I'm the definition of a horror game convert, having been way too terrified to enjoy the genre when I was younger, and I trace much of that conversion back to Resident Evil: Village. The eighth Resi game was the first time I covered one of its launches professionally, and that obligation made me play it all in a sprint – and I loved it.
The combination of straight horror with a crescendo towards action-heavy camp silliness was the perfect catharsis, and I've since hoovered up others, from older Resi games to Silent Hill f and Silent Hill 2 alike. Now, though, the next mainline Resi game is here – Requiem, and I've done the same trick, crashing through it completely.
I decided that, since I've got a lovely rig with an Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 Ti beating in it, I should play the game on PC, rather than defaulting to my PS5 Pro (as I often tend to), and that's had me enjoying some pretty stunning visuals, as I've made my way through what is a slightly lopsided game.
Where Village took you on a clear journey from total vulnerability at the start, letting you get more powerful over time until you were something of a supersoldier by the end, Requiem breaks things up more deliberately. You start the game playing fragile FBI investigator Grace Ashcroft, and when you're in her shoes you're fairly slow and light on weaponry, a more old-school Resi gameplay loop emerging.
Every so often, though, and more heavily as the game goes on, you'll get to step into series hero Leon Kennedy, who's way faster and more aggressive, and who has an expanding arsenal of guns and grenades to use. This is more like Resi 4 and 5 – action-heavy and lighter on the scares.
This structure works pretty tremendously, letting the development team give you quite long stretches of abject tension as Grace before a cold-water shock and a return to the comforting one-liners and weaponry of Leon. That said, I do have one beef with how the game's structured.
Its first half, roughly, takes place in a super creepy medical centre, one nestled in an old and ornate building that will remind people of many locations from Resi games past. It's gorgeous and great fun to explore as both characters. From there, though, the game takes a trip back to post-bomb Raccoon City, and the washed-out greys and browns of its design (by necessity) make it a way less interesting location to explore at length.
The gameplay is also far more bombastic by that point, almost turning into a boss rush at one point, and it all means that there's a pretty lengthy gap without much tension, which is a misstep in pacing terms for me.
Still, while that rankled away in the back of my mind, I was still having a great time blasting a variety of shambling undead – and also having fun in the graphics menus, seeing what tweaks were open to me.
The 5070 Ti I'm running had me able to get pretty stellar performance from the game at 1440p – pushing it to 4K was still playable enough, but max settings had me at around 45fps without much trouble, but I was playing at more like 120fps at the step-down resolution.
That said, with a game as dark as this one often is, the downsides to Nvidia's often-magical frame generation could be detected at times. DLSS and frame generation can be game-savers in some circumstances, but they were prone to quite a lot of shimmering in Requiem, so I ended up tamping them both down a little to prioritise visual clarity over frame rate ceilings I didn't need.
I also got to play the game in a couple of novel ways, ones that I'll write about separately – trying out my Steam version on the Lenovo Legion Go 2, which I'll be reviewing soon, for one, and also playing it on Nintendo Switch 2. The latter feels like something of a miracle for longtime Nintendo fans, and really is a deeply impressive port.
It means that you can play this greatly enjoyable horror yarn wherever you like, and that's quite a situation compared to some other big franchises out there.
Requiem isn't a new high point for its longstanding series, despite that technical wizardry. It's a super-solid entry, and one in which fans will find a lot to love, both in terms of easter eggs, cameos, returning monsters and long-awaited lore explanations.
It doesn't quite have the locations to back that all up, though, leaving it still slightly in Village's shadow, to my eyes – although that can still be a pretty impressive place to lurk.
