the Raccoon City outbreak decades earlier, and the investigation goes wrong almost immediately. She is taken by a man called Victor Gideon and wakes up inside a chronic care hospital that has been converted into something considerably worse.

What makes her different from every other lead this series has had is that she is not competent. Resident Evil protagonists are usually already the answer to the problem. Grace is not. She moves slowly, she panics, she is frequently on the edge of falling apart, and the voice performance sells every bit of it without ever tipping into the campiness this series usually leans on. Watching her turn from someone who cannot hold a corridor into someone who will stand and fight is the actual arc of the game, and it is far better written than the series has any right to be at this point.

Her toolkit is deliberately miserable. Two guns, a pistol and a heavy revolver called Requiem, and that is your lot. Knives break. Inventory slots are few. Ammunition is so scarce that finding thirty rounds feels like a plot event. What she does have is a blood collector, which lets her syringe up the pools left behind by dead zombies and combine that blood with scrap for bullets or with a herb for a medkit. It is grim, it is inventive, and it turns every corpse in the building into a resource you have to walk back to.

Grace's section is a locked-door labyrinth in the classic Spencer Mansion tradition, and it is stalked. There is a butcher with a very large knife who hunts you through the corridors, and he is not the only one. The old Mr X feeling is here, except now there are several of them and they appear to be learning. We heard footsteps fade, decided the coast was clear, stepped out of a room and got a knife swung at us from an angle we had already checked.

The zombies are the other reason this half lands. They are not the shuffling, groaning crowd this series has used for decades. They have kept fragments of behaviour. One of them flicks a light switch on and off, over and over, for no reason at all. Another wanders a room muttering to itself, then drops to its knees to eat something that used to be its colleague. It is a small design decision and it is disproportionately effective, because a thing that is almost a person is much worse than a thing that is clearly a monster.

And they come back. Leave a body where it fell and it will get up again later, mutated, tougher, less willing to hold still for a headshot. You can prevent that with a hemolytic injector, which swells a downed zombie until it bursts, but the components for those are the same components you need for bullets and healing. Everything in Grace's half is that trade. There is no free option anywhere in the building.

Leon's half is Resident Evil 4 with the brakes off, and it is genuinely brilliant fun. He arrives as a rescue and immediately starts behaving like a man who has done this too many times to be scared any more. Execution moves, deadpan one-liners after almost every significant kill, and an arsenal that keeps growing. He can pick up a fire axe or a lead pipe that a zombie dropped and throw it across the room, which is as satisfying as it sounds.

The best new idea in the whole game lives here. Leon carries a tracker that pays out credits for kills, and those credits buy ammunition and weapon upgrades. That one system quietly rewrites decades of Resident Evil habit. Previously the smart play was always to kneecap something, kick it over and run past to save ammo. Here, running past is leaving money on the floor. The game wants you to clear the room, and it pays you to do it.

If we have a complaint about this half it is the guns themselves. They are effective, they sound great, and they are completely interchangeable. There is nothing here with the personality of the Red9 or the Broken Butterfly, nothing anyone is going to argue about online in five years. You will pick a shotgun because it is the shotgun, not because it is your shotgun. That is a small thing, and it is the only genuinely flat note in a section that otherwise does not miss.

Requiem's fear is all in the first half. Once the story leaves the hospital and moves out into what is left of Raccoon City, the balance tips hard towards Leon, and there is a stretch near the end of roughly five hours where you barely see Grace at all. Both halves are good. That is not the issue. The issue is that the game front-loads everything that makes it frightening and back-loads everything that makes it fun, so instead of a rhythm you get two long blocks.

There is a late tiptoe sequence through a facility full of returning monsters that reminds you exactly what the game gave up, and it is one of the best things in it. It also arrives close enough to the ending that it functions as a farewell rather than a return. Imagine ordering a whiskey and coke and being handed two separate glasses. Both drinks are good. It is not what you asked for.

The difficulty curve compounds this. We played on the standard setting and Requiem is, by some distance, the easiest game this series has made. The final boss in particular goes down fast, and if you have been hoarding your heavy ammunition the way this series has trained you to for three decades, you will finish the game with far more of it than you needed. If you have played a Resident Evil before, start one difficulty above where you normally would.

This is a thirtieth anniversary game that does not behave like one. It would have been easy to build the whole thing out of cameos and callbacks, and Requiem largely refuses. Familiar faces and locations turn up, but they are used because the plot needs them rather than to make you point at the screen. There are real twists about the origins of the Umbrella Corporation and the ambitions of the man who founded it, and they recontextualise things rather than just restating them.

The written notes scattered around are worth reading, which is not always true. Some carry the actual mystery of who Grace is and why she was taken. Others are jokes. We found a doctor's report on one particularly loud zombie that formally diagnosed her with main character syndrome, and it is the funniest thing in a game with a chainsaw in it.

The wobble is in the last act, and we will keep it vague. One antagonist is built up carefully across most of the game, given a genuinely intimidating introduction and a set of abilities the game makes sure you see, and then removed from the story without a fight. It is not framed as a subversion. It just happens, and the air goes out of the room. It is the one moment where Requiem's writing visibly drops a thread it had been holding well.