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Resident Evil Requiem

Ch. 1 of 8
— CH. 1 · INTRODUCTION —

Contents

Resident Evil Requiem

8 sections
  • Resident Evil Requiem sold five million copies in its first five days, which made it the fastest-selling game in the long-running Resident Evil series. Capcom released it on the 27th of February 2026, and critics greeted it warmly. It is the ninth main entry in the series. Its lead is an unlikely one. Grace Ashcroft is an FBI analyst rather than a soldier, and she is pulled into a mystery 28 years after the destruction of Raccoon City. A federal agent named Leon S. Kennedy helps her. Several questions drive what follows. Who is killing the survivors of that old disaster, and why does Grace matter so much to the people responsible? How did a project first imagined as an online open-world game become a single-player horror story? And what does it take to run such a game on a handheld console?

  • Grace Ashcroft spends her chapters hiding, and the game is built to make that feel necessary. Her sections follow the survival horror style of Resident Evil 7: Biohazard from 2017 and Resident Evil Village. Supplies are scarce. She must dodge threats, solve puzzles, and juggle a small number of inventory slots, stashing spare items in supply boxes.

    A hulking monster called the Girl hunts her through these sections. Ordinary damage does nothing to it, so avoidance is the plan. Players will recognize the type from Mr. X in Resident Evil 2 from 1998 and Lady Dimitrescu in Village. Grace can crouch, sneak, and tuck herself under tables. Hiding is no guarantee, because the Girl can stalk her through walls and ceilings. The only way to hurt the creature is to drag it into the light.

    A lighter or flashlight lets Grace see in the dark, but the glow draws the Girl's attention. Glass bottles found around the environment can be thrown to distract enemies. On the Standard difficulty, also called Classic, and on Insanity, saving requires ink ribbons and typewriters. Those typewriters double as checkpoints after death, and automatic saves are rare in her sections.

    Leon S. Kennedy plays a different game entirely. His chapters lean on action, in the spirit of Resident Evil 4 from 2005. He carries a range of firearms, performs takedowns, and finds ammunition and other resources in greater abundance, which suits a fight against zombies. A hatchet with limited durability lets him parry incoming attacks. He can also grab weapons dropped by enemies and turn them on their owners.

    Instead of fixed slots, Leon keeps his gear in a briefcase that holds whatever fits. BSAA containers hand out new items, and he can upgrade weapons by depositing treasures and defeating enemies. Occasionally he faces enormous monsters in old-fashioned boss fights.

    The story passes back and forth between its two leads, an approach used earlier in Resident Evil: Revelations from 2012 and Revelations 2 from 2015. Grace's chapters default to first person, while Leon's default to third. Players can switch viewpoints whenever they like. Capcom says first person is meant to feel tenser and more real, while third person suits people who prefer an action-based style.

    On the 27th of March 2026, Capcom added a Photo Mode through an update. Opened from the pause menu, it freezes the scene so players can adjust camera angle, zoom, and focus, and change character poses and facial expressions. Stickers, frames, and filters can be applied before a screenshot is taken.

  • The Wrenwood Hotel stands condemned, and eight years before the story begins, Alyssa Ashcroft was murdered there. She was the protagonist of Resident Evil Outbreak from 2003. Her daughter Grace is sent to inspect a body found in the derelict building. Capcom describes Grace as an introverted bookworm who is not proficient in combat, unlike series heroes such as Claire Redfield or Jill Valentine.

    The victim is one of several Raccoon City survivors who have died mysteriously. The cause is lingering T-virus mutation, known as Raccoon City Syndrome, or RCS. Inside the hotel, Grace finds a data disk that her mother left behind. Then Victor Gideon, a former Umbrella Corporation scientist who has been searching for her, abducts her.

    Leon Kennedy is investigating the same deaths, and he is suffering from RCS himself. He sees Victor escaping with Grace and gives chase. Victor infects nearby civilians with the T-virus and starts a zombie outbreak, which covers his escape to the Rhodes Hill Chronic Care Center. Leon's handler, Sherry Birkin, helps track the location. Leon rescued Sherry from Raccoon City's destruction when she was a child.

