Resident Evil RequiemResident Evil Requiem

The first thing you hear is the rain. Then the static. Then something breathing that is not you.

Thirty years after the Raccoon City incident, the city is a tomb. The ruins were never rebuilt. The quarantine zone was never lifted. The government sealed it, fenced it, classified it, and walked away. But the dead do not stay buried. Not in Raccoon City. Not ever.

Grace Ashcroft is an FBI technical analyst who has never fired a weapon in the field. She is brilliant, methodical, and haunted by a murder she cannot solve — her mother, Alyssa Ashcroft, a journalist killed at the Wrenwood Hotel under circumstances the Bureau refuses to explain. When a string of new murders echoes her mother’s case, Grace is pulled into the investigation. The trail leads exactly where she feared it would: back to Raccoon City. Back to the Wrenwood. Back to the place where everything ended and something else began.

She is not alone. Leon S. Kennedy — older, scarred, carrying the weight of every mission since that first night in 1998 — returns to the city that made him. Leon is investigating the disappearance of a fellow officer, a trail that converges with Grace’s in ways neither expects. But Leon is not the rookie he was. He is a weapon. And the game lets you feel the difference.

Resident Evil Requiem runs on a dual-protagonist structure that splits horror and action with surgical precision. Grace’s sections are pure survival horror — first-person, resource-scarce, suffocating with dread. Every shadow moves. Every locked door hides a decision. She is vulnerable, underequipped, and terrified, and the game transmits that terror directly through your hands via the DualSense controller. Leon’s sections shift to third-person action — the confident, brutal gunplay of a veteran who has seen worse and survived. His half of the game is Resident Evil 4 energy channelled through RE Engine at its absolute peak.

At the heart of the conspiracy stands Victor Gideon — a goggle-wearing figure with ties to Umbrella who has been waiting in the ruins of the city for decades, nurturing a new intelligent viral strain that does not simply reanimate the dead. It evolves them. The infected in Requiem are not shambling corpses. They learn. They adapt. They remember who they were. And that makes them infinitely more terrifying.

The Wrenwood Hotel is the game’s centrepiece — a sprawling, interconnected survival horror location that recalls the Spencer Mansion in scope and the Baker Estate in atmosphere. You will know its hallways by heart and dread every one of them. The game also takes you through the ruins of Raccoon City itself, now overgrown and feral, a graveyard that the forest is slowly reclaiming.

Capcom has called this a celebration of the franchise’s 30th anniversary, and the description is accurate. Requiem threads callbacks to every era of Resident Evil — the slow dread of the originals, the action spectacle of 4, the first-person immersion of 7 and Village — into something that feels both nostalgic and entirely new. By the time the requiem plays, you will understand why they chose that word.