Racoon City’s swansong is terrifying and mournful

In his own world, Leon S. Kennedy is a survivor too. One of the two heroes at the center of Resident Evil Requiem, the latest chapter of Capcom’s long-running survival horror saga, Kennedy has lived through hell. On his first day as a rookie cop in the fictional metropolis of Raccoon City, he watched as locals were torn apart in the streets by zombies born from American bioweaponry. Kennedy only narrowly escaped town one day before it was wiped off the map by the United States government, plunging Raccoon City into darkness under the shadow of a mushroom cloud, leaving little more than a crater behind. As far as we know, he never returned to the place he swore an oath to protect. He never reckoned with the anguish he experienced there. He never stopped to remember the thousands that didn’t make it out in time. That is, until Resident Evil Requiem.

Trauma runs deep in Requiem. Underneath all the pulse-pounding horror, blood-pumping action, and cornball one-liners — all three are in high supply here — is the always over-the-top Resident Evil series at its most mournful. Requiem isn’t just a spectacular bit of digital closure for one of gaming’s most likable heroes or for an era of PlayStation nostalgia; it’s a reminder to confront our world’s darkest atrocities rather than hide away from them. Evil can only truly prevail when there are no more good people left to stand up and fight back.

Though Requiem follows 2022’s Resident Evil Village in chronology, it’s better described as a direct continuation of 2019’s excellent Resident Evil 2 remake. It builds on that game’s elegant puzzle box horror, its tense zombie shootouts, and its richly detailed visuals defined by grit and shadow. Requiem also picks up an ellipsis story left off on, but it takes an act before that becomes abundantly clear.

Requiem begins as if it’s a reboot. Rather than immediately putting players in control of an old hero with a storied history of zombie slaying, the story starts with a new face: Grace Ashcroft. The young FBI agent is far from your typically unbothered STARS agent or RCPD cop; she’s a ball of nervous energy. It doesn’t take long to learn why. After getting called to investigate a disturbance at an abandoned hotel in the town of Wrenwood, we learn that Grace is plagued with the memory of witnessing her mother’s brutal murder. (Incidentally, her mom happened to be Alyssa Ashcroft, a reporter who was a playable character in Resident Evil Outbreak for the PlayStation 2.) Grace’s nerves are already good a shot before she’s abducted by a mysterious creep named Dr. Gideon and whisked off to a medical facility.

The first act of Requiem unfolds there, and it’s the perfect place for Capcom to replicate the puzzle-horror of the very first Resident Evil’s iconic Spencer Mansion. A weak and initially helpless Grace must search for a way out, gradually unlocking new wings and rooms as she hunts down keys. Everything the series built its name on is handled immaculately here. The limited resources, hair-raising jump scares, persistent threats that wander the halls in all their fleshy glory — it’s everything that made players fall in love with Resident Evil decades ago.

The opening act is periodically guilty of playing the hits rather than pushing the format forward, but it does successfully fuse old and new with little friction. Requiem builds on the first-person gameplay of Resident Evil 7 Biohazard, sticking to that game’s brand of tension — shaky pistol hands and all. Grace slots into that role perfectly as an unwitting hero. She comes across as genuinely terrified as zombies chase her down claustrophobic corridors, putting you into the ideal haunted house mindset.

Fear is baked into Grace’s blood. (And blood plays an important role in Requiem, as it’s a resource Grace can soak up to craft bullets, healing items, and stealth-killing injections.) You get the sense that she’s been hiding from the world ever since her mother’s death. Grief over her inability to save her mother haunts her, and Grace’s trip through hell becomes a personal story about facing that tragedy and rising to the role of protector when needed.

Image: Capcom

It’s an unexpectedly intimate story by Resident Evil standards, but Grace’s nightmare is only a prelude to something bigger. It’s a thematic tutorial built to get players thinking about the long-term impact trauma can have on a person. I wouldn’t totally label it a disappointment, especially when the opening hours provide some of the series’ best genuine scares, but Grace doesn’t come off feeling like the star of her own story. At least not when Leon S. Kennedy has so much emotional baggage to unpack.

At first, Kennedy is presented as a supporting actor. He’s looking into a mystery tied to the survivors of the Raccoon City incident when his investigation inevitably criss-crosses with Grace’s. He’s playable in short bursts initially, akin to Ada Wong’s quick interludes in 2024’s Resident Evil 4 remake, but he lights up the screen in those moments.

It’s not just because Kennedy, now older and sicker (but still voiced by Nick Apostolides), is arguably gaming’s most charismatic hero. Capcom deploys his kickassery to almost comedic effect. Whereas Grace’s sections leave you feeling defenseless as you try to fend off howling witches and hulking butchers with nothing but a dinky handgun, Leon’s bits have him tearing through the same creatures like it’s another Tuesday. He hacks zombie heads off with a hatchet, blows through bosses with a small artillery of guns loaded into an inventory that dwarfs Grace’s tiny backpack, and he can somehow parry chainsaws. He’s done all this before, and it shows in the series’ best action outside the groundbreaking Resident Evil 4.

