Resident Evil Requiem review: a perfectly formed virtual page turner

Raccoon City survivors are dying in mysterious circumstances. A young FBI agent returns to the hotel where her mother was murdered eight years ago and learns she’s being stalked. A pallid chap wearing too many spectacles at once is turning people undead as he walks past them in the street. And all we can think is: Leon Kennedy’s looking fantastic for his age.

The beleaguered cop and zombie apocalypse survivor is approximately 51 years old during the events of Resident Evil Requiem, Capcom’s superb latest instalment in a decades-long survival horror story, and the fact he’s this vital and stylish in 2026 is miraculous. And yes, we are using him as a metaphor for the franchise. Thanks for picking up on that.

The hairline and the immaculately maintained stubble help his look along, as does the very conspicuous Porsche Cayenne Turbo GT he drives. But like Resi itself, what’s really striking is how well Leon’s weathered the winds of change.

It was his first day on the job in 1998’s Resident Evil 2, you’ll remember, when the Umbrella Corporation’s dangerously HSE-noncompliant experiments wrought a zombie apocalypse across Raccoon City. Ever since then, his has been a life of hardship, survival, loss, and listening to Albert Wesker give massive monologues. Many game heroes would have given up, slipped into obscurity or let their stubble grow unkempt. But not Leon. Somehow, he’s stayed at the beating heart of the games industry, as relevant today in this blend of over-the-shoulder zombie head-popping and first-person police procedural as he ever was.

Co-protagonist Grace Ashcroft is the magnetic opposite to her silky haired co-lead. As Requiem begins, she’s in the very early stages of her career in the FBI, a profession that her incredibly nervous disposition doesn’t seem particularly suited to. But some bad stuff went down with her mum when she was a teenager, and it’s lit a fire in her to seek justice and answers.

The game uses these two opposite archetypes brilliantly, by drawing a line between the old-school survival horror some fans will demand and the more psychological slow-burn stuff that the franchise’s later work has focused on. In other words, Leon’s sections deliver the all-action set pieces and the shooting galleries, while Grace’s sections give you the exploration, cat-and-mouse adversary fights and quiet, mounting tension reminiscent of Resident Evil 7 and Village. It’s a very powerful combo.

The setup options recommend playing Leon’s chapters in third-person and Grace’s in first-person to delineate the old and new gameplay styles even more clearly, although happily it’s up to you which perspective you use for each character. It’s a malleable game in general in this way, with plenty of accessibility options and a fantastically optimised engine for PC. Given that RAM now costs £600 and graphics cards are less affordable than vintage Rolexes, we appreciate a game that takes the workload off our hardware and makes it easy to run at a high framerate while still looking sumptuous.

Its distinctive look is a kind of cinematically heightened photorealism

And sumptuous it is. Requiem is constantly labouring the details in its scenes to maximise a sense of atmosphere, and features a clever marriage of tech and art direction. Its distinctive look is a kind of cinematically heightened photorealism that suits the gameplay brilliantly. Early on you’re introduced to ‘The Girl’, for example, after waking up in an abandoned and (of course) sinister hospital. The set dressing and lighting around here are immaculate, achieving a look that’s momentarily indiscernible from reality. That means when something enters the frame that breaks from the constraints of reality – which of course it does, in the most horrifying fashion imaginable – it’s all the more jarring and dissonant.

In a similar manner to Ethan Winters’ encounters with the Bakers in Resi 7 or Lady Dimitrescu in Village, Grace’s passages of play are high-stakes games of hide and seek that have you scrambling away from an unkillable predator towards a safe environment where they can’t follow you – until they manipulate the environment to make it so that the safe areas are no longer safe. We might be getting old, but at times the tension and dread is almost too much. Not since Alien: Isolation have we felt so terrorised by an assailant.

Like the best Nirvana songs, those moments of excruciating intensity are counterbalanced by downtime. Grace is an FBI agent, after all, and her defining trait is that she’s nervous and not combat-trained, so it makes sense that a lot of her time is spent investigating scenes rather than shooting holes into them. Requiem uses these sections to deepen the plot, drench you in atmospheric dread, and capitalise on Angela Sant’Albano’s virtuosic voice acting performance.

Then you’re back with Leon and his well-conditioned hair, shooting stumbling T virus victims like his bullets have an expiry date. It’s that constant variation in dynamics, along with the strength of its storytelling and production values, that makes this game such a treat. It’s a virtual page-turner, a ‘one more chapter’ experience that doesn’t outstay its welcome. Singleplayer games like this are incredibly rare these days, so to find one so perfectly formed is borderline miraculous. Yes, there’s an online store and there’ll be DLC, and that’s absolutely fine. If that’s how games like this need to monetise the experience, we’ll take a few costumes and additional playable chapters over battle passes full of dance emotes for games we don’t care about but can’t stop playing any day.

It’s enough to make you nostalgic for the singleplayer gaming landscape 10 years ago, when triple-A releases like this felt like they made up most of the games industry. But what it doesn’t do is make you nostalgic for the Resident Evil of 10 years ago. This is as good as the series has ever been, and it’s achieved that by cherry-picking what made it great through all three decades and multiple contrasting visions of its lifespan. Long may it continue to terrorise us, well past its natural lifespan.