    Grace wakes in Rhodes Hill, escapes her confinement, and finds herself stalked by the Girl. Leon arrives just as Victor infects the staff and patients with a mutated strain of the virus. Victor seals the facility, and the two heroes are separated. Grace frees a young blind girl named Emily. Together they learn that Victor is obsessed with Elpis, a bioweapon made by his dead mentor, Oswell E. Spencer, and that Grace is somehow essential to it.

    Emily is gravely wounded during the escape. Grace kills the Girl by exposing her to daylight, but Emily mutates into a monster, and Leon must subdue her. Devastated, Grace abandons Leon and leaves with Victor and his benefactor, Zeno, a representative of the Connections crime syndicate.

    In the quarantined ruins of Raccoon City, Zeno shares his belief about Elpis. Based on Victor's reading of Spencer's unfinished research, he thinks it is a highly contagious mind-control virus. He also tells Grace that Emily is one of many clones of her, made in experiments to move Spencer's consciousness into a new body. The missile strike that destroyed the city, he adds, was arranged by the Connections to hide Elpis rather than to stop the infection. Zeno then brings Grace to ARK, a former Umbrella facility hidden beneath the ruins. Meanwhile Victor attacks Leon and is apparently killed.

    Inside ARK, a fail-safe will destroy Elpis if the wrong password is entered. Zeno believes Grace is the successful result of the consciousness experiments and so must know the code. Leon rescues her, but his worsening infection separates them again. Grace opens her mother's disk at a terminal and finds recorded interviews that Alyssa conducted with Spencer.

    On the recordings, Spencer expresses regret for the damage his creations caused. He reveals that he adopted Grace as an infant, a normal child unrelated to any cloning work, and later entrusted her to Alyssa's care. Grace realizes that his final hope lay in her. She deduces that the password is "Hope".

    Leon and Grace confront Zeno in the Elpis chamber. Elpis turns out to be a potent antiviral that can neutralize every viral-based weapon. Zeno injects himself without knowing this and loses his enhanced abilities, while Grace uses it to cure Leon. Victor returns, kills Zeno, and vows to spread chaos. He triggers ARK's self-destruct system and mutates into a Nemesis-like monster, and Leon is forced to kill him. The BSAA's Hound Wolf Unit, sent by Chris Redfield, rescues the pair.

    The exposure of ARK sparks a global scandal and new investigations into Umbrella, the Connections, and the United States government. Some time later, Grace has cured Emily with Elpis and adopted her, and Sherry is cured of RCS as well. Then, in the ruins of ARK, two soldiers eliminate the remaining BSAA forces and retrieve their "objective".

  • On the 1st of July 2024, a Capcom Showcase presentation confirmed that the next main Resident Evil game was in development under Koshi Nakanishi, who had directed Resident Evil 7. By then the project was already deep into a six-year effort. According to Nakanishi, it began as an online open-world multiplayer game. In 2021 the team rebooted it, because they felt it "wasn't what the fans wanted".

    The reboot did not settle the design at once. The team tried making a "genuine horror game with Leon" in the mold of Resident Evil 2. They concluded that "people wouldn't want to see a timid Leon". That judgment helps explain why the finished game gives horror to a new character and action to the veteran. The writer, Haris Orkin, spent two and a half years on the project.

    At the 2025 Tokyo Game Show, producer Masato Kumazawa explained why the Nintendo Switch 2 was not part of the original plan. The console had not been officially revealed when work began. Once the team received Switch 2 development kits, they tested the hardware by prototyping a port of Resident Evil Village. The port went smoothly, and that gave them the confidence to try Requiem. Capcom had been skeptical that the system could cope, but the results surprised them.

    The controls took some experimenting. The developers tried using the mouse function of the Joy-Con 2 controllers for aiming and camera movement. Kumazawa said this "confused the gameplay", and the team settled on the console's gyroscope instead.

