Platform tested: PS5 | Developer: Capcom | Release: February 27, 2026 | Also on: PC, Xbox Series X|S, Nintendo Switch 2
Talking about the "new Resident Evil" is starting to feel like talking about a band that's been on a farewell tour for fifteen years. It's always the new one. And yet here we are again — because Capcom released another one, it sold five million copies in its first week, and honestly? Most of us are right back on the couch at midnight with the lights off, jumping at shadows we've been jumping at since 1998.
Resident Evil Requiem is the ninth mainline entry in Capcom's horror institution. It brings back Leon S. Kennedy — ageless action hero, perfectly coiffed even when surrounded by undead — alongside Grace Ashcroft, an FBI analyst and the daughter of Alyssa Ashcroft from the obscure Resident Evil Outbreak. The setting is Raccoon City, thirty years after its destruction. The title is Requiem. Capcom are absolutely, finally, acknowledging that their series is mortal.
That acknowledgment is the most interesting thing about the game. Whether the game is interesting enough to match it is the more complicated question.
The Setup: Two Games, One Box
The most immediately striking thing about Resident Evil Requiem — and what every review, including this one, will dwell on — is its dual-protagonist structure. You play as Grace and Leon in alternating chapters, and Capcom has made a deliberate, almost theatrical choice: these are not the same game wearing two costumes.
Grace's half is survival horror. First-person perspective (recommended), limited resources, deliberate pacing, enemies that evolve when you think they're dead. The Blister Heads — evolved versions of standard zombies that rise faster and hit harder after being downed — are a direct descendant of the Crimson Heads from the 2002 Resident Evil remake, and they work just as well here. Grace is not physically imposing. She's an analyst dropped into a nightmare she isn't equipped for, and the game makes you feel every moment of that inadequacy. When she discovers the ability to craft ammo from infected blood, harvested from puddles of gore or drawn from fresh corpses, it transforms the horror set-dressing into a survival mechanic in a single elegant stroke.
Leon's half is something else entirely. Third-person, explosive, cinematic, at times so over-the-top it tips from tense into genuinely funny. Leon fighting his way through a city overrun with infected feels less like survival horror and more like a very competent, very wet action film. The chainsaw returns — of course it does — wielded now by enemies who will pick it up off the floor if you drop it, and drag their friends through the room when they fall. It is absurd. It is delightful.
The question Capcom is daring you to ask is: does stapling these two experiences together produce something coherent? The surprising answer is mostly yes.
Grace Ashcroft: The Real Discovery
We expected Leon. Grace is the genuine surprise.
Actress Angela Sant'Albano delivers her lines with a halting, quaking believability that does exactly what the role requires — she sounds like a real person who is terrified, not a video game character running through fear animations. In a series where protagonists have historically been carved from the same indestructible-hero template, Grace's fundamental vulnerability is refreshing. Her investigation of the Rhodes Hill Chronic Care Center — an abandoned hospital that is legitimately one of the best-designed survival horror environments in years — is tense and methodical in all the right ways.
Her crafting system, the blood-harvesting mechanic, the slow accumulation of resources and dread: this is the half of Requiem that people who loved Resident Evil 7 will lose themselves in. The atmosphere is suffocating. The lore, which ties back to the original trilogy more deeply than the game initially suggests, rewards players who have followed the series since the beginning.
Leon S. Kennedy: Still Indestructible, Now Interesting
Leon has been indestructible since 1998. Requiem is the first game to make that feel like a problem.
The decision to give Leon a mysterious infection — something eating at him from the inside, a reminder that even a superhero has limits — is the best character writing the series has applied to him since Resident Evil 4. He looks older here. He moves with the weight of someone who has seen too much and survived too much, and who is quietly starting to suspect he might not survive this. When the game pauses on his face, there's something there that previous entries never bothered to find.
