A Requiem for the Evil Residents
Spoiler warning: this post discusses the game's story and some of its late content in considerable detail. If you haven't played it yet and intend to, bookmark this and come back!
Let's talk about Resident Evil Requiem!
I'll be upfront: I loved it! Not without grievances here and there, and not without a specific complaint that I will get to and that will consume the second half of this post entirely. But yes, I loved it. Capcom set themselves an almost obnoxious task for the series' 30th anniversary: take thirty years of survival horror, two wildly different protagonists, and somehow make it all work and feel like one coherent, scary, emotional game. Miraculously, they pulled it off. Mostly!
Grace Ashcroft is our newcomer, she's an FBI analyst thrown into a nightmare she is in absolutely no way equipped to handle, and the game makes absolutely sure you feel that at all times. She is terrified (her animations are amazing and her VAs even more so), her inventory is tiny, her ammo is scarce, and every shot fired is its own small crisis because you are never quite sure you can afford it. The Care Center she spends most of her time in is a masterclass in slow, creeping dread much like Spencer Mansion from the OG game. Grace has no combat training, she has her wits, occasionally Leon's overpowered Requiem handgun that rips almost everything you point it at but has very limited ammo, and the game makes every single encounter feel like it might genuinely be her last.
Then you switch to the man, the legend, Leon Kennedy, and the tonal whiplash is so complete it's almost comedic. Leon does not have Grace's problems, he has an axe that can parry almost everything, a huge inventory and lots of weapons. His sections are not scary in the slightest, but that's fine cause they are, enormously, unashamedly, pull-the-trigger-and-feel-cool fun, and the game earns every second of them because it earns Grace's terror first.
Both of them are also performed brilliantly! The English cast is excellent across the board, and I want to specifically call out the Italian dub (I'm italian, yeah, pizza reveal) as well, because it doesn't always get acknowledged and it absolutely deserves to be.
Now, however...
The retcons.
I need you to understand that what follows comes entirely from love, because I can only be this specifically annoyed at something I genuinely care about.
Raccoon City, as established since Resident Evil 3, was gone. Not damaged. Gone. The missile that ended the outbreak was designed to eradicate all biological life in the area, including horrors such as Birkin's last mutated form and NEMESIS and the city ceased to exist as anything other than a crater, as shown in the movies (The ones Capcom made, we don't talk about the other movies). Requiem takes you back to Raccoon City. Which is still standing, with infected still wandering around inside it. I understand this is a creative decision, I understand the nostalgia. However I do not understand how anyone looked at the words total annihilation and decided they meant a bit worse for wear.
And then there is Spencer. Oswell E. Spencer, founder of Umbrella, architect of a eugenics program designed to forcibly evolve humanity, the man personally responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, who kidnapped and experimented and brainwashed children and who goes to his grave in Resident Evil 5 (experimenting on poor innocent people while on the run) still fully committed to his god complex, madly ranting about it. Requiem gives him... a redemption arc. The game would like you to consider that he was perhaps misguided. That he was just senile. That there was regret in there somewhere underneath everything.
Oh, yeah, and the new evil organization (The Connections) was actually behind everything since forever!
Yeah...
All of that said: Resident Evil Requiem is a good game. It has flaws, it has pacing issues, it has retcons BUT it is scary, it is fun and it is occasionally emotional in ways I did not see coming. I will absolutely be playing whatever comes next.
Capcom, please do not make me regret saying that! And treat poor Claire and Jill better, will you?