  • The RE Engine has powered every Resident Evil since Resident Evil 7: Biohazard in 2017, and Requiem is the first entry designed only for ninth-generation consoles. Because of that, it was built with ray tracing in mind. Village, a cross-generation release, was not. On PC, Requiem offers path traced lighting. That includes ray traced global illumination for multi-bounce indirect light, plus ray traced reflections, shadows, and ambient occlusion. Village had only more limited global illumination and reflections.

    There is a catch for PC owners. Path tracing works only on Nvidia graphics cards, because turning it on forces DLSS Ray Reconstruction with no fallback for other denoisers. Character skin uses subsurface scattering. Offering both a tight first-person view and a wider third-person view also affected technical details such as level-of-detail thresholds and shadow cascades.

    Grace's hair is a story of its own. The RE Engine has a hair strand system that renders individual strands, rather than the older technique of flat hair cards. It debuted on shorter hair in the Resident Evil 4 remake. The Requiem team could not reach the quality they wanted for Grace's longer hair. The Pragmata team, working on an android character named Diana alongside the RE Engine developers, led the effort for longer hair. That work was then carried over to Requiem. Light shines through Grace's hair realistically, and it reacts properly when she hangs upside down, strapped to a gurney.

    On PlayStation 5, the game renders internally at 1080p and upscales to 4K at 60 frames per second. The PlayStation 5 Pro keeps that target and adds ray traced global illumination and reflections. With ray tracing off and a variable refresh rate display, it can run between 90 and 120 frames per second. Capcom was impressed by what the Pro could do at high frame rates. Requiem also marked the debut of the second generation of Sony's PSSR upscaler, which improves image stability. The first version had struggled with noise and artifacts on ray traced games such as Silent Hill f and Silent Hill 2.

    Xbox Series X uses the same settings and techniques as the base PlayStation 5. The weaker Xbox Series S renders at 720p internally with spatial upscaling at 60 frames per second, and it swaps the strand hair for a simple hair mesh.

    The Nintendo Switch 2 version renders internally at 360p in handheld mode and 540p when docked. DLSS upscaling brings those to 720p and 1080p output. That 540p base with DLSS beats the Series S approach of spatially upscaling from 720p. The Switch 2 aims for 60 frames per second and keeps global illumination, but it replaces ray traced reflections with screen-space reflections. Geometry quality drops, and hair cards give a rougher look than the strand system.

  • Fourteen years separate Leon's last major appearance, in Resident Evil 6 from 2012, from Requiem, and the game shows him older. His design shifted during development, with input from women on the Capcom team. Nakanishi said they would "point out and comment on even the finest details like the wrinkles on his neck". He felt the result was a design "that would make anyone's heart throb". The Japanese slang term "ikeoji", roughly meaning an attractive or cool older man, has been used to describe him. So has the phrase "hot uncle".

    Producer Masato Kumazawa said Capcom was "looking for a car that fit Leon". The answer came through a collaboration with Porsche, which supplied a custom third-generation Cayenne Turbo GT for the game. Capcom also worked with the watchmaker Hamilton on custom timepieces for Leon and Grace, announced on the 15th of January 2026.

    Leon's watch is a Khaki Field Auto Chrono, an all-black chronograph inspired by tactical special operations. Its crown imitates the knurled adjustment knob of a sniper scope, and the chronograph pushers take the shape of bullet casings. An engraved wing at the nine o'clock position on the dial and on the case back stands for "prayers for the fallen". Grace wears an American Classic Pan Europ, with a 42mm black case, a gold-and-black dial, and a unidirectional bezel.

    Angela Sant'Albano was revealed on the 19th of February 2026 as the English voice and motion capture actor for Grace. She had auditioned in April 2023. Requiem was her first video game performance, and her first time working with motion capture. Nick Apostolides returns as Leon in English, after playing him in the Resident Evil 2 and Resident Evil 4 remakes. In Japanese, Shihori Kanjiya voices Grace and Toshiyuki Morikawa voices Leon.

    Antony Byrne, Jane Perry, Eden Riegel, and Emma Rose Creaner were later revealed as the English actors for Victor Gideon, Alyssa Ashcroft, Sherry Birkin, and Emily. Imaginarium Studios provided motion capture, with Kate Saxon as performance director. Shooting began in 2023 and ran until 2025, in three-week blocks separated by a month off. Facial animation was captured the same way.

