I just finished Resident Evil Requiem in 24 hours with 40 of the 49 trophies, and honestly, this might be one of the best Resident Evil games I've played. I loved it.
Let's start with the obvious: the game is absolutely stunning. Yes, it's the RE Engine again, and yes, we've seen what it can do for years now, but that doesn't make Requiem any less gorgeous. The lighting, the material work, the faces, the way darkness actually feels dark, all of it is dantesque. Performance is good overall, though maxing it out is the usual modern-game ordeal: crank everything up, switch on DLSS, and hope for the best. That's the state of PC gaming now and Requiem is no exception, but once it's dialled in, it's a genuinely beautiful game to sit in.
The structure is what makes it for me. The first half alternates between Grace Ashcroft and Leon Kennedy, and that alternation is brilliant. You mostly control Grace, and she's the opposite of the usual Resident Evil protagonist: she's an FBI technical analyst with barely any field experience, she's nervous, she's out of her depth, and the game makes you feel every bit of that. Playing on the standard difficulty, without unlimited saves, those sections are unbelievably tense. You're rationing everything, planning your routes, deciding which enemies are worth fighting and which ones you simply run from. It's proper survival horror in the lineage of RE7 and the RE2 remake, and it had me genuinely anxious in a way the series hasn't managed in a while.
Then you get these short bursts with Leon, a few minutes at a time, packed with action. As pacing, it's perfect. Just as the tension with Grace is about to become exhausting, you're handed the fantasy of being the veteran who actually knows what he's doing, and then it's snatched away and you're back to being scared. That contrast is the smartest thing the game does.
Where I was a little more disappointed is the second half, where you're playing Leon and only Leon, and it turns into a full action game. Don't get me wrong, it's still good, and the locations are fantastic. Revisiting places tied to the series' history, with Grace's connection to her mother Alyssa and the Raccoon City survivors running underneath it, is exactly the kind of fan service I want. But sustained action just isn't what I wanted from a game that had spent ten hours proving how good it was at making me afraid. The tension deflates. The good news is that it comes back at the end, when control returns to Grace and the survival horror grip tightens again, but that middle stretch was the one part where I felt the game drifting away from its best self.
The story I have nothing bad to say about. It's well constructed, it's told with restraint rather than burying you in exposition, and it ties Grace's personal investigation into the wider series history without feeling like a nostalgia exercise. Grace herself is a great addition to the cast precisely because she's fragile, and watching her harden over the course of the game gives the whole thing an arc that most Resident Evil protagonists don't get.
The atmosphere is incredible throughout, and the soundtrack and sound design do an enormous amount of the heavy lifting. Audio is more than half of what makes the Grace sections work: the stalker enemies, the sounds behind you, the silences. It's a masterclass.
As for replay value, 40 out of 49 trophies in 24 hours means I got most of what I wanted out of it. As for the remaining trophies, there are a few collectibles left, but the real barrier is that getting the last nine or so basically means replaying the whole game. I just don't have the appetite for that anymore. I've got too many games in the backlog and too many other things going on to sink another full playthrough into a game I've already experienced the way I wanted to. Forty out of forty-nine in 24 hours is exactly where I'm happy to leave it.
Overall, I'd give it a 8.5/10. A gorgeous, genuinely frightening return to form that balances survival horror and action better than any Resident Evil since RE4, held back only slightly by an action-heavy middle that loses some of the tension the rest of the game builds so well.