His gameplay sections don't entirely match this emotional register — the action is big, kinetic, and occasionally cartoonish — but the contrast between the man the story suggests and the superhuman things his gameplay demands him to do is a tension the game leans into rather than ignores. By the end, that tension becomes the point.
The Horror Mechanics: Capcom's A-Game
Combat in Requiem is excellent across both protagonists, albeit in entirely different registers. Grace's encounters are measured, resource-anxious affairs where every bullet counts and every corpse is a potential threat. Leon's are loud, precise, and deeply satisfying in the way that Resident Evil 4 and its remake were satisfying — the physicality of hits, the weight of movement, the rhythm of managing multiple enemies at once.
The Blister Head system in particular stands out. The idea of enemies that evolve after death — becoming faster, more aggressive, harder to manage — keeps the horror sections perpetually uncomfortable. You are never fully safe after a kill. That persistent uncertainty is what the best Resident Evil games have always trafficked in, and Requiem delivers it consistently in Grace's sections.
The puzzles are back in real numbers, particularly in Grace's chapters. They're mostly satisfying, occasionally a little too simple, but the balance is far better than the post-RE4 years when puzzles were practically eliminated. One late-game puzzle — apparently still unsolved by a significant portion of the internet at time of writing — is either a masterpiece of complexity or a design error, depending on your patience.
Where It Stumbles
Requiem is not a perfect game, and the Écran Large-style of review demands honesty about that.
The alternating chapter structure, for all its cleverness, does lock the pacing in ways that occasionally frustrate. You are not free to pursue either protagonist's story at your own rhythm — the game decides when you switch, and sometimes that decision comes at a moment where you want to stay. Players who replay the series' earlier entries for their freedom of movement may find this structure confining.
The story, which starts with genuine ambition — Leon's infection, Grace's connection to Raccoon City's history, the weight of Umbrella's legacy — loses its nerve in the third act. The final boss is a large, decaying mass of flesh in a confined space. If you've played Resident Evil before, you know this final boss. You've fought it several times. Capcom has been ending their games this way for twenty years and seems constitutionally incapable of stopping.
There are visual bugs. Collision issues. A camera that occasionally decides it has other priorities. None of these are game-breaking, but the technical seams show in a way that a game this high-profile probably shouldn't allow.
And the price — $70 for a main campaign that takes most players between 12 and 17 hours — will be a genuine point of contention for some. The replayability is real, the New Game+ is substantial, and there is apparently a DLC already in late development. But the value proposition is a fair debate.
The Verdict
Resident Evil Requiem is the series acknowledging its own mortality — and then immediately defying it by being genuinely, often brilliantly, alive.
Grace Ashcroft is one of the best new characters Capcom has introduced in years. The horror sections are among the most expertly crafted in the franchise's history. The dual-protagonist structure, for all its rigidity, produces two complementary experiences that each illuminate what the other is missing. And the decision to give Leon S. Kennedy — the unkillable, perfect-haired, one-liner machine — a genuine reckoning with his own limits is the best thing the series has done with him since his introduction.
It doesn't quite land its finale. The story's ambitions outpace its execution by the end. And two decades of Resident Evil conventions occasionally show through the polish like bones through fog.
But after 8 to 12 hours — more if you're thorough, more still if you replay it, which you will — Resident Evil Requiem leaves you with something the series doesn't always manage: the feeling that it meant something. That Leon's story going forward has genuine stakes. That Grace Ashcroft is a character worth following.
That is Capcom doing what they do best. It is enough.
Quick Facts
| Developer | Capcom |
| Publisher | Capcom |
| Platforms | PS5, PC, Xbox Series X |
| Release Date | February 27, 2026 |
| Genre | Survival Horror / Action |
| Campaign Length | ~12–17 hours |
| Metacritic | 87/100 |
MedGarGaming Score: 8.5 / 10
Two games in one body. One of them is among the best Resident Evil has ever made. The other is very good. Together, they're just good enough to matter — and occasionally great enough to remember.
Comments (0)
Join the conversation
No comments yet. Be the first!