    The two camera options doubled some of the animation work. Every action needed versions for both views, and the wider third-person view required exclusive animations that first person would never show. When the Girl chases her in third person, Grace visibly stumbles. Her hands shake when she handles and aims firearms. These panicked touches reflect her timid nature and echo the "final girl" trope from horror films.

  • Capcom revealed the game at Summer Game Fest on the 6th of June 2025, where the trailer was the closing reveal of the show. It showed a devastated Raccoon City, including the police station from Resident Evil 2 and Resident Evil 3. The game collected over 1 million wishlists across its platforms. Three weeks before release, that figure reached 5 million. A playable demo appeared at Gamescom and PAX West in August 2025.

    A second trailer arrived on the 20th of August 2025 and showed more of Grace's backstory, including a scene between her and Alyssa. A third trailer, at the Game Awards 2025, revealed Leon as a second playable character. A Switch 2 version was announced at a Nintendo Direct in September 2025, alongside Switch 2 versions of Resident Evil 7: Biohazard and Resident Evil Village. A themed Switch 2 Pro Controller was revealed too, with amiibo figures of Grace and Leon due in 2026. A fourth trailer followed at Sony's State of Play on the 12th of February 2026.

    Some promotions were stranger. In February 2026, Capcom released a live-action trailer starring Maika Monroe as a mother living through the first Raccoon City outbreak in 1998. On the 20th of February, it announced a game bundle with hanging fitness equipment, made with Yume Group. From the 23rd of February to the 1st of March 2026, S. Ride ran ten taxis wrapped in game livery in Tokyo, Musashino, and Mitaka. Grace became a Fortnite skin on the 1st of March 2026, given to people who bought the game through the Epic Games Store.

    Trouble came before launch. On the 17th of February 2026, IGN reported that some players had obtained physical copies early from retailers. On the 20th of February, a week before release, Capcom asked people not to spread spoilers and said it would issue takedown notices for leaked footage. The next day Hideki Kamiya, who had worked on earlier Resident Evil games, wrote on Twitter that posting leaks was "a detestable act that destroys everyone's happiness and deserves a thousand deaths".

    After launch, Nakanishi confirmed on the 10th of March 2026 that downloadable additions were in development. A minigame called "Leon Must Die Forever" was released on the 8th of May 2026.

  • Metacritic recorded "universal acclaim" for Requiem, and reviewers saw it as a worthy way to mark the series' 30th anniversary. Matt Wales gave it five stars at Eurogamer and called it a "masterful bit of suffocating horror and a nostalgic, fan-thrilling victory lap for the legendary series". Dave Aubrey of Video Games Chronicle said it felt like "a remastered greatest hits album". Jasmine Gould-Wilson of GamesRadar+ rejected the label "nostalgia bait". She argued the game was "tying up the many loose ends" and delivering the "most cinematic, bloody, surprisingly emotional moment for the franchise to date". Elie Gould of PC Gamer called the return to Raccoon City a "worthwhile venture".

    The blend of horror and action drew special praise. Game Informer wrote that Capcom "masterfully weaves Leon and Grace's stories together" so that her horrors never persist for too long. GameSpot said the game combined "two distinct experiences that each capture the best parts of Resident Evil". Scott Duwe of Destructoid called it "an exceptionally well-made nostalgia romp that elevates everything that makes the series special".

    Not every reviewer was fully won over. Aubrey called the Rhodes Hill Care Center "genuinely fantastic" and among the best areas in the series. He still felt its echoes of the Raccoon Police Department in Resident Evil 2 made the game a "retread that does not live up to its inspirations". Kotaku felt that Leon's playtime overtook Grace's, because she "takes a backseat in the latter half". Nic Reuben of The Guardian disliked a "run of damp squib boss fights" near the end, but praised Angela Sant'Albano and Nick Apostolides for "some heroic heavy lifting".