Image: Capcom

Requiem truly begins in its radical second act. The dynamic is reversed as Leon becomes the star when he returns to Raccoon City for the first time since its destruction. It’s a completely different game; a thrilling third-person shooter set in a compact, open-ended stretch of ruins. Leon cuts through the zombies still wandering the quarantined remains of Raccoon City, gathering points for each kill that he can spend to buy new guns and mods. There’s over-the-top stunt choreography that brings the games closer in line to the series’ unhinged animated movies, like Resident Evil Death Island.

As fun as all that chaos is — and it is very fun — Leon’s homecoming is the series’ most somber moment. It’s not the wish fulfillment ‘90s kids dreamed of in the PlayStation days. The once iconic Raccoon City is unrecognizable. The buildings have been reduced to rubble. There are patches of zombies, but the streets are largely empty, matching the haunting atmosphere of Silent Hill 2 more than any Resident Evil game. It’s a mass graveyard, and you get the sense that the world would rather pretend Raccoon City never existed at all than reckon with the thousands of mutilated bodies sealed within it.

Death has always been central to Resident Evil, but it’s rarely been a series about death. It deals in government conspiracies and loaded commentaries on the bioweapons industry; the zombies are little more than targets to hit in spooky carnival games. Requiem brings weight to the saga. Amid all the shootouts of its second act, we’re left to walk with an uncharacteristically shaken Kennedy who seems as if he’s slowly coming to terms with the fact that he barely survived a massacre — and that so many others did not.

Requiem can be placed within a long lineage of great Japanese art that deals with post-war trauma through science-fiction. Despite the fact that it’s set in a fictional American city, Resident Evil has always evoked the specters of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Resident Evil 3: Nemesis (released 54 years after the tragedies) famously ends with an American bomb streaking through the sky like a comet and landing right in the center of Raccoon City. It explodes in a fury of blinding white light. Buildings blast apart and zombies are vaporized in an instant as a tower of flame engulfs the city block by block. It’s played as a “cool girls don’t look at explosions” escape sequence, but it’s a deeply unnerving scene removed from the game’s B-movie corniness. It’s not far off from the real-world accounts of Hibakusha, who experienced Japan’s bombings as children.

“I was three years old at the time of the bombing,” Yasujiro Tanaka, a Nagasaki survivor, told Time in a 2017 project collecting testimonies from Hibakusha. “I don’t remember much, but I do recall that my surroundings turned blindingly white, like a million camera flashes going off at once. Then, pitch darkness.”

Image: Capcom

Whether intentional or not, Requiem only makes that connection more explicit. Raccoon City’s ruined skyline bears a striking resemblance to photographs taken in the aftermath of the bombings. The remaining survivors all seem to be dealing with some form of long-term side effects. And Kennedy himself is branded with a black mark under his gloved gun hand that isn’t so dissimilar from the radiation burns etched into Hibakusha skin. 30 years into Resident Evil’s often convoluted story, we finally have an installment that meaningfully connects its zombie fiction to real-world atrocities.

It’s still Resident Evil, of course. Melodrama and schlock horror are still the focus, and it all escalates into familiar shootouts in places you’ll swear you’ve been to a dozen times. There’s headache-inducing lore and eye-rolling fan service aplenty, as well as villains whose motivations only make sense half of the time. Capcom isn’t out to radically reinvent its flagship series as it did with both Resident Evil 7 and Village. Instead, it plays like a coda to the original trilogy. It returns to the Raccoon City incident, both in its classic survival horror gameplay and story, to allow its characters to finally unpack decades of grief, regret, and survivor’s guilt. That’s what ultimately links Requiem’s two heroes together, even if their stories don’t totally fit together: Grace deals with loss on a micro level, while Leon deals with it on a macro one. Both face their fears for the hope that they get a chance to save even one life.

Image: Capcom

Today, the living Hibakusha still fight too. In 2024, the Nobel Committee awarded its Peace Prize to the grassroots organization Nihon Hidankyo, a group of atomic bomb survivors who have dedicated their lives to sharing their stories and advocating for the total abolition of nuclear weapons programs. In his presentation speech, Nobel Committee chair Jørgen Watne Frydnes praised the group’s courage and underlined why its work mattered: “Memory work can be an act of resistance, a force for change,” he said. Frydnes went on to quote South Korean novelist Han Kang, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature that same year.

“I believe that trauma is something to be embraced rather than healed or recovered from,” Kang wrote. “I believe that grief is something which situates the space of the dead within the living; and that, through repeatedly revisiting that place, through our pained and silent embrace of it over the course of a whole life, life is, perhaps paradoxically, made possible.”

The key to unlocking Resident Evil Requiem is right in its title. In Christian tradition, a requiem is a mass for the dead. It’s a moment of reflection where we are to offer our prayers for the repose of those we have lost. Let us not just take Leon’s journey as a face-value remembrance of Raccoon City, but as an acknowledgment of the lives claimed by real-world tragedy. May our collective memories hold more power than any bomb.

Resident Evil Requiem will be released Feb. 27 on Nintendo Switch 2, PlayStation 5, Windows PC, and Xbox Series X. The game was reviewed on PlayStation 5 using a prerelease download code provided by Capcom. You can find additional information about Polygon’s ethics policy here.