Resident Evil: Requiem‘s first trailer tied it unambiguously to the wider Resiverse, with sweeping footage of a nuked and abandoned Raccoon City, but the slice of zombie survival I saw at this year’s Summer Game Fest felt like a pocket horror experiment in the vein of P.T. and Amnesia: The Bunker. I hope it’s not a one-off. I hope the whole game is like this.
FBI agent Grace Ashcroft regains consciousness tied upside down to a gurney in some kind of sanitarium, midway through the process of being drained of blood. She frees herself with a chunk of glass, and sets out to investigate the inky sepulchral corridors beyond. Unlike Resident Evil 7, and, pre-update, Resident Evil: Village, Requiem allows you to play in third-person via the settings, but I sense Capcom’s preference is that you peer through Grace’s eyes. All the better to hear her panicked, shuddering breaths, all the better to see the lighter flame shivering in your fist, and all the better to hear the thunder of ogreish footsteps coming up behind you.
The sanitarium area is home to a monstrous hag, and the hag is, I think, one of Capcom’s best munsters to date. A powerfully bastardly confection of traits, whose behaviour appears to be both scripted and dynamic. She’s got Lady Dimitrescu’s stature, meaning she’ll have to stoop to pass through doorways, but she can also crawl around in the ceiling like a xenomorph. When she descends, face first, it’s a bit like Sadako flowing out of your telly.
The hag is a frightful spectacle up-close, her clumpy, gnashing teeth bulging from a face of pickled corpseflesh, but there’s a touch of the overgrown child here, a terrible trace of “I just want to play” communicated by the petulant hammering of her feet as you sprint shrieking down the hallway to the area’s apparent saferoom, where the lamplight and warmer colours if not the shuttable door keep the entity at bay. The noise of the hag’s steps is masterfully calibrated in such a way that you can’t quite believe she isn’t right on top of you, which means you can’t quite resist turning to look, which will probably get you slaughtered.
The parallel in Village is That Basement Section from Donna’s Doll House, with the caveat that the hag won’t murder you instantly if she catches you. I don’t think combat is an option, at least at this stage in Requiem – in our demo, Grace had to find a fuse for an elevator to make her escape. Naturally, the replacement fuse was locked inside a box that required a screwdriver, which was hidden in another box somewhere else, which meant that Grace had to backtrack across the layout, repeatedly passing the same blind corners and ceiling holes. In the words of every horror game enthusiast: death to all janitors. I once worked as a janitor, and you’d best believe I didn’t hide basic tools or seal away replacement parts like the Holy Grail.
Conspicuous throughout the demo was Capcom’s mastery of light and darkness. I have occasionally tried to classify the different species of darkness video games are capable of, which might sound like the bullshit artistry of a writer who still thinks a GPU is some kind of police car, but then you encounter a game like Requiem, in which some shadows absolutely swallow anything outside of arm’s reach, forming negative spaces that seem as thick as obsidian.
The sanitarium consists of pale green wallpaper and pearlescent light fittings which, given slightly brighter conditions, occasionally look like hovering skulls or eyewhites. When you find the lighter, it’s a curse in disguise, because now you get to shock yourself every time you flick it on. Oh, I’m sorry, Madame Champyboots – I didn’t notice you gurning there. I’m just going to head back to the saferoom for a spell.
The question is whether this is a quarantined Maximum Terror episode in a game of frenzied Resi 4-style crowd control and upgradeable weapons. Our PR handler took care to combine the words “horror” and “action” during the demo presentation, leaving the ratio unclear, but the marketing catchphrase “addicting fear” suggests that this might be one of the spookier, less trigger-happy Resis.
While the trailer does suggest a tour of Raccoon City, it also cites one particular location, Remnant Hotel, as the focus of Grace’s story. After all, it was here that her mother died. Which I guess explains the hag, from a psychological baggage POV. I wouldn’t be surprised if the whole of Requiem were spread across the floors of that hotel. Fingers crossed.
