“Requiem for the dead. Nightmare for the living.” Thus began Resident Evil’s 30-year anniversary celebrations, where the ninth mainline entry was unveiled at the 2025 Game Awards: Resident Evil Requiem.

In Requiem, you play as meek and introverted Grace Ashcroft, an FBI analyst whose nature is antithetical to fan-favourite Leon S. Kennedy, who by this point is rightfully jaded and quite literally sick. The two join alliances upon finding themselves at the heart of the outbreak of a mysterious disease known as “Raccoon City Syndrome”, one that Leon is infected with after surviving Raccoon City in RE2 (1997). The disease, a mutated and dormant strain of the T-virus, is in the blood of every Raccoon City survivor. And Leon is running out of time to find a cure.

A heavy weight was attached to the air of anticipation surrounding Requiem’s announcement—on par with anything Resident Evil related—because of its marketing as a swansong for a saga with an infinite number of loose ends and dropped storylines. Plot points such as the founding of counter-bioterrorism agency, Blue Umbrella, were relevant to one entry before being dropped without any elaboration.

Resident Evil saw massive success with the zombie outbreak stories of RE2 and RE3 (1998), with another pique in the franchise’s popularity following their acclaimed remakes, released in 2019 and 2020, respectively. 

RE2 introduced players to Leon Kennedy, a first-day rookie officer working at the Raccoon Police Department (RPD), and Claire Redfield, sister to one of RE1’s protagonists, Chris Redfield, who arrives at Raccoon City to search for her brother. 

RE3 brings back another RE1 protagonist, Jill Valentine, and focuses on her escape from the Raccoon City outbreak as she is persistently stalked by a bioweapon, Nemesis. Both games take place at the same time, and their intertwining narratives give a deeper life to the city of Raccoon City.

So, when Requiem teased a final visit to the ruins of Raccoon City following its decimation in RE3, expectations were insanely high. Theories of surprise cameos popped up all over Twitter, YouTube and Reddit as longtime fans teemed with excitement. 

Now, a month after its release and 35 of my own hours put into this game, I’ve concluded Requiem to be two things: an awfully, terribly, disastrously written game and a superb back-to-basics formula filled to the brim with fan service (for better or worse).

In terms of its gameplay, Requiem delivers a fantastic gorefest. The game frequently switches between the two protagonists. Grace’s sections take a stealth and survival focus, with a limited inventory and saves that mirror Grace’s lack of experience. Meanwhile, Leon’s segments are reminiscent of the action-horror angle found in RE4 (2023) and RE6 (2012). The characters and their gameplay directly juxtapose each other, and shine in their own ways. Grace’s scaredy-cat nature strengthens the tension of every dark room you enter, specifically when encountering stalker enemies that relentlessly hunt you down in a similar fashion to Mr. X and Lady Dimitrescu; meanwhile, nothing can reach the high you feel as Leon, delivering fatal blows to the skulls of zombies that explode in squelchy, moist pops of red mist.

One of the most notable stalkers, the Girl (previously dubbed as the Hag or Big Mama by fans), is a ten-foot-tall monstrous woman with an insatiable hunger for flesh and claws for feet. She ferally hunts Grace down using her heightened sense of hearing, and the only way to get her to stay away is by using light sources that burn her vampiric skin. The unique roster of enemies, each with their own personalities, is one of the highlights of Requiem. Zombies maintain a primal sense of self and are thus trapped in routines they were accustomed to as humans. 

Infected maids scrub mirrors until glass shards get wedged in their hands, and opera singers screech out haunting melodies as their bloodied jaws hang off their upper skulls. One of the zombies during the Rhodes Hill section at the start of the game says, “I’m sorry” after you incapacitate it when it lunges at you. It’s a brilliant way of giving new life to far too familiar enemy archetypes—players feel hesitant to kill any enemy that is aware of their actions, despite not being in control of their body.

When you’re thrown into the shoes of Grace, you really see where the survival horror shines. She stumbles, falls, screams, cries—she’s terrified and confused. It’s recommended to play Grace with the first-person perspective option, and it’s honestly the only way you should play as her. Her sections are filled with jump scares and eerie moments that lack the same scare factor when experienced in third-person.

Leon’s sections, in contrast, up the ante in combat and are a total power fantasy. An expanded parry system with new finisher executions and melee moves presents Requiem to have some of the most fun combat we’ve experienced in the series. There are moments at the end of the game where Leon’s disease has mutated so severely that he will have coughing bouts that prevent players from using their weapons. It’s nothing more than a mere annoyance when you replay these sections, but stumbling across a room full of zombies and being unable to do anything aside from coughing heavily is a great mechanic to derive tension.

But as for the story… it’s very bad. Despite being titled Requiem, there isn’t an epic sendoff of anything, just more of the same re-treaded story beats found in previous entries. Charismatic villains are unceremoniously killed off in cutscenes with no option to fight them, and high stakes are conveniently solved moments before the final boss fight. For a game celebrating the franchise’s 30^th anniversary, it strangely fixates on Leon’s requiem and his only. The game almost wants players to forget it was not just Leon who survived the traumatic events of Raccoon City, but also Jill Valentine and Claire Redfield. So, where are they? Their absences are without a doubt felt in-game, especially when you reach locations such as the RPD and can’t help but feel as if someone is amiss.

You leave RE9 with far more questions than answers because of its contrived and disappointingly rushed writing. Character motivations make no sense, and the game’s runtime is so short that the side characters and antagonists are never given room to develop. There’s really nothing good I can say about the plot, which is a massive shame as Angela Sant’Albano (Grace Ashcroft) and Nick Apostiledes (Leon Kennedy) give dedicated performances full of spirit and verve.

The pacing is one of the worst aspects of Requiem; some of the most dull sections drag on for too long, and the best are insultingly short. Leon only really gets to explore the RPD for about 15 minutes before he moves on and spends way too long doing fetch quests. Grace’s fantastic section at the Rhodes Hill Care Centre ends disappointingly early, and her sections afterwards are not as fun or compelling. Narratively, this causes side characters like Emily, a little girl whom Grace finds in the basement of the care centre, to be nothing more than excuses to move the story forward rather than characters with the potential of being developed. 

Once completing the game, there is a sorta-kinda new game plus option. You keep the credits you’ve earned as Leon in previous playthroughs, but you must repurchase every single weapon and upgrade each time you start a new game.  Additionally, your arsenal is noticeably smaller than in previous games; Grace has 3 guns you can unlock, compared to Ethan Winters’s 12 weapons in RE7. Finishing the game feels less rewarding because of this. There’s also a non-skippable walking simulator flashback, in which you play as a little girl in the Raccoon City orphanage, which is unbelievably boring and monotonous. It is small frustrations and baffling design choices like these that make replaying the game not as fun as it could have potentially been.

Requiem feels unsure of what it wants to be. It’s simultaneously a Call of Duty shoot ‘em up action horror, but also an Alien Isolation-esque stealth simulator. It’s two games in one, and as a result, it falls short as players are left with a game with some incredibly fantastic ideas that aren’t explored in any depth at all, with a jarring pace that almost feels deliberate. 

As a longtime fan of the series, I do acknowledge these critiques come across as nitpicks, which is why it’s difficult to succinctly pose my thoughts on Requiem. It is one of the most exhilarating titles in the contemporary survival horror genre thus far, but I also feel it could have used a couple extra months in the oven before releasing. I catch myself playing in wide-grinned awe, but I am always wanting a little bit more after each playthrough.