Resident Evil Requiem pulls you back to Raccoon City with a very clear idea of what kind of nightmare it wants you to live through. You aren’t just revisiting a ruined city from old cutscenes or files. You’re walking alongside a new investigator who grew up in the shadow of that disaster, and a veteran agent who has spent decades trying to stop the same horror from spreading again and again.
Instead of choosing one style, Requiem hands you two. Grace’s chapters focus on slow, careful horror. Every bullet, every creak in a hallway, and every closed door matters. Leon’s chapters flip the camera back behind his shoulder and let you push through crowded fights with an arsenal that actually matches his reputation. The campaign cuts between them, so you keep moving from creeping through grim corridors with a flashlight to clearing rooms with headshots and axe finishers.
That structure is the heart of the game. Requiem tries to be the point where thirty years of Resident Evil stories, scares, and experiments collide in one long trip through Raccoon City’s aftermath. Sometimes that means sharp, personal moments with Grace as she digs into what the city did to her family. Sometimes it means loud, bloody payback as Leon faces people and creatures tied to mistakes he has been carrying since his rookie days.
You feel that mix as soon as you start playing. Requiem often comes very close to the kind of game long-time fans pictured when Capcom first teased a return to Raccoon City for this anniversary era. Sometimes it relies on old lore or shifts focus between its two leads in ways that will land differently depending on how much history you bring in with you.
Grace And Leon Carry Very Different Sides Of The Same Nightmare
Resident Evil Requiem splits its story between two timelines that keep crossing the same wound. Grace Ashcroft is an FBI analyst sent to look into a string of strange deaths tied to survivors of Raccoon City. Leon S. Kennedy is already deep into the hunt, following his own trail of bodies and cover-ups back toward the same history. You do not pick one path at the start. The campaign moves you between them as one long case.
Grace Picks Through What Raccoon City Left Behind
Grace gives you the closest thing this series has had to a true outsider in a while. She grew up with second-hand trauma instead of first-hand memories, and you feel that in how people talk around her and how much she has to piece together herself. Early on you are working crime scenes, chasing names, and walking into places that older games only hinted at. The story does a good job of tying her investigation to Raccoon City without turning it into a trivia tour.
Leon Is Stuck Cleaning Up The Same Old Mess
Leon’s side is more about living with things that already happened. He is older, worn down, and very aware that he has watched similar outbreaks spiral more than once. The one-liners are still there, but the delivery has more edge to it. When he meets Grace, his role shifts from lone clean-up to someone who has to explain this world to a person who did not sign up for it. Their conversations between missions give you a break from monsters and let both characters react to what they have seen.
Requiem spends a lot of time circling back to the destruction of Raccoon City and the companies behind it. Files, locations, and returning faces all point back to that one disaster. Some of those callbacks work well, especially when they push Leon to confront choices that past games mostly left in the background. Others are there mainly to remind you of older bosses or twists, and those moments can feel more like a checklist than a new look at the lore.
The Split Story Comes With Trade-Offs
The biggest trade-off in this setup is how much screen time each lead gets. Grace carries the early hours with a strong hook and a clear emotional arc, but the back half tilts harder toward Leon as the bigger Umbrella plot comes into focus. That shift makes sense for a long-time series hero, yet it also means Grace’s personal story does not quite get the same payoff the opening hours set up. If you are coming in for both characters equally, you get a great start for her and a stronger finish for him, rather than a perfectly even split.
Grace’s Horror Chapters Bring Back That Classic Resident Evil Panic
Grace’s side of Resident Evil Requiem is where you get that tight, uncomfortable survival horror feeling again. You move through compact wings of hotels, clinics, and back corridors with a flashlight out, never quite sure what is waiting around the next corner. Ammo is low, health items are limited, and your first instinct is usually to listen at a door instead of kicking it open. When the game shifts you back to Grace after a stretch as Leon, you immediately feel the difference in how careful you need to be.
Stealth Keeps You Careful Without Feeling Cheap
Early on, you are mostly trying to stay out of sight. You watch patrol routes, duck behind furniture, and use small pockets of light or shadow to slip past things that will tear you apart if you get careless. Stealth has enough give that a mistake does not instantly ruin a sweep through a floor. If you get spotted, you usually have a chance to sprint, slam a door behind you, and regroup in a safer room. That push and pull keeps you on edge without turning every encounter into pure trial and error.
Blood Injector Choices Keep Every Body Dangerous
As you work deeper into each location, Grace’s toolset grows. You pick up a basic handgun and, later, rare weapons that can save you when a plan goes wrong, but bullets never feel cheap. The blood injector system is where the game really starts asking you to make choices. You can harvest blood to craft more ammo or create injections that stop corpses from twisting into something worse. Both options help, but using either means getting closer to bodies you would rather avoid, and every time you step toward one you feel that risk.
Enemy behaviour ties all of this together. Hotel staff keep tidying or flicking switches, patients react badly to loud noise, and other infected still clutch tools from their old jobs. You learn to read those habits and route around them, and on higher difficulties that knowledge matters more than any single weapon Grace carries.
Leon’s Fights Let You Hit Back Hard
When the story hands control back to Leon, Resident Evil Requiem suddenly lets you stop tiptoeing and start pushing forward. Camera pulled back over his shoulder, you move through streets and corridors that you once crept through as Grace, only now you have the gear and training to actually clear them out. The first time you walk into one of her old panic rooms with Leon’s full loadout, you instantly understand how different his half of the game is.
