Koshi Nakanishi, the director of the horrifying Resident Evil Requiem, avoids working in Capcom’s offices in Osaka, Japan, late at night. The building is on the site of a deadly Sengoku-era battle from the 16th century, he said, and employees sometimes “hear footsteps coming from the floor above — where no one actually is.”
He cupped his ear, looking at the ceiling.
“I think I hear it now,” he said jokingly.
Requiem, the latest game in the 30-year-old survival horror series, features a fair number of jump scares. But its creators also play with psychological anxiety that recalls Hitchcock and the revulsion seen in last year’s “Weapons,” one of the horror movies that Nakanishi has recently viewed.
Nakanishi, who has worked on Resident Evil games since 2012, is an avid consumer of horror media such as “The Substance,” urban myth videos on YouTube, “The Shining” and “The X-Files.” Requiem’s antagonist Victor Gideon, with his eerie, steampunk-style headgear, is reminiscent of the miscreants that Mulder and Scully investigated.
Unlike movies and television, horror games like Resident Evil allow players to overcome what looms in the dark. But you can first scare them out of their wits. Nakanishi does so by considering the concepts of fear and tension, as well as the momentary releases that serve as a reward for conquering one of the evils within.
“If someone is continually exposed to the same kind of experience, they become numb to it,” he said through an interpreter. The key is “to vary the tempo and the rhythm to create a sense of unpredictability.”
Early in Requiem, one young woman has a fraught awakening.
She is hanging upside down, bound by leather straps to a gurney. An IV dripping blood, perhaps infected, sticks in her vein. Frightened and sweaty with blood rushing to her flushed face, she struggles mightily to break free. She then navigates disorienting, dark hallways smeared with blood and dismembered body parts. Soon, her panic morphs into sheer horror when an oversize zombie child pursues her.
“I had a nightmare about that gurney scene,” recalled Angela Sant’Albano, the actress who plays that woman, a timid F.B.I. data analyst named Grace Ashcroft. She said her every move was closely choreographed, almost like a dance sequence.
Grace is so overcome with grief stemming from the murder of her mother, an investigative journalist, that she becomes a super introvert. In her office, she obsesses over an explosion that occurred in the fictional Raccoon City in 1998. The blast was a government operation that was intended to eliminate infected humans who acted like flesh-eating zombies. But it did not kill them all, which is why these games continue.
Sitting sat at a desk in Osaka with a large poster of Grace’s face behind him, Nakanishi said that the game’s frights were very carefully imagined in the six years it took to make. During that gestation period, he said, an open-world multiplayer version was scrapped. So was an idea to make Requiem as challenging as FromSoftware’s incredibly difficult Dark Souls and Elden Ring projects.
“From a design standpoint, it was just kind of hard for the sake of being hard,” the producer Masachika Kawata, who has worked on Resident Evil projects since the late 1990s, said through an interpreter. He is now finishing work on Pragmata, a science fiction action-adventure game scheduled for April.
Instead, Capcom moved to an alternating first- and third-person formula that initially showcases horror before giving a reprieve with action and adventure. The monstrous frights throughout keep players returning for what Nakanishi calls “addictive fear.”
“No one has ever counted,” he said, “but I would say you would feel fear 100 times in Requiem.”
It may be more than that, if feeling disoriented and claustrophobic while navigating the mazelike buildings counts. Even seeing your shadow might be unsettling. In Requiem, you will die in many gruesome ways, including having your head bitten off.
The franchise, which has sold 183 million copies, is known for its inventive scares. Players were spooked when a priest turned into a scorpionlike creature in Resident Evil 4; the sadistic Baker family became cannibalistic in Resident Evil 7: Biohazard; and the giantess Lady Dimitrescu transformed into a dragon-riding, tentacled demon in Resident Evil Village.
In Requiem, it is almost as if the terror in each level can attack you from all sides, the wind eerily blowing a lace curtain through an open window, a child’s picture book with a bloody note warning you to stay in the light, a shadowy being squirming down a wall.
“Seeing those things in succession slowly builds up fear,” Kawata said, adding, “You do feel a strong sense of wanting to escape.”
The limited resources that are part of the challenge in every Resident Evil make finding your way out more difficult. Grace takes time to find a cigarette lighter to illuminate her way through darkened halls. Once a gun is procured, bullets are limited. Even your hatchet becomes dull.
Because Requiem is partly a remembrance of the terror that occurred long ago in Raccoon City, Nakanishi noted that the infected “retain remnants of their memories from before they became zombies.” You might see a zombie trying to cook or clean. He lamented that a zombie baseball player had been taken out of the game.
Leon Kennedy, a longtime series hero somewhat like Clint Eastwood, appears in third person for action sequences when many undead need to be put down, say, with a chain saw. He is especially over the top when he stomps on zombie heads like Gallagher once hammered watermelons onstage.
Nick Apostolides, the actor who has portrayed Leon since 2019, described the character as corny and cool, edgy and reliable. Leon’s purpose is to “fight for those who can’t protect themselves,” he said in an email. “To do what’s right, all the time, at all costs.”
It may be Grace, however, who reacts as most people would in real life. She stutters and has panic attacks during the more unnerving scenes, but she keeps going.
“I think we always want to believe that, in a high-stakes, life-or-death situation, we’ll stand up and we’ll be the hero,” Sant’Albano said. The reality is different. “At moments, we will hide in the corner and maybe cry or, you know, scream. And then, at others, we will stand up and fight.”
There is a straightforward contrast. Leon, a former police officer who has dealt with zombies since Resident Evil 2 in 1998, is no longer flustered by any infected being, no matter how ghastly. Beyond paper files and computer research, Grace has never seen anything like zombies. Every bump in the night unnerves her.
Nakanishi indicated that Leon’s confidence was akin to the bravado seasoned players might have, while Grace’s apprehensive nature mirrors how new players feel.
Requiem can give both groups frights because Capcom has not indulged in much repetition of its ugly monsters and creepy scenarios over the past three decades. Despite the rotten beings, it has managed to keep things fresh.
The post Resident Evil’s ‘Addictive Fear’ Is Keenly Calibrated appeared first on New York Times.
