The Resident Evil games work best when they’re puzzle boxes: baroque mazes crammed full of interlocking rooms and hidden hallways, with blood and viscera spilling from the cracks. When I brought home the original Resident Evil as a middle-schooler in 1996, my friends and I could barely find the courage to hold the controller as a zombie, freshly fed off a bleeding corpse, stood up and backed our character into a heavily wallpapered hallway corner.
Nothing is more terrifying than being between a zombie and a wall, clutching a shaking pistol with a vanishingly small supply of bullets.
Resident Evil Requiem, more so than the past few entries in the long-running series, seems at first to fall in line with this approach. After a few scene changes through an F.B.I. office, an impressive if uncanny rendering of a Brooklyn city street (complete with bodegas advertising “Food Stamp”) and a moldering hotel, Requiem settles on the stately and crenelated Rhodes Hill Chronic Care Center, an old sanitarium turned into a mad scientist’s testing ground. That scientist, Victor Gideon, played with mealy, gold-toothed verve, has drawn the game’s two playable characters, Grace Ashcroft and Leon S. Kennedy, here to complete the final stages of his dastardly plan, which involves using Grace’s special provenance to unlock more aggressive forms of bioengineering.
To our characters, and to the player, this story line is largely unimportant and detached from the immediate pressures of surviving Rhodes Hill. These early hours of the game, spent with Grace tiptoeing down dark and creepy corridors to avoid the center’s zombified residents, evokes a by-the-books haunted house with all the expected trappings. It’s a building full of puzzles and blocked doors to be unlocked while dashing away from gnashing teeth and grasping arms.
Many of the zombies here retain aspects of their former selves, an idea introduced with the chore-obsessed villagers of Resident Evil 4. Maids continue to scrub at the floors and walls, smearing blood instead of soap and varnish. Divas croak out discordant arias in the center’s stately lounge and chefs stab endlessly at ambiguous slabs of meat. The whole setting is stuck in horrifying suspended animation, lousy with trapped souls who will snap out of their reverie and chase down Grace, should she be so unlucky as to interrupt them.
There are giant, grotesque man-babies smashing their way through corridors and flattening intervening zombies on their way to crush Grace. A shrieking, girlish monstrosity, transformed by Dr. Gideon’s ministrations into a hulking beast, descends from holes in the ceiling (like the infernal monster from Alien: Isolation) and interrupts Grace’s carefully plotted routes.
Though mansions and mansion-like structures are the series’ bread and butter, Rhodes Hill feels anything but stale. The default first-person perspective of Grace creates a frightening immediacy and a sense of vulnerability to the horrors on display, which don’t always react in predictable ways. Certain zombies will get back up long after they have been dispatched and transform into much more powerful and aggressive incarnations, adding friction to the task of sussing out the cleverly hidden solutions to puzzles and keys to doors.
This kind of environment is where these games function best. Its Saturday morning cartoon premises notwithstanding, Requiem’s Rhodes Hill section provides what is needed to enjoy claustrophobic horror: the exhilaration of making it back to a safe room with a sliver of health remaining, the sudden shock of a corpse falling from a closet, the desperate attempts to line up your cross hairs with a zombie’s bloody grin as he shambles ever closer.
Things come apart, however, once the player is forced to spend a significant amount of time as Leon, which unfortunately means most of the game’s back half. Leon spends Requiem on a greatest hits tour, reliving the glory years of Resident Evils 2, 4 and 6 by blasting his way effortlessly through crowds of zombies, punctuating that action with roundhouse kicks and cheesy one-liners. There are no puzzles for Leon, just a charnel house of disinterred bodies.
These sections are the clanging cymbals that interrupt the more measured timpani of Grace’s moments, and they work well when experienced in brief. But once the game moves to the ravaged and bombed-out streets of Raccoon City, the previous setting of most of the series, the cymbals clang on and on, leaving behind only a splitting headache.
Raccoon City and its buried labs are a harsh comedown from the brooding grandeur of Rhodes Hill. Nondescript gray and brown streets stretch in either direction. Beneath, the lab’s corridors are cold and sterile. Instead of carefully plotting out paths and rechecking his inventory and bullet count, as Grace must, Leon gets an immersion-breaking weapons upgrade system that warps in powerful military gear, purchased with credits from a kill-counting smart bracelet.
Whatever dense architectural intimacy we felt playing as Grace is exploded here into an open world full of arbitrary chores. Spread around are various MacGuffins, barely able to hide their artifice, useful only to pad out the time until the game’s plot sees fit to deliver more fan-servicey story dumps, reminding players of beloved locations and infamous foes.
While dotted with occasionally interesting interactions, like a glass-walled building on its side that must be traversed carefully, this is a setting players will have seen many times before in more impressively executed projects, like The Last of Us and its sequel.
Resident Evil games have always seesawed between survival horror and action bombast. Jill Valentine from the first Resident Evil was, after all, both the “master of unlocking” and a woman who could take down the muscled Tyrant with a bazooka. But the game’s final boss fight was a singular, outsize moment that only worked because it served as an accent for the rest of the game’s plodding tension. Requiem serves up this tension well, until it abruptly doesn’t, once it’s time for Leon to tromp through a bland, abandoned city while popping zombie heads and watching his kill count rise. Next to the quiet deliberateness of Grace’s approach, Leon’s hypermasculine action hero gameplay feels clumsy and brutish.
When Requiem is packed into the wood-paneled maze of Rhodes Hill, its aesthetic drips with eerie drama and shocks with terror. The core survival loop of the franchise keeps our attention. It’s an intoxicating, familiar blend of squeezing past harrowing encounters, all exits blocked by shambolic undead, tilting a picture frame here, solving a visual puzzle there.
Let out into the light, these ingredients dissolve into dust, much like the game’s monsters. As rich and long as Resident Evil’s history is, it seems far too easy for its developers to forget the power of shadows.
Resident Evil Requiem, which will be released on Friday, was reviewed on the PlayStation 5. It will also be available on the PC, Switch 2 and Xbox Series X|S.
The post Resident Evil Requiem Shines Within Its Confines appeared first on New York Times.