    On Steam, 344,214 players were online over the launch weekend, a series record and double the figure for the 2023 Resident Evil 4 remake. In the United Kingdom, Requiem topped the physical sales chart with a bigger launch than either of the previous two Resident Evil games. Of those UK sales, 54 percent were on PlayStation 5 and 36 percent on PC. Xbox Series X and S accounted for 6 percent, and Nintendo Switch 2 for 4 percent.

    By the 16th of March 2026, Requiem had sold six million copies, which made it the best-selling game of the year so far. By the 24th of April 2026, it had passed 7 million units.

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Updated

Common questions

When was Resident Evil Requiem released and on which platforms?

Resident Evil Requiem was released on the 27th of February 2026 for Nintendo Switch 2, PlayStation 5, Windows, and Xbox Series X/S. Capcom developed and published the survival horror game.

Who are the playable characters in Resident Evil Requiem?

Resident Evil Requiem has two playable characters: FBI analyst Grace Ashcroft and DSO agent Leon S. Kennedy. Grace's chapters focus on survival horror, while Leon's chapters focus on action.

Who directed Resident Evil Requiem?

Koshi Nakanishi directed Resident Evil Requiem. He also directed Resident Evil 7: Biohazard, and the next main entry was confirmed under his direction on the 1st of July 2024.

What is Elpis in Resident Evil Requiem?

Elpis is a bioweapon-like project created by Oswell E. Spencer that turns out to be a potent antiviral. It can neutralize all viral-based weapons, and Grace Ashcroft opens it by entering the password "Hope".

How well did Resident Evil Requiem sell?

Resident Evil Requiem sold five million copies in five days, making it the fastest-selling Resident Evil game. It reached six million by the 16th of March 2026 and more than 7 million units by the 24th of April 2026.

Can Resident Evil Requiem run on Nintendo Switch 2?

Resident Evil Requiem runs on Nintendo Switch 2 with DLSS upscaling from an internal 360p in handheld mode and 540p when docked. It targets 60 frames per second and uses hair cards instead of the strand hair system.

Why did Resident Evil Requiem change during development?

Resident Evil Requiem was conceived as an online open-world multiplayer game, but the team rebooted it in 2021 because they felt it "wasn't what the fans wanted". It became a single-player game split between Grace and Leon.

All sources

110 references cited across the entry

  1. 1Resident Evil Requiem is coming next yearAndrew Webster — June 6, 2025
  2. 11Resident Evil Requiem
  3. 15How To Get All EndingsJason Rodriguez — February 26, 2026
  4. 16Who is Zeno in Resident Evil Requiem?Jason Rodriguez — February 26, 2026
  5. 17Return to Raccoon City in Resident Evil RequiemKevin Dunsmore — June 7, 2025
  6. 58Requiem for the dead. Nightmare for the living.Imaginarium Studios — February 27, 2026
  7. 66Resident Evil Requiem Surpasses 1M WishlistsMik Dzisko — June 24, 2025
  8. 67Thank you for over 5 million wishlists for Resident Evil Requiem. 3 weeks remaining.Resident Evil — February 10, 2026
  9. 75State of Play February 12, 2026 EnglishPlayStation — February 12, 2026
  10. 89Resident Evil Requiem ReviewWesley LeBlanc — February 25, 2026
  11. 91Resident Evil Requiem Review - Two-Headed MutantPhil Hornshaw — February 25, 2026
  12. 92Resident Evil Requiem ReviewDan Ryckert — February 23, 2026
  13. 93Resident Evil Requiem ReviewTristan Ogilvie — February 25, 2026
  14. 94Resident Evil Requiem reviewElie Gould — February 25, 2026
  15. 95Resident Evil Requiem Review (PS5)Liam Croft — February 25, 2026
  16. 98Resident Evil Requiem ReviewOllie Williams — February 25, 2026
  17. 99Resident Evil Requiem: The Kotaku ReviewKenneth Shepard — February 25, 2026
  18. 102Resident Evil Requiem Tops the UK Retail Charts - SalesWilliam D'Angelo — March 2, 2026
  19. 109NewsHere are all The Game Awards 2025 winnersClaire Lewis — December 11, 2025

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