We’ve been getting drip-fed Resident Evil Requiem information for a few months now, culminating in numerous Leon-centric fan theories, some absolutely terrifying hands-on sessions, and a better look into our new protagonist, Grace Ashcroft. The latest crumb being a new story trailer shown at TGS over the weekend.
Like most of the content that’s come out, this trailer looks suitably terrifying. As Grace and Alyssa search what looks to be yet another Spencer Mansion, they’re plagued by unholy beasts and a crusty creep in a raincoat—typical Resident Evil shenanigans. All of which is enough to send me into a bout of anxious excitement, as I picture the mental toll some of these scares are going to have on my fragile psyche.
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But while I, and anyone else with a working amygdala, can see how terrifying Requiem is going to be, it turns out that the scares are kind of lost on the dev team. “We’ve made so many of these that we can’t tell anymore until someone else plays it,” director Koshi Nakanishi says (via IGN). “There was actually a bit of a worry internally before we showed the Resident Evil Requiem hands-off at SGF and the first hands-on at Gamescom, was this actually scary? Because we don’t even know anymore.
“We don’t know if something’s scary. So we keep adding on stuff, and at one point we were like, what if [Grace] gets a big gash in her leg, or her leg gets cut off, because that thing attacks her, but we talked ourselves down a little bit.”
I like to think that I’ve built up a little resistance to being scared after playing so many horror games for so long. But I’m not ashamed to admit that any composure I thought I had in the face of horror games flew out the window when I played Requiem at Gamescom.
To be fair, it was 9 am on the last day of the convention, and I’d only had a maximum of 15 hours’ sleep over the last week, so I wasn’t in a great place. But still, what should’ve been a quick 20-minute demo turned into a 40-minute clusterfuck as I managed to freak myself out so much that a couple of PR and devs had to step in and hype me up so I could finish the segment.
In my panicked daze, I also managed to somehow miss the two glass bottles lying on the floor in the first room, which would later be used as the only way to distract the 8-foot monster in my way. Confusing myself, the devs who had been watching me play, and the monster who was expecting to see a bottle fly past its face. All of this is to say that, yeah, Resident Evil Requiem is plenty scary, so Capcom doesn’t need to worry about that.
Despite some clear health risks for my poor heart, I am happy that Requiem is opting for a survival horror approach rather than being more about action. This isn’t just because Nakanishi makes some truly horrifying games—see Resident Evil Biohazard—but it’s also the kind of switch the series needs after Resident Evil Village.
“I think you can broadly classify Resident Evil titles on a scale of how much they’re like Resident Evil 2 or Resident Evil 4,” Nakanishi explains. “Resident Evil 7 was definitely on the 2 side of that, as it returned to survival horror roots and was very acclaimed for that. Resident Evil Village built on that and added more action and gunplay, and brought it towards the RE4 side of that particular scale.
“But if we kept going in that direction there’s almost an inflation effect, where you have to keep adding more and more action to outdo the previous title, and by doing that you ultimately end up where Resident Evil 5 and 6 went, and although they’re still great games, the general consensus is that they pushed Resident Evil so far in the action direction that it was no longer horror.
“I didn’t want to have to do that with Resident Evil’s ninth title, where I just tried to outdo the action in Village and ended up making something I didn’t want to make. Firmly swinging the scale toward the Resident Evil 2 style was our intention—it’s almost an upgrade of that Resident Evil 2 style.”
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