It’s a blindfold kickback type of a game called the Raccoon City shuffle.
Mild spoilers follow for this year’s Resident Evil Requiem.
There’s a real disconnect at the heart of Resident Evil Requiem, but it isn’t immediately obvious. It’s a game that’s really quite good right up until it isn’t.
It’s a relatively subtle issue compared to some of the other faults you can lay at RE9’s door, but it’s bothered me for a few months now. It’s another example of one of the things I’ve come to appreciate about Resident Evil: when this franchise screws up, it does not do so quietly or in predictable ways.
Other series have misfires for the usual reasons: janky controls, insufficient testing, rushed to market, over budget, C-suite interference, no actual writer, a creative director who visibly lives on a diet of Red Bull and bong water, etc.
A flawed Resident Evil game, conversely, is way out on the ragged edge. It has screwed up in ways that other game developers could not dream were possible. Only Blizzard, before its acquisition by Xbox, may have equaled Capcom’s facility for being able to make new mistakes.
2012’s Resident Evil 6, for example, is often cited as the worst game in the mainline series. It’s hard to argue with that, but it’s more complicated than the game simply being bad. You can write, and I have written, essays on the specific beautiful disaster that is RE6.
To oversimplify: RE6’s biggest issue is that it couples a fun albeit poorly-explained combat system with scenario design that never lets you explore that system. If RE6 was “just” a game about Helena Harper, the Breakdancer With A Shotgun, it would be remembered more fondly. Instead, it stops every 10 minutes to put you through yet another ill-conceived gimmick level.
Requiem has a different problem: it’s a deliberate prisoner of the series’ own success.
I can understand why someone might enjoy Requiem more than I did. Its highs are very high, particularly in its first half, and one particular action sequence is arguably a top-10 moment for this entire hardware generation. When Capcom is firing on all cylinders, it’s one of the greatest game developers in the world, and parts of Requiem are a showcase of the company at its best.
There are also parts of Requiem that descend into self-referential hell, most of which are in its last third, and that’s when my interest in it cratered.
I am, by any measure, an enormous fan of this series; I feel no need to establish my bona fides for new readers, but I can assure you that they are significant and personally embarrassing. I am, in theory, exactly the audience that Capcom was aiming for. Even so, RE9 left me, more than anything else, annoyed.
This is because of the distinct point in its back half when it suddenly abandons most of its narrative momentum in favor of being fat-packed with franchise references. RE9 ceases to be its own story and turns into an interactive museum, a callback Ouroboros. The marketing department broke into the writers’ room with knives in their teeth and hilarity ensued.
RE9’s descent begins when you revisit the police department from Resident Evil 2, and to its credit, it does just about earn that scene’s impact. Leon Kennedy’s story arc in RE’s remake era has been broadly about the gap between who he is, who he thinks he is, and who he’d prefer to be.
His return to the RPD underscores that theme by illustrating the degree to which Leon only remembers it as the site of his foundational failures. On entry, he exclusively remembers people who he failed to save. The fact that they are also people that he couldn’t have saved, who were doomed before Leon got there, doesn’t figure into his thoughts. That much is fine. Nostalgia is a tool.
Then RE9 screws up by doubling down, in ways that are reminiscent of the later Silent Hill games. It builds the back half of the game off of cheap nostalgia and fan appeal, with a parade of old monsters, villains, and characters, some of whom have been dead for decades in-universe. It adds little and means nothing; it’s cheap heat for the fans and little more. Worse, it relies upon your knowledge of obscure corners of the games’ storyline, such as one of the DLC missions for RE5. It’s a level of continuity porn that’s usually reserved for Western comics.
That contributes to my impression, after rolling credits, that RE9 began as two wholly separate projects that were stitched together with spit and bailing wire. It exists because Capcom wanted to release a mainline game for RE’s 30th anniversary, and as such, it decided RE9 had to be a celebration of the series. Taken individually, neither of the two separate games in RE9 are terrible, but they end up as something less than the sum of their parts.
You can point to a couple of other issues with Requiem that drag down the whole. The “best” may be how its primary antagonists visibly do not know what in the hell they’re doing. This does not feel like a deliberate creative choice. It feels like I’m somehow getting outfoxed at every turn by an undead Mr. Bean.
For my money, however, RE9’s peculiar sense of self-celebration is what brings the entire thing down. It’s got a couple of good levels and solid fights, and Grace’s opening section goes a long way towards making zombies genuinely scary. There’s still a lot of juice in RE’s lemon.
It’s simply laboring under a problem that’s usually exclusive to bigger franchises: someone in a position of importance demanded that Resident Evil Requiem, before it was anything else, had to be focused on the nostalgia dollar. When it goes in that direction, it stops moving forward, and that’s when it spoils.
That, in retrospect, makes it an oddly well-suited game for 2026. We currently live in an age of the reheated, and RE9 is a sequel about being a sequel. It digs up the past to give us what we already had. At its end, that’s my greatest disappointment, and it’s one that only a maniac fan of the series could have.
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