Combat Loops Around Kicks, Shots, And Axe Swings
Gunplay has a clear flow. You pop a zombie in the leg to drop it, close the gap with a kick, then swing the axe to finish the job. If another enemy rushes you from the side, you swap to the shotgun on the d-pad in a blink and send it flying into a wall. Fights usually turn into little chains like that, where you are knocking enemies down stairs, slamming them into railings, and trying to keep space open so you are not swarmed. The feedback on every hit makes each short exchange simple to follow.
As Leon’s arsenal grows, those little chains get more playful. You start an encounter with pistol shots at range, switch to the rifle to pick off a threat on a balcony, then drop back to the shotgun when a group gets too close. One early moment has you blow a chainsaw carrier’s legs out, grab their weapon off the floor, and then watch another zombie pick it up after you bury it in their back. Fights like that show how much room there is to improvise once you are comfortable with his tools.
Weapons, Briefcases, And Staying In Control
Even outside of the combat itself, Leon’s side sells his veteran status. His briefcases give you more room to arrange gear, closer to an old RE4-style grid, so you carefully sort which guns, healing items, and throwables you want ready for the next big encounter. Enemies still hit hard and can dogpile you if you get sloppy, but Requiem gives Leon enough answers that you rarely feel helpless. After an hour with him, walking back into a Grace chapter brings that extra jolt of nerves right away, because you know you cannot solve every problem with a well-placed kick and an axe swing anymore.
Raccoon City Looks Broken And Sounds Dangerous
Resident Evil Requiem puts you in streets and interiors that always look one step away from collapse. Raccoon City’s hotels, clinics, alleys, and back rooms are lit with harsh beams and broken bulbs. Glowing signs bounce off puddles and wet pavement. Character models hold up in close shots, and faces carry small twitches and eye movements that sell Grace’s fear and Leon’s tired focus when the camera gets close.
Lighting does a lot of the work. You get long, dark corridors with a single flickering bulb, stairwells where a door at the top is the only safe-looking patch, and rooms where the glow from equipment or monitors is the only thing keeping a shape in view. When a maid keeps dragging a cloth across the same mirror, or a worker keeps stabbing at a light switch, you see that loop from across the room before you hear anything. That visual cue is often your first warning.
Sound design pushes that atmosphere even further. Footsteps change as you move from tile to carpet to concrete. Distant growls and scraping echo through larger areas in ways that make you stop and listen before you round a corner. Gunshots hit with a heavy crack, and the wet crunch when a head finally gives in is nasty enough that you do not forget it. Some of the best stretches are quiet ones with Grace, where the game lets you hear every small shuffle in the next room.
Performance backs all of this up cleanly on PlayStation 5. Loads between areas are short, and firefights keep their frame rate even when particle effects start filling the screen. You can pick a mode that favours sharper reflections or one that smooths out motion for quicker aiming, and both hold steady during busy scenes.
Resident Evil Requiem Shows How Far This Series Has Come in 30 Years
Resident Evil Requiem is the first game in a long time that really treats Raccoon City as more than a backdrop. You are dropped between Grace and Leon, and the whole campaign is about picking through the wreckage of what happened there and what it did to the people who survived. When the story and structure line up, it gives you a strong mix of slow, horrible discovery with Grace and hard payback with Leon, all wrapped around one long walk through old Umbrella secrets.
Grace’s Side Feels Like The Old Panic Done Right
Grace’s chapters are the side you will probably remember most clearly. Her routes bring back that knot-in-your-stomach feeling from older games, where a single room can chew through your bullets and nerves in one go. The injector system and careful inventory juggling give you constant choices about how bold you want to be, and the way enemies keep traces of their old routines makes every floor feel like it belonged to someone before you got there. Leon then comes in and lets you push back, with combat that rewards quick swaps, smart positioning, and a bit of show-off play once you are comfortable with his kit.
The trade-off is that Requiem doesn’t always give both sides of that pairing the same space. The back stretch shifts harder toward Leon and toward long-running Umbrella lore, and that swing can leave Grace’s personal arc feeling less complete than her introduction suggests. Some late story reveals also depend a lot on how much you already care about older entries, and a few callbacks are closer to “recognize this?” moments than real twists.
Even with those caveats, Requiem is the kind of horror game you can stick with if you like counting bullets and second-guessing every hallway. Grace gives you the slow, nervous side of that experience. Leon gives you the payback, with fights that finally let you hit back hard. Together they finally treat Raccoon City as more than a bit of background text. For a series this old, it is surprising how much this one still has to say, and if you care about where Resident Evil has ended up after three decades, this is an easy one to put near the top of your list.
Resident Evil Requiem
Summary
Resident Evil Requiem pulls you back to Raccoon City with two strong routes. Grace’s chapters bring slower, nervous survival horror, while Leon’s side sticks to harder-hitting combat. You sneak through hotels and clinics with a flashlight, juggling blood injector choices and limited ammo. Then you swap to over-the-shoulder fights where kicks, axe swings, and quick weapon swaps clear the room. The story spends a lot of time on old Umbrella lore and gives Leon more of the focus by the end. If you are already into Resident Evil, this stands up as one of the strongest modern games in the series.
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